Developer: The Zium Society
Year: 2026
Genre: Multimedia Program
System: Windows

The Zium Railway is the latest in the series of virtual galleries published by The Zium Society. I’ve been a fan of the series for a while and it has been fascinating to watch these grow from more straightforward galleries (but still impossible to create in a physical space) where you walk around a virtual world and look at pieces of art, to this latest one where you ride a train around a world and enter virtual worlds created by artists for you to explore. I absolutely loved it and cannot recommend the entire series enough. While I liked some of the worlds more than others and there’s the odd bug here and there, it is a stunning amount of work put into a multimedia program that you can get for free, although I recommend donating money if you can because the revenue is split evenly between the artists and you get some neat bonus materials too. If you happen to get tired of exploring the space the long way, you can also press keys that instantly teleport you to the galleries. Sometimes on social media I’ll lament the death of multimedia cd-roms and other programs that combine art and music in interesting ways without there being a series of win conditions you’re supposed to meet, but this is it!

After this had come out, I went back and loaded up The Zium Garden to play with my 6 year old since it was one of the few that runs on Mac and she had a great time. Kids sometimes just like to have interesting spaces to explore without things running around trying to kill them. I’m so happy this series exists and will be playing through all of them again. I hope to see more of them in the future.

The Zium Railway is available for Pay-What-You-Want for Windows on Itch.io.