The Great Tree offers a fantastical plain in the shade of its towering natural centerpiece. Night Encounters is a heavily wooded parcel of government land that may or may not contain evidence of extraterrestrials and may or may not evoke the wistful suspense of Amblin movies. Festive Funlands, the only arctic scenario of the bunch, proves beguiling enough to make up for that oversight.

The few missteps in Career mode only stumble because of the game’s economics.

Pirate Cove, the end of the tropical first chapter, offers a tantalizingly wide footprint in a crumbling Spanish fortress, but the trick is a tight checkbook. Players should expect to teeter on the edge of insolvency until, or rather unless, the crowds really click. There’s a clever way to earn more petty cash, hidden right there in the scenario description, but that only evens the odds so far. No amount of early hardship will help much with Cavernous Coaster, though, a jaw-dropping location that inevitably ends in a whimper, reducing park guests to capitalist agents of chaos.

Tastes come and go. Rides degrade with age and, eventually, improve with nostalgia. But sometimes that brand-new B&M hypercoaster goes unridden simply because it’s on the far side of the park and, despite simultaneous marketing blitzes to all possible demographics, nobody feels like walking to it. Add that to the occasional glitch that prevents a gold medal from unlocking properly and it can be enough to take refuge in simpler theme park simulators.

The other two modes of Planet Coaster split that difference.

Anyone hellbent on becoming a captain of industry can start with a blank slate or existing scenario in Challenge mode. Without the usual objectives, the only rule is profit and every possible variable can be tweaked to make it as fleeting as possible. Less capital to start with and fewer attractions to spend it on. Pickier guests less vulnerable to ad campaigns. Gremlins in the gears of every roller coaster. The game shipped with three difficulties - Easy, Medium, Hard - but patched in a Harder option not long after.  The result has inspired endless forum posts on how not to go broke within a month.

Anyone who just wants to build the park of their dreams or most recent vacation can unleash in Sandbox mode. Like it says on the tin, the sky’s the limit. No money. No responsibilities. Every last animatronic and scenic package included with the price of admission. The lack of any to-do list may be a turn off, but there’s no denying the appeal of madness without method. Enterprising players looking for a little more structure can make their own scenarios and find many more customs on the Steam Workshop.

The endless toybox at the heart of Planet Coaster is just as irresistible no matter how you play with it.

Instead of abandoning or embracing the grid system of RollerCoaster Tycoon, Planet makes it conditional. Track rides can be bent and twisted to the limit of human endurance. Scenery can be placed, poked, and prodded at will. The grid only appears when erecting buildings or walling-in the cube-based shops. It’s an easy learning curve that never ends. You could spend an hour on a single hot dog stand, hanging ivy vines on the roof, adding wooded accents to each windowsill, and eventually throwing it all out to cover the thing in boulders. If you’re happy enough with it, buildings can be copied and pasted with two clicks.

Concerns on how flexible Planet Coaster is as entertainment design Play-Doh should be assuaged with a single YouTube search. Creations range in eye-watering intricacy from recreated roller coasters to an eleven-and-a-half minute retelling of the movie Aliens. It is, with as little exaggeration as possible, the most robust creation tool of its kind outside of plain ol’ 3D modeling. Officially licensed playthings from Back to the Future, Knight Rider, and The Munsters can be purchased à la carte. The Ghostbusters DLC includes its own two-scenario campaign, complete with voice-work from original stars Dan Aykroyd and William Atherton. Other add-ons include, but are not limited to, spooky sets, shooting galleries, and backlot tours. Any design elements that can’t be kitbashed in-game can be imported as FBX files.

But the beauty of the game is in the underwhelm.

99% of people who indulge in Planet Coaster will not spend multiple days on a single attraction. A healthy percentage won’t even spend multiple hours.

Either way, that moment still comes.

 All it takes is a carousel, a top spin, an antique car ride. Something small and plain. It’ll seem bare against the horizon or between that coffee shop and pizza joint. Taking whatever theming is on-hand for the scenario, you start filling in the blank. A red Nevada rock. A busted wagon wheel. Cacti with perfect posture. It helps the attraction’s queue rating, so the guests start admiring the view, too. But the props could use some rhyme and reason. Maybe that wagon was hauling coffins and crashed. It’s Old West poetry, but throw some foggers under the lids and it becomes a ghost story. What of the headstones? The open graves? You wonder if the Steam Workshop has a few good skeletons to round it out. You wonder if the wagon wasn’t carrying coffins at all but dynamite. What could it explode? What story would that tell and how would you tell it to the tiny digital people strolling past it?

Then the sun sets - never less than a perfect blush in Planet Coaster - and the white noise of the park quiets down. It’s just you and a little thinking music from Jim Guthrie and JJ Ipsen.

Suddenly an artist in a strange medium.

Not playing. Creating.

There are plenty of games like Planet Coaster, but none that get the difference.