It’s been a few months since Double Fine parted ways with Xbox, and they’ve been busy getting to work since that split. There’s this Kickstarter game jam they recently launched that has Brutal Legend 2 as a stretch goal (just ignore the fact that the stretch goal is $100 million). And now the indie studio has once again announced its first post-Xbox game: Thank You Bus Driver, a very silly workplace sim where you drive passengers to their destination and slap them if they break the rules.
You all have at least a basic understanding of how bus simulations work, right? You drive them, stop to stop, picking up and dropping off passengers where they need to go. Thanks Bus Driver is like that, except there are rules that your passengers must follow. Rules like not sleeping. Or no nail trimming. Or not stinky! So what do you do if someone on the bus breaks these rules? Well, you slap them of course! This is where the goofy but charming tension comes into play.
You see, you have to get to each stop within a certain time limit, with a timer on the dashboard counting down until you fail. But slapping passengers means constantly checking behind you to make sure they’re following the rules. Ideally, there’s a rearview mirror to keep an eye on everyone, but you have to turn around to give your slap, which means you could, of course, crash into oncoming traffic. So the balance lies in keeping everyone in check while still transitioning from one stop to the next on time. On top of all this, new rules can be added randomly, so you’ll need to be on your guard all the time.
And you’ll want to do it too, because the more good you do, the more thanks you receive and the more time you have to get to the next stop. On top of that, you can get little trinkets for your dashboard, variant cities to explore, and “more!” It’s utterly delicious, and while it doesn’t have a release date yet, you can get it on Steam. here.
As the Thank You Bus Driver announcement came, studio head Tim Schafer also participated in an interview with Bloomberg dig into the Xbox separation process. When Schafer realized there was a chance the studio would be closed, after a period of misery, his next thought was: “Nobody is putting Double Fine out of business except me. (Xbox CEO) Asha’s not going to shoot my dog. I’m going to shoot him. But I’m not going to shoot him because it’s doing great. A lot of people want to walk the dog.”
