Showing some gratitude is the least these scribbly wretches can do. The passengers in Thank You Bus Driver – Double Fine’s new comedy public transport sim – are almost invariably rowdy, entitled hypocrites, happy to sully my single-decker by picking their toes and bellowing down their phones, while only ever being seconds away from a strop if another traveller does the same. Still, here I am, locked in symbiotic misery with them, desperate to choke down the scraps of acknowledgement they’ll spare for arriving at their stop in good time. I hate them. Please love me.
To be clear, I don’t regret playing Thank You Bus Driver. It’s a brisk three hours of chaotic wheelsmanship, dense in visual gags and amusingly exaggerated physics, in which you are both driver and disciplinarian. Catch sight of someone breaking the bus rules, and instead of detachedly tapping a sign, you leave your seat to deliver a corrective slap. This risks the still-moving bus careering off course, and thus a shift-ending missed stop, but silencing the troublemakers is the only way to ensure everyone else arrives happy. And happiness means Thank Yous, the only currency that matters.
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It’s a fun little time, with just enough multitasking to stretch your attention without snapping it in frustration. I wonder, though, which Double Fine made it. Was it the newly independent, hugs and jokes, Amnesia Fortnight Double Fine? Or the Double Fine who talked themselves out of a union, and whose flight from Microsoft ownership involved jettisoning a quarter of their staff?
There are ample signs of the ‘nice’ one. Not that games like Keeper and Kiln were creatively bankrupt trendchasers, but Thank You Bus Driver has that endearing, rough-and-tumble quality of human beings trying something out. Passengers come in the form of Bigfoots and swimming rings and microwaves full of fish, and someone – maybe multiple people! – took the time to give them all uniquely goofy animations for dropping a coin in a slot. Your slapping arm is uncomfortably long and rubbery, a pneumatic limb whose weirdness goes completely unaddressed. Crashes and, indeed, your own acts of open-palmed violence are exclusively played for laughs – usually good ones. I confess to intentionally aiming for the local cows, just because their betrayed expression and excessively long windscreen-sliding motion make for too well-executed a joke to resist.I adore, too, how ‘resetting’ the bus from a stuck position drops it back on the road… from thirty feet in the air, metal groaning as it slams into the asphalt.
It can be clever, too. There is a heavy randomisation element, from the placement of stops to the timing of passenger behaviour to the vaguely roguelike-ish item upgrades you’re offered by a commuting trenchcoat oddball, but the necessity of juggling bus happiness with bus urgency breeds actual tactics. Do you move carefully, keeping a constant eye on the mirror to instantly slap down transgressions, at the cost of letting the shift clock tick down? Or do you focus on caning it through town, allowing passenger resentment to build before attempting a mass slapfest to restore harmony at the last moment? In what probably doesn’t bode well for whenever I drive my future children to Legoland, I’ve developed a taste for the latter, and have devised a kind of ‘unguided missile’ technique based on its principles: point the bus somewhat towards the next stop, accelerate, then spin around to beat down on farepayers as we all roll to a gentle stop. Or off a cliff.
For all of its spark, though, I can’t shake the feeling that Thank You Bus Driver has some more cynical thinking behind it. It is, ultimately, a Numbers Go Up game: there’s no real narrative, and no jeopardy beyond having to start a new shift if you run out of time. Your one and only reason to exist is a bigger collection of Thank Yous, which are delivered with slot machine chime effects, and pursued through service to arseholes. Like a less subversive Roman Sands RE:Build, on wheels.
Would it be unfair to suggest this has a lingering whiff of Microsoft about it? You can, at least, throw hands with your customers. But even a full house of swiftly punished fish-microwavers will just be replaced at the next stop with a new, possibly identical batch. The grind for approval never ends, until it does, when the game decides you’ve amassed enough gratitude points to be considered a valuable entity.
That said, Thank You Bus Driver doesn’t have much legs beyond a single playthrough anyway. While those three hours are entertaining enough, in spite of the service industry angst, there’s no getting round the fact that you’re driving the same bus through the same small town with the same handful of rules, every time. Attempts to mix this up fall flat: night shifts, rain, and ‘conventions’ (where the bulk of your passengers share a single archetype) are eventually thrown in, but none of them meaningfully change how a drive plays out. You’re more at the mercy of the regular randomisations, where an unlucky succession of distant stops can kill a shift even with careful passenger management. Chaining nearby stops, likewise, is the best (if equally chance-dependent) means of accumulating mad TYs.
Still, as a single, foot-down charge to the credits, it’s a decent way to chuckle your way through an afternoon. And to answer my own question, I still think Thank You Bus Driver shows off Double Fine’s creative flair, much more so than it raises worries about the new era. Hopefully that spirit endures into their future independent projects – maybe with a little less gacha ding-dinging.