It’s been a couple of months since Double Fine parted ways from Xbox, and they’ve been busy getting to work since that split. There’s that game jam Kickstarter they recently launched that has Brutal Legend 2 as a stretch goal (just ignore the fact that stretch goal is $100 million). And now, the once again indie studio has announced their first game post-Xbox: Thank You Bus Driver, a very silly job sim where you drive passengers to their destinations, and slap them if they break the rules.
You all at least have a basic understanding of how bus sims work, right? You drive them around, stop to stop, picking up and dropping off passengers wherever they need to go. Thank You Bus Driver is just like that, except there are rules your passengers have to follow. Rules like no sleeping. Or no toenail clipping. Or no stinky! So what do you do if anyone riding the bus breaks those rules? Well, you slap ’em of course! This is where the goofy but charming tension comes into play.
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See, you do have to get to each stop within a certain timeframe, a timer on the dashboard counting down towards your failure. But slapping the passengers means constantly checking behind you to make sure they’re following the rules. Conveniently, there is a rearview mirror to keep an eye on everyone, but you do need to turn around to enact your slap, meaning that you could, of course, crash into oncoming traffic. So the balance comes from keeping everyone in check while also getting from stop to stop in good time. On top of all this, new rules can get added at random, so you’ll need to be on your guard the whole time.
And you’ll want to do so, too, as the better you do the more thank yous you get, and the more time you have to get to the next stop. On top of that, you can get little tchotchkes for your dashboard, town variants to explore, and “more!” It’s all quite delightful, and while it doesn’t have a release date just yet, you can wishlist it on Steam here.
As the announcement for Thank You Bus Driver came in, studio head Tim Schafer also took part in an interview with Bloomberg digging into the process of splitting from Xbox. When Schafer caught on that there was a chance the studio might be shut down, after a bout of misery his next thought was, “No one puts Double Fine out of business except for me. [Xbox CEO] Asha’s not going to shoot my dog. I’m going to shoot it. But I’m not going to shoot it because it’s going to do great. A lot of people want to walk the dog.”