Let’s get this out of the way, especially if my parents are reading: I can drive a car in real life. I haven’t in about 15 years, because I live in New York City, and also because an ex-boyfriend convinced me I was bad at it, but I usually say that if there were some emergency that necessitated me operating a motor vehicle, I could do it. Despite what that ex-boyfriend insisted, I recall being a safe and thoroughly serviceable driver, if a little anxious. But I am not anxious in the Bus Bound demo: I am confidently terrible at being the bus.
Bus Bound, which has a demo as part of Steam Next Fest, sees you taking passengers around the bus routes of the city of Emberville. Excitingly, bus rides are free for passengers (it can work!), with a character telling you that “our funding comes from the city council based on how well our passengers think we’re doing.” As you drive your route and make stops, you get a number of thumbs ups from riders depending on how well you drive; these are used to unlock new busses, bus stops, and routes.
Rather than simply sit back and marvel at their city’s robust free bus service, passengers have a lot of opinions. They like when I roll gently over speed bumps or get them to their destination on time. They don’t like when I slam on the brakes and honk my horn because a cop turning right on red cuts me off. They don’t like when I park too far from the curb. They really don’t like when I smash into cars around us because I am a god damn bus and a bus is freaking huge, its turns way wider than I think and it taking far longer to slow down than I keep planning for. The passengers make their mean little frowns and say their nasty little comments about how they didn’t ask for bumper cars or surprise obstacle course: failed and I yell “Shut up, I’m the bus!” at them as we all smash around being the bus.
There are a lot of nice touches in Bus Bound: you can switch from a view from behind and above the bus to the first-person perspective of the driver easily, which I found helpful for checking if cars are coming but not so helpful for remembering that I am a bus that is the size of a bus. When you put on your turn signal you get a view of your mirrors. You can customize your bus colors in fun ways. Letting passengers on and off is a nice little process of engaging the parking brake, opening the doors, and then doing it all in reverse. The game has weather; in the rain, rivulets obscured my screen until I turned the wipers on, at which point the water didn’t simply vanish but hung around, really feeling like peering through a windshield.
Emberville itself is fascinating to drive through, absolutely stuffed with shops, billboards, and ads. It would be nice if you could walk around it on foot, because I kept swinging my camera around while driving to check everything out and then forgetting to focus on the road. I would like to be a passenger on my bus, or a bus driven by someone better at being a bus than me, just so I can look out the window at everything. It’s good that the city is a busy place to be; I can imagine the game’s core requirement of driving routes to grind out thumbs ups could get repetitive in the full game.
But I don’t mind the repetition. In driving sims like Euro Truck 2, I love the everydayness of doing my chores, driving my routes and listening to the radio and getting to places on time. Even when I drove the same Bus Bound route multiple times, I found it satisfying to see the same streets at different times of day, parking a little better or getting a little closer to being on time or staying below the speed limit more often. I didn’t try to keep causing massive pileups, or sideswiping pedestrians, or pulling out into traffic without looking. I wanted a calm, routine day as the bus–it’s just that the bus is a bus, and this is how busses are.
So I’m not great at being the virtual bus, but I swear I can drive in real life. And unlike the ex-boyfriend who convinced me I couldn’t, I’ve never clipped a mail truck while driving an empty school bus without a CDL, so whatever. (We owned a school bus. It's a long story.)
