Double Fine's first post-Xbox game is a slapstick bus sim
Action Labs is the newly independent studio's label for weird little experiments, and its debut arrives October 14.
The economy of Thank You Bus Driver runs on gratitude. You drive a town's bus route against the clock, and every "thank you" a happy passenger offers adds seconds to your timer—so the fastest way to stay on schedule is to be appreciated, whatever that takes. Rules posted by the depot change daily. Rulebreakers can be slapped, or ejected out the door at speed. (There is quite a bit of slapping.) The fence between you and the next stop is, per the game's own description, optional. It came out of the brain of Double Fine's Will Koehler, was built by a small team in a matter of weeks, and arrives on PC October 14 via Steam, GOG, and itch.io.
The opening of the Thank You Bus Driver announcement trailer, muted here—the full trailer with sound is on Double Fine's site. Courtesy of Double Fine.
I had Double Fine boss Tim Schafer at the first ever Killscreen Festival (then called Two5six) back in 2015 and a lot has happened to the studio. It was acquired by Xbox and then self-empancipated this year. This is the first release from Double Fine Action Labs, the sub-label the studio announced this month for what its blog calls "weird, little games." So, the context matters here: after seven years inside Microsoft, this summer's Xbox restructuring spun Double Fine back out as an independent studio, catalog intact—and Tim Schafer told GamesBeat that the plan for independence runs through small experiments and a Kickstarter reviving Amnesia Fortnight, the studio's internal game jam, as a public event. Becoming a smaller studio, the thinking goes, means making smaller, stranger games—and giving them a name of their own.
We've been here before. Killscreen covered Amnesia Fortnight back in 2014, when the jam's prototypes made the case that Double Fine's two-week experiments were where the studio's best ideas surfaced. And in 2013, Schafer argued that crowdfunding doesn't free creators so much as trade one boss for thousands. Thirteen years later, Schafer is testing that proposition firsthand—and the first fare out of the depot is a bus driver who runs on thank-yous.
Screenshots from Thank You Bus Driver. Courtesy of Double Fine.
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