Hold onto your butts, here comes SimBus

Here's a trailer for the freshly announced SimBus from Polish developer SimRail S.A. and publisher PlayWay, who previously published games like House Flipper, Car Mechanic Simulator, and, uh, Lust for Darkness?

Features like vehicle customization, realistic cities based on geodetic data, a day-night cycle, realtime weather, and "authentic bus physics and sounds" make SimBus seem like a typically serious central European simulation game. Then there's the bit in the trailer where the player suddenly inhabits a passenger and interacts with a fellow commuter. The four options on this Bus Effect dialogue wheel are: TALK, FIGHT, CALL POLICE, and ASK HIM/HER OUT. When the player chooses the latter option, they get a bottle thrown at them? Maybe this is a more chaotic game than first glance would suggest, even before we get to the multiplayer.

Here's the official description, which I cannot help but read in a Polish accent: "SimBus is new, advanced bus simulator. Drive historic and modern vehicles from all parts of the world. Visit living cities of USA, Europe and China in different eras. Become bus driver, follow the timetable and meet other players on multiplayer mode."

Become bus driver? Sign me up. SimBus has a Steam page, but no release date yet.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.