![]() Mira Tannhauser, overseer for the city's brand new bus system, and someone who is beyond delighted about it. Bus Simulator 2018, I would argue, finds a new way of doing tutorials - which is to star Ms. You know what tutorials are like: either they're unskippably telling cybergrandmother how to suck murdereggs at length, or they follow the Step 1: move the camera > Step 2: punch > Step 3: remember these 312 different key combinations > GO formula. Never is this more true than in the tutorial. It's very much a job rather than an escape, but it's a job pitched as an inherently good-natured, sociable and helpful experience, rather than the desert-dry tedium I fear it might be in meatspace. Even so, the different rhythms of this, the frequent stops and gently changing circumstances of working out how out much change to give or dealing with a fleeting inconvenience, are immediately pulling me in. I don't know that a bus is as romantic as a truck - it's much more unwieldy, it's the very opposite of solitude and going off-course feels less transgressive and more that you're just rudely inconveniencing people. It even goes a little further than that - you can yell at passengers to move out the way of the doors or stop playing loud music, for instance. In the main, Bus Sim 18 is very much WYSIWYG, in that it is a simulation of driving a bus around a city, replete with taking fares, giving change, lowering wheelchair ramps and meeting timetable expectations. And it's all thanks to Mira Tannhauser, the world's number one fan of being on a bus. This is a bus-driving game that is absolutely delighted to be a bus-driving game, and wants me to feel the same way. I'd had gentle hope that Bus Simulator 2018 might similarly be more than the sum of its dry, mass transit parts, but actually playing the thing reveals a game working overtime to be charming. I have filled these pages with paeans to American Truck Simulator's soul-searching road odysseys, to the hypnotic satisfaction of stripping parts in Car Mechanic Simulator 2018, and even to the rhythmic, weirdly cyberpunk otherness of casting lines and gutting trout in Fishing: Barents Sea. Forget Newell's billions, Plunkbat and whichever indie renaissance is currently happening: the real success story of Steam, over the years, is superficially dour and highly-specific vehicle simulations finding large audiences who have very little interest in steering torque or rim patterns.
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