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.

, 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 ( ), 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.)