This feeling is helped along by the long minutes where you park your bus at the depot and wait until your next trip is due. I come away from every OMSI session recharged, feeling as if I've been on holiday in a peaceful other world. You're simultaneously focused on the task at hand and free to think of other things, to let your mind wander across the hours ahead or behind you. Your task is of course that of a bus driver, to pick up passengers and take them to their destination, push buttons to dispense tickets, and make your stops on time as comfortably and reliably as possible, but the routine and the precision and the sound of the rain and the lurching weight of your locomotive guide you into a kind of trance. I don't know my gear stick from my drive shaft, but OMSI's buses are alive with creaking metal, shuddering suspension, and hissing brakes. OMSI is rich, soulful, a mental balm, a sensory delight, and one of my favourite games. How strange, how funny, who would want to play this?Įveryone should want to play this. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.Īs if being a bus simulator wasn't an easy enough joke, OMSI goes further by being about a particular type of bus at a very particular time and place: divided Berlin during the 1980s. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations.
