I mean, theres no microtransactions or loot boxes so...

Real Talk:
The motion controller implementation is poor, the 'room-scale' functionality exists for about 3 feet (1 meter) in any direction before just turning the screen black, you will never, ever find a single multiplayer session without a concerted push by the entire VR community, and you will almost certainly crash the game from fidgeting with the horn, since there's genuinely nothing else to do.

Realer Talk:
It's Desert Bus. None of these are downsides.

Swedish man killed 5000 people because of Ducktales. 10 / 10

as someone who's beat this game about 3 times now, twice as a passenger, it's genuinely a really good bonding game if you have good friends that are willing to waste a lot of time with you. get in a discord call together, spill out your feelings, talk about life, get some karaoke going, or get one of them to screenshare a movie. it's a long ride, but maybe the true points are the friends we made along the way.

bus

my wife left me

If you are lucky, this might be the worst game you will ever play.
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What does that even mean? Let me explain:

There's good games. There's bad games. There's interactive art pieces that use game mechanics. There's barely interactive media that present themselves as games. There's training simulators that are set up like games but aren't intended to be games. There's… how many of these would you like me to list? Want to talk about interactive movies? What about visual novels? What about… oh, was I wasting your time? Did you want me to make a point about Desert Bus? Hang on, I wasn't done rambling…

What is entertainment, what is it really? How do we quantify it? Isn't it just synthetic time wasting? Why do we need to be entertained at all? Why do we watch movies? Why do we read books? Why do we play games?

Why do we do anything that is not directly related to our own survival? Primary human needs: air, water, food. Secondary human needs shelter, and? I don't know, should we debate what comes next? How far down the list is "!@#$ you just entertain me?"

List enough things and needs turn into wants, and then you have to figure out what is entertainment? Time itself will continue to move along whether you enjoy yourself or not. And how do we value that time? What is more precious than the limited amount of time we have on this planet to spend?

Have I wasted enough of yours yet?

Somewhere in there was a (much shorter) version of what this game will do for you as a metaphor: waste your time.

And there's the crossroads we sit at while I write this. Normally I would slam a game hard for being a time waster that doesn't provide entertainment value along with the spending of time. But that would be missing the point of Desert Bus.

It's almost unfair to even call this a game, it only meets the criteria by the slimmest of margins. I'll tell you what it really is: A political rebellion masquerading as an art piece that happens to use minimal game mechanics to communicate a point of protest against the ignorance of politicians who hate (or at least completely do not understand) video games.

How does that translate?

You drive a bus. You do this by holding down the W key for as many minutes/hours as you can until you get bored and turn the game off. The bus has a bad front end, it drifts to the right. You'll need to occasionally realign the bus to keep it on the road. It's a straight boring road where nothing of consequence happens, you might splat a bug on your windshield. It will be the most exciting thing that happens every few hours, maybe.

Yes, the game is that boring. Yes, this is 100% intentional.

So, why does it even exist?

Honestly the best way for you to find that out would be to play the game, drive the bus and leave the in-game radio turned on for the first 20 minutes. What you will listen to is an interview with Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame) where he explains why the original game was created in 1998 and then later how this version was created in response to fan interest.

The short reason is:
Some politicians suggested games should only exist to teach people job skills. The original (and this remake) are to examine the boredom of being a bus driver on long trips. It's political satire in game form.

So, what did I mean when I said I hope this is the worst game you will ever play? Well, it's an intentionally boring game but it's functionally put together well, despite the lack of actual variety in doing things. There's an interesting 20 minute interview to listen to and if you can force yourself to play beyond that there's a handful of other commentary and music snippets if you can sit through a few more hours of it.

In that sense, if you decide to spend any time with it, yes it's a bad game, but it's supposed to be a bad game and it's a bad game with a message. Granted, you can experience that message in just 20 minutes of listening to Penn's interview and then never play again, but if you are a fan of political satire or even just a fan of Penn Jillette and his interview style you'll at least come away from this with another of his anecdotal stories.

And let's face it, there actually does exist worse games than this, and even worse than that are incredibly terrible games that should not exist and I truly hope you manage to avoid them entirely.
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WARNING: If you are an achievement hunter, do not start up or launch this game unless you are willing to invest more than 1000 hours into the most boring experience of your entire life. I'm not going to fully detail what's involved other than to say it is literally 100's of hours of moving in one direction and only some of it can be done idle.

Be aware:
There is no save game. It must be done entirely without shutting the game off, at all. You can stop the bus and park it on the road, alt-tab and do other things, live your real life and come back, but you can't ever turn the game off while attempting this or it will completely reset. If you at any time run off the road, you're done ~ not only are you done but the bus is towed backwards in real time. So if you drove for 4 hours and ran off the road, it will go backwards for 4 hours.

No sane or rational person should ever attempt these achievements unless you are capable of adapting your real-life around it for several weeks.

However, if you don't care about the achievements, then feel free to just boot it up and play until you hate it and then shut it off.

So, Why would I ever recommend this?

I recommend you be aware that it exists and why. Feel free to go watch the 20 minute interview on YouTube and never actually play it, or simply boot it up and drive for as long as you can tolerate it.
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Bottom line: It's free and it's a satirical art piece that shows what games might be like if idiot politicians had their way. Feel free to not actually play it, just be aware it exists and hope that nothing worse than this ends up on your play list.
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I'm writing this while driving as a passenger in the bus because I've nothing else to do

Saw a thumbleweed, got excited
Cacti are cool

Good game

bus
people on bus
8 hours
non-vr possible
10/10
needs voice chat

I have gone through 8 hours of the most mind numbing, completely pointless and idiotic torture that can be legally administered to a human being, and yet I don't regret a single moment.