Разработчик: Nikita P.
Описание
A small visual novel about bus trips and conversation with different companions, whom you see for the first and last time in your life.
Every new trip is slightly different from the previous one.
March. Evening. It was already dark outside. I'm on the bus home, with a disgusting mood. I look out the window, listen to music. I'm sorting through the concept for a new game. And at some point I realized that no one had yet done a bus travel simulator, where you are the passenger. Yes, the passenger, not the driver. Immediately I took out the phone, and began to write the ideas.
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS: 7/8/10
- Processor: 1.6 GHZ
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 256 MB
- Storage: 200 MB available space
- OS: 7/8/10
- Processor: 2 GHZ
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1 GB
- Storage: 200 MB available space
Отзывы пользователей
A very simple visual novel. It's cute for a small novelty but don't expect too much. I got it on sale for a dollar and I believe that's a fair price for a cute weird little game.
Bustories is a very simple point and click 2D static "adventure" game where you're on a bus and random people tell you random stories while your stats go down. You need to eat, drink and relieve yourself at bus stops to keep your status going through the ordeal. Truly a terrible idea for a game, married to an even worse quality technical implementation.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic 2D/MS-Paint graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the poor choice of using node-webkit/NW.js instead of a serious game engine. This is a very poor quality toolset for gaming, sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities because it's primary function for games is to make simple HTML/browser/simple mobile apps rather than full fledged PC games (and given we are here for PC games, you can see why this is a problem). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2023 (and this was released not so far back in 2018), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Bustories has the total ripoff price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
I really liked this game!:D
Bustories is very simple. You are a passenger on a bus and random strangers sit next to you and talk to you. In between stops, you can buy some food to eat and go to the toilet. That's it.
Pros:
[+] The art style is clean and cute.
Cons:
[-] There are no dialogue options - you just click through text the entire time.
[-] The strangers tell you random things about their lives. One or two of the strangers seemed to be trying to make an important point (e.g. a man told me how he became homeless by getting addicted to gambling.) but others seemed very pointless and boring (e.g. a kid who told me about how his dad likes to hunt and how his brother has no friends, or a woman who told me stories about a man who beat up some hooligans that tried to steal his car.)
[-] The game will last you about 30 minutes to talk to 8 people. You are spending 2-3 minutes with each person.
Ultimately I found the game's "stories" to be quite monotonous and couldn't wait for the game to end.
Something about the concept was appealing, so I ignored the reviews and game the game a chance. I was wrong.
I knew I was in trouble when the main menu loaded and I clicked to view the guide, which appearing as text on the screen of a tiny phone in the middle of the screen. Two of three words per line, and everything around the tiny phone was black. That was the guide for how to play the game!
Once you start the game proper, you miss the days of the menu. The translations are bad, and while I often figured out approximately what the person were saying, there were times when I had no clue. For a game that is almost entirely about the conversations, it's odd that more effect wasn't put into making the conversations understandable. Then again, real people waffle on and speak in circles so it is pretty accurate.
I also found myself wanted a "Sorry, this seat is taken" option, as well as a "Pretend to sleep" option when some of the people were beyond annoying. But those options do not exist and you have to suffer through the stories.
There are tons of items to eat and drink, but no tool-tips. While the food is often easy to identify, the drinks could be anything from water or milk, to straight vodka. I have no idea. There are also pills for sale. I bought some, and it made me consume the entire packet, with no discernible effect.
The game is pretty short but note that there doesn't appear to be a way to say your progress. I could be wrong, but it looked like the only options were 'Exit' or 'Resume' when I was in the game.
I was so happy to see the "End" sign instead of a regular bus stop sign, and could finally leave this game forever.
Most boring game i've ever played my enter life - the premise it's just outrageously boring with no mechanics that at least encourage you to pay attention to the dialogue or the game for more than 30 secs - 0/10 Don't waste money on this
Bustories is an interesting idea, badly executed.
You're riding on a long distance (not city) bus on your way to some far off destination. En route, people will start to talk at you. The stories are all different and range from incredibly mundane to bafflingly insane, to slightly interesting.
The gameplay element here is that each time you click to progress a line of dialogue, the hunger and thirst meters go down. If it goes down too far, your health suffers, eventually leading to a game over.
To combat this, at each bus stop you can go into a store and buy food or drink, or use the toilet when necessary.
The game has decent graphics and a soundtrack with various tunes to pick from (or mute), and each character you encounter is unique.
The core concept is implemented well, and I haven't encountered any bugs at all.
There is a big problem, though. The translation of the stories, which should be the main draw of the game, is pretty bad. It is obviously machine translated from Russian or a similar language, with mangled sentences and sometimes completely wrong words.
There is also no way to skip stories. While it may seem as if you just need to sit out someone until the next bus stop, in actuality each character will have to finish their story before you get at the next stop. If you are not interested in one of the stories at all, there is no option to skip it and you just have to keep clicking, and managing your food and drink meters.
If you actually only had until the next bus stop to finish a story, there'd be a lot more to this game and I could overlook the bad translation, but together they make this a game I cannot in good faith recommend.
I wanted to like this. If you are not so bothered by botched text you can, and perhaps should, check it out, but it is not worth the price the devs are asking.
I bought this game because 1: I had a coupon and 2: It caught my eye a little and i was intrigued by what looked like a traveling game where you interact with other people.
The game itself could have offered so much more, the Food/Drink/Toilet bar seemed almost useless but were a mild getaway from the manotomy of how painful the stories were on the bus.
They used big words which made you think at first this might be a good little mini story game.. but after a while poorly written sentences would appear and words that don't even exist.
Then it became apparent they were using big words to possibly seem more intelligent to capture your attention..
I would have loved if the stories had better meaning, were uplifting or had some good reason behind them.. some started off almost like they did.
Only to suddenly make no sense as if they were written by someone high on weed or having a crisis mentally.
I wanted to be as gentle as possible with the review but thats failed a tad.
I would not recommend buying this.. the creators had a gateway to make something good and they lost it.
A short but really enjoyable little game. Definitely worth the money.
Quite relaxing, nice music, quirky characters... however I am hungry now xD
As a travel enthusiast I can only reccommend this game :)
I got the game because it seemed like a pleasant experience, getting to know strangers through conversations and stopping at gas stations to get snacks. Unfortunately, the characters seem like they're just there to say prejudiced and unpleasant things about people.
Good Idea, Bad Execution
If the game was free I could recommend it, but frankly to me it's not worth any money. I enjoyed the little things like getting to take care of yourself at bus stops like on a real trip and the changing scenery in the background for different locations which I didn't expect. However the meat of the game, the reason we're playing it, the strangers, went downhill pretty fast. For starters you can't click to finish the dialog loading which drives me crazy since it was just slow enough to bother me and I like to use the skipping the whole dialog loading function on some games since everyone reads at different speeds. The characters were so vague and boring. There's 7~8 strangers and each story is as bland as the next. It's like the Dev picked 7~8 random stories as different as possible from each other, made an outline of said stories and called it good enough. The game must have been translated, because the dialog had bad grammar mistakes it was sent through google translate. The strangers also have the attention span of a squirrel... they all have A.D.D. and can't focus or stay on a train of thought without randomly saying something else that somehow relates to another thing. That could be fun if the game wasn't so lifeless. If you have to get it, then get it on sale, but it won't be worth it.
Pros:
+Changing scenery through window
+taking care of yourself at bus stops
+easy to get achievements if you're into that
Cons:
-forgettable game with no impact
-boring, vague outlines of stories
-horrible dialog grammar (probably translated with google translate?)
-Not worth any amount of money. I'm not usually this harsh on games, but I don't see any value in this shell of a game
https://youtu.be/fMd3KdIXJCE
While this may be a perfect emulation of strangers talking at the player while stranded on the bus, the button line is that being trapped with strangers on a bus is not a fun experience.
The game is a giant non sequitur that you'll finish in under an hour. I'm not quite sure what I think, but I picked it up on sale and feel content so there's that.
Bustories is very enjoyable and relaxing but I have some qualms about it's design.
Primarily, the eating/drinking/pooping mechanic seems out of place. I assume it's made to break up the monotony of just listening to people's stories on a bus but it was really just there and served no purpose. I would have preferred to have my character maybe reflect on the story having been told or have that affect what was in the stores. It just seemd... disconnected.
Another big issue was the way the game was translated. Often it felt like the game was simply run through Google Translate instead of given any consideration for context or grammar. There were many instances where the sentence structure and grammar were too disjointed to make any sense. Almost every line had grammatical issues.
Otherwise, the stories were very interesting and I appreciated meeting all of the people in the game. I almost hated the game at first but once I realized the game was simply expecting me to relax and enjoy a few very short stories it clicked into place. I enjoyed this game very much.
5.5/10
Bustories presents an interesting concept, and (as the developer mentions) something I haven't seen before. Most of the game is simply riding around on the bus talking to fellow passengers, listening to some semi-interesting midi tunes, and getting hungrier and thirstier by the minute. At each stop, you can hop off for a minute to grab a snack and a drink to meet those needs, or use the bathroom if need be.
I met a character in-game that was meant to represent the developer, and he mentioned how much more extensive his plans had been for the inventory management system. However, it's so stripped down at the moment that it's almost meaningless. After I completed the game, I played back through without buying any food or drink, just to see what would happen. My character did eventually die on the bus, but I felt like I was almost halfway through the game at that point. I think that it would be extremely difficult to unintentionally die in this way. As you eat and drink, you also have a meter that represents your need to use the facilities. I ate and drank until this meter was full, but nothing seemed to happen in game. Perhaps the developer felt that the game wouldn't be engaging without including some sort of "fail state," but I don't think that this is the case.
The game is all about the drama of everyday life, in a way, and so I don't think a fail state is necessary. The best aspect of the game is, predictably, the stories that are told by your fellow passengers. Unfortunately, a decent amount of the English is flawed grammatically, but not so much as to be incomprehensible. I learned about the past modeling career of an older lady, a rich man who hangs out in internet cafes, and even the tale of a rambunctious boy named Victor who had an accident climbing a fence. The tales aren't necessarily mind-blowing, but I doubt that you'd hear too many tales you'd describe as mind-blowing if you spoke to fellow passengers on your own local bus route. There is something very earnest about the way the game proceeds - an attention to the mundane, on things that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle of busy life.
Unfortunately, some of your fellow passengers have somewhat troubling ideas, especially one that attempts to explain why she would never give money to a homeless person. It would've been nice to interact with this passenger and explain the flaws in their logic, rather than just passively listening. Either way, you'd likely meet people with underdeveloped moral beliefs on your local bus as well.
I can't give Bustories a strong recommendation, but if you'd like to take a moment to appreciate some compelling tales from the lives of everyday people, it might be worth a go.
A wonderful 8-bit short and sweet existentialist experience.
Good timekiller with a lot of interesting thoughts from developer in form of strangers' monologues. Feels exactly how it was when I traveled by bus without my headphones.
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Nikita P. |
| Платформы | Windows |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 22.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 47% положительных (17) |