Double Fine spent seven years inside Xbox making Psychonauts 2. Its first move as an independent studio again is a small, fast, silly game about driving a bus and slapping people.
Double Fine announced Thank You Bus Driver on Friday 4 September (Saturday morning for us), and it describes it as a chaotic bus driving game. You're the driver of a small town's bus with three jobs. Enforce the bus rules, which change every day, by slapping the people who break them and ejecting repeat offenders out the back door. Stay on route, with shortcuts through fields allowed. And stay on schedule, which is where the title comes in: every passenger who says thank you as they get off adds time to your clock. Thank Yous also unlock trinkets for the bus, variations on the town and more. Steam tags it Arcade, Roguelite and First-Person.
It's the first game under Double Fine Action Labs, a new label the studio says is for its weird, smaller, more experimental games. The idea came from Will Koehler at the studio and a small team built it in a matter of weeks. It's Windows only, the Steam page is up for wishlisting with no date or price beyond coming soon, and a playable version was on the show floor at PAX West over the weekend. There's no downloadable demo.
The context matters here. Double Fine joined Xbox Game Studios in 2019. On 6 July this year Tim Schafer posted that the studio would be independent again, with ownership of its games returned to it, and on 21 August the studio confirmed it was no longer part of Xbox and that buying any Double Fine game now directly supports the team. It also launched a Kickstarter, Amnesia Fortnight 2026, to fund its next round of small prototypes. Thank You Bus Driver is the first thing to come out the other side of all that.