Gas Station Simulator has been one of the most popular releases on Steam this year–even outselling Deathloop at one point—and for good reason, too. It’s the perfect game to wind down to if you’ve had an exhausting week. The game is set in an impossible but beautiful utopia: there’s zero expectations to achieve anything, and no one bats an eyelid if you leave them and their car stranded on a sand dune for days.

But let me explain. The crux of the game is this: you’ve inherited a gas station called the Dust Bowl. As luck would have it, it’s located smack bang in the middle of a desert, where sandstorms take place at an alarmingly frequent rate. Then there’s the building itself, which looks like an abandoned junkyard: trash and debris are everywhere, broken furniture is strewn about thoughtlessly, and the ground is caked with generous layers of sand and muddy footprints. While cleaning up this place will hit you with a punch of dopamine—you need to sweep and give the entire building a fresh coat of paint, which feels stupendously fulfilling—you also have to consider a litany of other affairs. This means fuelling up passing cars, keeping your gas station well-stocked with random knick-knacks, clearing away the small hills of sands that have accumulated from sandstorms, and even fixing up cars at the garage. You even have a shady investor—someone who refers to himself as your uncle— who probably has some ties to the mafia.

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Aside from, well, the small matter of the debt that he wants you to repay, your uncle is really the least of your worries. He doesn’t even chase you that hard to do that, anyway, other than to send a single buffoon your way. What I love about Gas Station Simulator is that it’s a breeze to experience; even with the mountains of busywork you need to juggle–and there is so much that you actually need to do, if you actually want to–it makes for a surprisingly relaxing jaunt. Don’t jump in expecting an authentic replica of running your own gas station, or a realistic business simulator where you’ll need to carefully consider how you wish to invest your profits.Your job is simply to do whatever the hell you feel like, really, at any given day.

Gas Station Simulator

The truth is that the debts can wait. The sand can accumulate—I once left a bunch of vehicles honking at each other ceaselessly, just because a police car got stuck onto a small sand dune. Meanwhile, everyone just stared at me, glassy-eyed, from inside their vehicles, wordlessly pleading with me to fix this problem. The toilets can stay unwashed, at least till a visible trail of green, noxious gas permeates the air. I even abandoned a store full of customers from a passing party bus—one of the game’s random events that sends a truckload of party goers dressed in alien and dinosaur costumes to your station—to hop onto the back of a delivery truck. When I returned some time later, they were still waiting patiently at the cash register, eager to hand over fistfuls of cash in exchange for some booze and a couple of novelty tin-foil hats. I also accidentally left a customer waiting in the garage for several days, who couldn’t drive off because I had left their car hanging in the vehicle hydraulic lift; I didn’t really have the right parts for repair at the time and forgot about fixing their vehicle till several hours later.

Hats off to you, however, if you decide to run Gas Station Simulator like you would an actual business. If you’re the enterprising sort, the developer has promised that there will be more content to come—one of which is supposedly a car washing side hustle that may give PowerWash Simulator a run for its money. But this life of hard, rough work isn’t for me. I’m happier gallivanting about, hopping onto the back of delivery trucks, playing arcade games, and throwing trash bags at the local teenage menace who has been vandalising my station for far too long.

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