Drago Entertainment has released a new trailer for the Motel Simulator, one of the next games in the shared simulator universe they’re building around Gas Station Simulator. On top of that, they’ve also provided some screenshots of Road Diner Simulator and reminded us that the Junkyard Cars DLC is still on the way for Gas Station Simulator.
This teaser is one of the first looks into the game (not featuring actual gameplay) and is one of the few real announcements made about the game in over a year. It essentially pans across a shady highway motel before zooming out and replacing it with a more flashy and modern one in a sequence that reminds me of The Sims (the first one).
It tells us very little. I’m interested to know if the little meth lab trailer is actually a gameplay mechanic. Like, do you accommodate the meth lab, or are you supposed to evict them somehow? If we dig in, there’s maybe a shade of Gas Station Simulator in the fact that there seems to be a little convenience store at the back of the parking lot. Maybe cleaning rooms (if that’s a feature) and handling customers doesn’t take up that much time, so they needed to add stocking shelves.
In a separate news post, the developer also talks about Road Diner Simulator, which received its own teaser last year. The three games are said to have crossover progress, with decisions made in one title affecting the others. However, this hasn’t really been clearly explained, perhaps because it’s a work-in-progress.
The news post for Road Diner Simulator largely focuses around new screenshots without much solid detail. In fact, the opening paragraph suggests they’re going to discuss how the three games link together, but when it comes to that, they preface using the word “might” and then outline supply chain interactions before closing by saying that would probably be too ambitious.
I enjoyed Gas Station Simulator back in 2021, and then subsequently did not enjoy Food Truck Simulator. I’ve played some of the DLC for Gas Station Simulator, and it seems to have difficulty iterating on the core concept. The recent Tidal Wave DLC, for example, was essentially the same game but in a different location with worse balancing.
If I speculate on what’s going on here, I feel like Drago Entertainment suffers from poor planning. Obviously, I’m not privy to all the challenges the team faces, but I’m basing this assumption on obvious signs of feature creep and half-baked additions. It seems to me that they will get an idea and then plow right into it without appropriate prototyping and pre-production to ensure everything comes together properly. The ambition is admirable, but the execution is where it counts.
However, I’m still ready to try out Motel Simulator and Road Diner Simulator. I have a fondness for janky representations of mundane work, so my expectations are set appropriately
Neither Motel Simulator nor Road Diner Simulator have a release date. PC is the only announced platform.
