Progress Bar Simulator

Back when I first got the original PlayStation in the mid-1990s, I had an impatient friend who would aggressively repeat the word "loading" every time he saw a progress bar. "Loading, loading, loading, loading, loading," he would obnoxiously repeat, almost as if he was the only person in the world to realize that the disc had to spin the information into the memory. Until today, I hadn't thought about that guy in well over a decade. But after playing through Progress Bar Simulator, a game built entirely around loading screens, it made me wonder what he would have said. Would this have been the thing to get him to stop reminding us that we were stuck in a loading screen, or would it have straight-up made his head explode? While I doubt I'll ever know the answer to that question, at least I have Progress Bar Simulator to talk about, because it's ... something.

Progress Bar Simulator is exactly what it sounds like. It's a PC release where you simulate some of the greatest loading screens of all time, choosing to go as fast or slow as you want to. It's also being released on April Fool's Day, which raises a pretty obvious question: Is this a joke?

The truth is, I'm not entirely sure. It's one of those games I played out of morbid curiosity, intrigued to see if there was more going on under the surface. I was hoping it would be like that game Frog Fractions, where it looked like one thing early on and then went batshit crazy by the end. Progress Bar Simulator does end up going crazy in some interesting ways, but it's definitely not the next Frog Fractions.

This is not a hard game to describe. The idea is simple enough: Press the right arrow to advance the progress bar and left to regress it. You don't have to use the arrows, because a mouse, controller and WASD keys will also get the job done. If you fail to press any button, the progress board will slowly regress, so the idea is to keep pressing the button to fill it up. And that is basically all you do. The goal is to keep filling up the bar in order to move on to the next loading screen.

It's these loading screens that prove to be the most noteworthy part of Progress Bar Simulator. These aren't just random screens, but rather a number of recognizable loading bars pulling from several decades of computer technology. We get stages based on America Online, a computer defrag, the Apple II installer, a disc-repair tool, Steam updater, Windows notification, a Tetris game and more.

There are two dozen of these loading screens in total. Once you fill up all the progress bars, the game will send you back to the beginning to do it again. What makes this game slightly more intriguing is that the loading screens begin to bend and become distorted the longer you push forward. But does any of this lead to a big revelation? Is there a reason to punch that arrow key thousands of times in order to make it to the high levels?

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In a word, the answer is no. At least, I don't think so. Best I can tell, Progress Bar Simulator is a big waste of time. There's a multiplayer mode that lets you test your button pressing skills against other people, but there isn't much to the game beyond that. I managed to complete more than one thousand stages before ultimately giving up. That was enough to unlock most of the achievements, including the one telling me to go past level 1024. I did, and nothing happened. That's disappointing, because there was a real opportunity here to make some sort of point or give us a proper payoff.

It could be that I simply didn't understand the game's brilliance and will later find out that it is packed full of secrets. Honestly, I hope that's the case. It could be that Progress Bar Simulator is a lot like 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie that critics were confused by in the late 1960s but today consider to be one of the best films of all time. Maybe that's the case, but considering that Progress Bar Simulator has a mini-game where all you do is defrag a computer over and over, I think that this is just an elaborate joke.

As a parody, Progress Bar Simulator is a funny idea. The problem is that the execution hints at a deeper game that never materializes. That's not to say there isn't greatness hiding behind all these loading screens, but after a thousand levels and hours of painful button mashing, I'm of the mind that what you see is what you get. Take it from me, there are better things to do with your time than watch a bunch of loading screens.