What Progress Bar Simulator is
Progress Bar Simulator is a game about the progress bar itself: the thing you stare at while a download crawls, an installation stalls, or a Windows update takes forever. Here you take control of it instead. You press keys or click the mouse to push a bar forward or pull it back, at whatever pace you like. The bars are drawn in styles taken from the history of computers, so a run through the game doubles as a walk through old interfaces. The tone is satirical and a bit surreal — it treats the progress bar as one of the great achievements of the modern age and gives it the full treatment.
Playing it on your own
Any key you would associate with "right" or "up" moves progress along, and "left" or "down" reverses it. There is no fixed speed to hit; you go at your own pace. If your machine feels too fast to actually enjoy a bar creeping along, the idle mode lets you sit back and watch bars fill slowly and smoothly, the way they were meant to be watched. When you want the opposite, RUN BAR is there for speed-running: try to get through everything as fast as you can and shave time off your own playthrough.
Playing it with friends
Multiplayer turns the whole thing into a keyboard contest. Everyone competes at once, mashing space to progress and backspace to regress, and the question is who can press faster than all the others together. There is also a Twitch mode: set a channel name in the Options menu and your audience joins in. Any chat message containing a + pushes progress forward, any message containing a - pushes it back, and each message counts for exactly one action. Streamer against crowd, no middle ground.
Before you start
Expect a short, simple loop — press keys, watch bars move — dressed up in retro and abstract presentation rather than in story or depth. The Steam features list includes Remote Play Together, so a session can be shared that way. The tags range from relaxing and idler to psychological horror and immersive sim, which is the joke: the game is about waiting, and it leans into how that feels. Go in wanting to kill time, race friends, or just watch bars fill, and it delivers exactly that.