Over the weekend, developers Spiral House and REMEX Software together with publisher Mythwright setup a public beta test for Deadstick: Bush Pilot Simulator. Taking advantage of the preview of this incoming flight sim, I put in a bit of time with the still in development title to see how its coming along and what we can expect from the game as it matures towards release. There are some rough edges but there’s also a lot to like.

What is it?

Deadstick occupies an interesting place within the flight sim pantheon. It combines a few other styles of game together into an experience that, though well worn in other genres, is a bit different and unique within flight simulation. Its like Euro (or American) Truck Simulator, Firewatch, Snow Runner, and Microsoft Flight Simulator all got tangled up together into a single product. Generally speaking… it works!

The title of the sim has recently been changed to the Bush Pilot Simulator emphasizing that the core of the experience is focused around you as a pilot.

While most of the time in a flight sim your experience in the world is by extension of the airplane, here it is very much you as a person on foot that walks around, moves things, interacts with the airplane and then uses the airplane to go explore the world beyond that. It’s a subtle but important difference.

You start out in a pilot hut with access to things like an old school PC, a fax machine, and an old school brick phone. The nearby job board can also give you your next job opportunity.

From there, you walk over to your plane, complete the exterior inspection (similar to MSFS’ walk around mode), physically tow the airplane out into a parking spot, and then become acquainted with its setup.

You can also perform repairs at the repair hangar inspecting and fixing damage to the aircraft from wear and tear or mistakes made in the field.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the various Cub and Super Cub iterations in MSFS and X-Plane over the last several years and this fictional representation has a few unique quirks but its basically a Cub inspired aircraft that is immediately familiar in operation. Its got a clickable cockpit and tooltips give you a sense of what you’re supposed to do with the mouse to interact with the magnetos or the fuel pump or other devices within the cockpit. Start-up is a quick process which is good because you’ll be starting and shutting down the airplane a lot.

The playtest gives you a few different missions to fly which is great to get a sense of what they intend to offer as they develop the title. There’s enough variety of location and objective that it could be quite engaging for a while.

Examples? Pick up a crate and some bottles here and deliver them to another airport. Fly along the coast and locate a missing shipping container and then photograph it from the air. Take that photo and fax it to the company. It’s a lot of going to A, then to B, do activity, and fly back to A or go on then to C. That’s the experience in a nutshell.

Your opponent… the weather! Which did come into play late into my experience with a strong thunderstorm that ultimately damaged my airplane and caused it to crash.

How does it fly?

I went in with a lot of trepidation on how this might fly. The answer is better than I expected but maybe not quite where I’d like it to be just yet.

The good parts? Our Cub stand-in feels suitably weighty while also being responsive. Its not overly twitchy and while I flew this entirely on my HOTAS setup, I’m informed that it flies well on a gamepad too.

There are some real world flight dynamics that do appear here. It has slight asymmetric yaw tendencies, there appears to be ground effect, P-factor and torque are very important to counteract on takeoff, and it has a reasonably decent stall experience as well. That’s a lot of pluses in a sim that I wasn’t sure if it’d go far enough to satisfy here.

That all said, I do find the aircraft still lacks a bit of flight model personality. For example, I was able to essentially hover in ground effect over a longer runway with little or no aileron or rudder response needed. It just sort of sat there. I also find that wind and turbulence handling is a mixed bag too with the aircraft kind of wobbling in the wind rather than flowing with it (if that makes any sense). Its a bit disconcerting and unusual feeling compared to the wind and turbulence simulations I’ve experienced in other sims.

That all said, more casual flight simmers might be drawn to the title for the interactivity of experience and more sophisticated flight mechanics may be a negative to that experience or to the approachability.

I, as a seasoned flight sim fan, wouldn’t might a bit more liveliness from the aircraft but not everyone will. For some, its plenty lively and P-factor and engine torque together can pull you off the runway if power and rudder are applied incorrectly.

I’d also desperately like to see an autopilot added to this aircraft. There are times where you’re just cruising along (even in the starting sector) where I think I’d like a heading and altitude hold while I admire the scenery rather than trying to keep the aircraft centered. If the sim does indeed have much longer flights planned (to the northern sectors of the map for example), being able to go hands off for a few minutes would reduce fatigue. Throw in the danger of a sudden autopilot disconnection in the wind to keep the challenge up but give is the opportunity to cruise.

I know they want to have that hands on antique bush plane experience but I know from some extensive bush trips that there are times where I want to go hands off and enjoy the sights while the airplane cruises.

Speaking of antique bush plane experiences. Did I mention that you need to navigate the old school style? There’s no GPS here so its all about the map and your visual recognition skills. Generally I quite like this and I’m used to this kind of flying from IL-2 (for example) and it adds to the challenge in a game where the flying, navigating and weather are generally your chief opponents.

Visuals and sounds

It’s a really tough environment to be in with the sims on display in 2026. I really wasn’t sure if Deadstick could pull off anything approaching decent given its small dev team, start-stop development, and protracted timelines. Fortunately, the preview is already quite well developed with generally good graphics both day and night.

The visual style is definitely more stylized than photo-realistic and I think this is a very smart move. It gives the game a visual appeal that would be difficult to chase otherwise. MSFS and DCS are chasing the old “photo real” trope while Deadstick is more artistic looking and this is smart as trying to keep with them is foolish.

They’ve managed to pull off reasonably good looking distant scenery (mountains and long sight lines look good), the clouds are not the best but they are consistent. Ground clutter is very well realized and trees, autumnal as they are in this preview, render out well into the distance as well. I love the animated effects on the trees as the winds pick up and the rain comes down.

I do find some scenes have some pretty harsh lighting effects and the shadows also tend to be quite low resolution and tend to flash and judder a fair bit while you watch them move across the ground and across your instrument panels.

I also find the field of view within the cockpit to be very narrow and restrictive. On my 32in display, I like to widen my field of view a lot in sims like X-Plane, MSFS, DCS, etc. Here its very constrained and I want more visibility of both what is ahead but also cockpit instruments. Right now I feel like I don’t quite have enough.

Sounds are pretty good with decent enough audio samples, chunky ground sounds and ground collision sounds, and all of the various buttons and switches make noises… at least until the engine roars to life. Ambient audio effects are present as well though I think more samples and would help give the world a bit more presence. Rustling leaves and grasses would be a nice addition as you walk around.

Some issues to discuss

This is a playtest of a in-development title and so while I bring up some issues and items that jumped out to me, let’s first acknowledge that Mithwright and the developers of Deadstick are still working on this project. The experience is intended to gauge community reaction and iron out some bugs and there are some bugs and rough edges.

Technically the sim ran reasonably well with very good frame rates and decent visuals even at 4K. I did, however, get persistent and periodic stutters while I was flying around often associated with a flash from the sky… it may be some sort of weather related rendering issue affecting the performance of the whole sim. It even causes the audio to jump too so that was a bit annoying.

During one of those pauses, I also had the sim freeze up on me as well. I ultimately had to shut it down from Task Manager to kill off the process. Its not perfect but its not a 1.0 full release either so that’s ok! Rough edges are expected.

Other items that bugged me included an overly cluttered interface with the playtest logo took up a big chunk of the bottom left corner of the screen. I wasn’t able to find a way to hide the otherwise helpful control reminders and the UI sometimes flicked and flashed too.

I bound a view control to my throttle axis but wasn’t able to invert it unless I also inverted the mouse look controls. I’d like for those to be separate as well.

One final item that came up while I was playing through. The world on display suggests one that is rich with its own lore and in-universe history. It’s really calm and delightful overall. But it also feels… empty. It needs people, animals, regularly scheduled flights, and a sense that the rest of the world is inhabited by anyone but you. I realize that this adds several layers of complexity that they just may not have yet had time to do but I do hope they do at some point.

Final thoughts

I’m quite optimistic about Deadstick: Bush Pilot Simulator right now! I’ve been writing articles on and off about this sim for half a decade or more and it looks like the full vision is finally coming to fruition after all of these years. I’m very glad to see it!

I was able to get in a little over 3-hours of playtime over a very busy weekend and my enjoyment of the title and how to do things within this world grew as I continued to play. I was a little ho-hum about it at first, being perfectly honest, but I started to pick up the kind of dopamine hit that I get with other titles that keeps me coming back for more.

This preview shows to me that Deadstick already has a solid gameplay loop that has been more or less well refined and gives me the kind of experience I was expecting from this kind of sim. The core of this experience is very good but it could benefit from a bit more work to the flight model, a few extra features like autopilot, a wider field of view, a bit more liveliness to the world, and a few less technical issues to boot. Deliver that in a 1.0 release with countless hours of exploration and jobs to do around this fictional world and I think Deadstick will stick the landing!

Learn more about Deadstick here on their Steam store page!