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74 Farming & Life Sim games reviewed and scored, best first.
74 reviews
A dead adventurer comes back as a skeleton shopkeep and starts hiring the living to die in his place — Xtonomous's solo-developed idle sim turns that morbid joke into a genuinely connected hire-loot-sell loop, then keeps things deliberately short instead of chasing the usual idle-game grind.
7.5 / 10
A village builder where everything — villagers, berries, houses, monsters — is a card on a table, and you craft by dragging one onto another. Twelve dollars, 96% positive, genuinely inventive. Then your table fills up and there is no way to automate anything.
7.5 / 10
A cozy pixel-art gathering and crafting game about rebuilding a village, sold on a shelf full of idle games and repeatedly mistaken for one. It isn't. It's a thirty-hour hand-managed crafting loop with a warm story attached, and at six dollars it's one of the easiest recommendations of the summer — for the right player.
7.5 / 10
A Tamagotchi-raising sim welded onto an idle RPG, charming in exactly the way its premise promises and shallow in exactly the way that premise risks — the hero grows on its own, but you rarely get to decide how.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed top-down delivery sim across three open cities, where cargo condition and a watchful police force matter as much as your route — launched two days ago with a tiny but detailed early review corpus and no achievement data yet to check its claims against.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, genuinely soothing pixel-art fishing game that lets you fish actively or let an idle mode do it for you — beloved enough to have gotten real players off the couch and back onto real lakes with their own families, undercut at launch by a real, consistently documented complaint that idling outperforms actually playing, and that there simply wasn't much game underneath the vibe.
7 / 10
A dungeon-crawling incremental where the monsters are also the ingredients — charming, tightly made, and finished by most of the people who buy it in a single sitting, for better and for worse.
7 / 10
A solo-developed idle aquarium game that nails the cozy, screensaver-adjacent fantasy of collecting fish, but leans so hard on one buy-raise-sell loop that its rarest rewards become a months-long grind with nothing else underneath to fall back on.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Kickstarter-backed farming sim whose "1.0" release in late 2023 shipped with main quests literally marked "work in progress" — a real, widely-documented letdown for long-time backers that the game has spent the time since quietly living down.
7 / 10
A hand-painted 2D desktop RPG about exploring enchanted realms, fishing quiet waters and filling out a Knowledge Book of everything you meet — released yesterday, priced under six dollars, and already dropping hints in its own patch notes that "single-player" might not stay the whole story.
7 / 10
A menu-only farming MMO that has quietly run since 2021 with no ads and a genuinely optional shop, propped up by a community wiki so thorough that half the game's actual strategy lives outside the app.
7 / 10
A plant shop sim so pleasant that almost nobody has a bad word for it — and so short that the people praising it keep mentioning they finished everything in four hours. Lovely, cheap, and about three systems away from being something you'd still be playing next month.
7 / 10
A lovely four-hour game about scrubbing an alien ocean clean, 98% positive, whose only real complaint was the price — and the price has since fallen 70%.
7 / 10
A first-person survival sandbox about hunting, farming and building a village that eventually runs itself, wrapped around the promise of a multi-generational dynasty that almost nobody who owns it ever actually reaches — a Very Positive, 42,000-plus-review Steam favourite that has spent the last two years answering "what's missing" with paid cosmetics instead of the content its own late-game silence keeps calling for.
7 / 10
A vampire farming sim with the best time-pressure idea the cosy genre has had in years, and almost no progression ladder to spend that pressure on.
7 / 10
A charming, Ghibli-inspired post-apocalyptic crafting and farming life-sim that's built a genuinely devoted, cross-generational fanbase over six years — while a long, consistent thread of its own reviews keeps arguing the developers never quite finished fixing it.
7 / 10
A pixel-art automation game that grafts Factorio-style conveyor belts onto a Forager-style hand-gathering loop. The first ten hours are genuinely charming; the back half turns into a long wait for timers to finish, and a cluster of recent reviews accuse it of bundling data collection players can't fully switch off.
7 / 10
The indie life sim that spent seven years being the great Sims alternative, now 91% positive and a million copies sold — with a build mode people adore and a live mode its own supporters say isn't finished.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental where the resource you're actually optimising is your character's lifespan — age through a job and skill web, die at seventy unless you've trained around it, and rebirth into a faster run. Small in scope next to the genre's marathons, and handed to the community as public domain, which explains why it's been forked well over a hundred times.
7 / 10
A free incremental with one reviewer clocking 31,732 hours and a persistent complaint from the rest — that a game with "idle" in its title keeps asking you to click.
7 / 10
Erkberg Games' short incremental about washing ash off a dead planet with a rain-cloud and a skill tree — a review of how far a three-hour, five-dollar cozy game can stretch its one good idea before it runs out of road.
7 / 10
A life-sim RPG about inheriting an empire that is already failing, built on the most detailed consequence machinery the genre has attempted — and undone slightly by how visible that machinery is.
7 / 10
An adorable desktop-companion idler where pixel animals roam the bottom of your screen while you work — undercut by a genuinely strange design choice for a game in this genre, its own idle mascots get sick if you leave them alone for too long.
7 / 10
The same demonstrate-it-once robot scripting that made Autonauts click, now defending a base against raiders with automated squads — a genuinely fun idea that never quite justifies asking for a second full-price purchase.
6.5 / 10
