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1729 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
1729 reviews
The most famous broken launch in modern gaming is now, five years and one total rebuild later, one of the best open-world RPGs you can buy. Ninety-six of its hundred most recent reviews are positive. The thing to check before buying isn't the game any more — it's the licence.
9 / 10
Nolla Games' falling-sand roguelite simulates every pixel of fire, gas, liquid and rock as one honest physical system, then hands you a wand editor deep enough to break that system on purpose. Four and a half years after its 1.0 release, only one in ten owners has ever finished it.
9 / 10
A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.
9 / 10
The version of Persona 5 that's actually for sale everywhere now, and the one worth reviewing on its own mechanical terms — a turn-based JRPG whose real engine isn't the combat or the style, it's a calendar that turns every evening into a resource-allocation decision with consequences that outlast the day.
9 / 10
A colony sim that treats the AI storyteller, not the tech tree, as the main system — every skill point your colonists earn is really just raising the stakes for the disaster it's about to send you. Seven years and five expansions after 1.0, the total price of owning everything has become one of the review's own subjects.
9 / 10
A decade on, the thing that still makes Stardew Valley work isn't the farm, it's the clock — energy, daylight and a hard seasonal deadline turned into the best progression pressure the genre has ever built, even if the pressure quietly switches off once you're rich.
9 / 10
Freehold Games' science-fantasy roguelike spent nine years in Steam Early Access before reaching 1.0 in December 2024, and what it built in that time is less a dungeon crawler than a character-building engine wrapped around a simulation that keeps generating outcomes nobody scripted. The reputation for impenetrability is earned. So is the one for depth.
8.8 / 10
A Detective Story Wrapped Around a Predatory Loan Money for Girls: Amortized casts you as a girl detective spending a sweltering summer trying to save her mother from a predatory l
8.6 / 10
One of 2024's most critically decorated narrative games — a Peabody Award nomination, an IGF Grand Prize shortlisting, a 90 on OpenCritic — telling a genre-blending story about clones, generational trauma and a pandemic-scarred future through the eyes of a devoted Watcher serving her ALLMOTHER, undercut for a small but genuinely coherent minority of players by exploration sections several call needlessly oversized for a game built almost entirely around its writing.
8.5 / 10
A city builder that refuses to let any settlement become permanent, banking what you learn into a roguelite meta-progression layer instead. It is one of the only games in its genre to treat the endgame as a design problem worth solving rather than a state to reach and stop.
8.5 / 10
A solo-developed exploration game about climbing a mountain in Hawk Peak Provincial Park, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 12,500 reviews for its warm, unhurried charm — with an honest, recurring value complaint about its brief length, and a smaller but real camera and controller-compatibility problem.
8.5 / 10
Eleven years in Early Access, 97.6% positive across 223,161 English reviews, and a graphics overhaul eight days old that has upset a loud minority without moving the score at all.
8.5 / 10
A hacking-themed incremental where the automation you'd normally unlock with currency is automation you write yourself, in real JavaScript against a real API — free, open source, and still getting rewritten out from under its own players five years after launch.
8.5 / 10
A tower-defense game where the enemy isn't units but a fluid — cellular automata standing in for an AI, spreading through terrain rather than pathing along it. Reviewed on its full lifetime and recent Steam review corpora, an 11-year-old cult favourite that some of its own harshest critics have played for thousands of hours.
8.5 / 10
The spaceship-roguelike that founded a genre still sits at Overwhelmingly Positive thirteen years on, on the strength of tense real-time crew management and a legendary soundtrack — but a real, sustained minority of reviewers make a specific, well-argued case that its randomness undermines the sense of learning the game otherwise earns.
8.5 / 10
Squad's beloved rocket-building and orbital-mechanics sandbox, reviewers repeatedly describe as genuinely educational as well as compulsively fun — a landmark simulation game with a real, well-documented 2018-era privacy controversy from a since-changed EULA in its history, which recent reviews suggest has quieted considerably.
8.5 / 10
Warhorse Studios' medieval simulation grows up without losing its stubbornness — a sequel that fixes the first game's roughest edges while doubling down on the idea that realism should cost you something. The result is one of the most complete RPGs of the last few years, provided you're willing to let a swordfight or a bowl of stew go badly.
8.5 / 10
Rome Never Fell, And Someone Finally Built A Colony Sim About It Nova Patria released on Steam on May 14, 2026 from small developer Sower Interactive, and it opens with a premise u
8.5 / 10
A space-colony simulation where the number that scales isn't a character level — it's the tangle of pipes, wires and thermal gradients you're personally responsible for keeping alive, and the game never once lets physics take a day off.
8.5 / 10
ATLUS rebuilds its genre-defining 2006 JRPG from the ground up with modern combat, full voice acting and a gorgeous new engine — a near-unanimous critical success undercut by a well-documented, still-discussed bait-and-switch over what the premium edition's DLC actually included.
8.5 / 10
An idle farming sim that gave up on being a game you look at, and became the desktop companion the whole genre now copies — charming and honest about its own smallness, if a little thin once the farm is built out.
8.5 / 10
A Grains-Of-Rice Fable Turned Into A Genuinely Thoughtful Idle Game The Board is Yours, the solo debut from developer and publisher Draelent, released on Steam on April 29, 2026, a
8.5 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
An expanded, engine-rebuilt reimagining of 2013's landmark narrative game, still regarded as one of the most original and cleverly written pieces of interactive fiction ever made — its only real, substantive criticism, buried under an avalanche of in-character joke reviews, comes from longtime fans questioning whether the new content justifies a doubled price for people who already own the original.
8.5 / 10
