BACK*SPACE
A sprawling, entity-free liminal-space walking sim across sixteen distinct levels that reviewers are calling one of the best Backrooms games ever made, let down mainly by thin display options and inconsistent audio.
8.4 / 10
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Simulation reviews
1729 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
1729 reviews
Project Zomboid
Twelve years into Early Access, the isometric zombie survival sandbox just shipped its biggest update ever and got multiplayer back. The skill grind is still the best in the genre; the menus are still the reason half the people who buy it never see it.
8.3 / 10
The Last Cat in the Universe Review: A Tiny Incremental That Will Wreck You
The Last Cat in the Universe is a $6.99 narrative incremental about salvaging a dying space station for the last surviving pet, and while the clicking-and-waiting loop is thin on its own, the two-to-three-hour story around it has left an overwhelming majority of reviewers in tears.
8.3 / 10
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Doloc Town
A side-scrolling farming sim that spent roughly fifteen months in Early Access before its 5 August 2026 graduation to 1.0, pairing Stardew-style crop and relationship systems with vertical platform building, gene-splicing crops, and bullet-hell drone combat against the ruins of a collapsed world.
8.2 / 10
Magical Princess Review: A Gorgeous, Modern Princess Maker Successor
Magical Princess is a $14.99 daughter-raising sim that modernizes the Princess Maker formula with beautiful art, voice acting, and over 50 endings, and while its story leans on familiar tropes, it has become one of the most beloved games in its niche this year.
8.2 / 10
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ShantyTown
A gorgeous, deeply chill diorama city-builder that mixes puzzle-like upgrade logic with pure sandbox creativity — let down only by clunky controller support and a slim handful of campaign levels.
8.2 / 10
Mayor May Knott
A scaredy-cat girl becomes the accidental mayor of a monster-and-ghost-filled town in this Tim Burton-flavoured puzzle adventure, and an overwhelmingly positive reception says its crafting, comedy, and absurd musical jukebox have found a devoted audience.
8.1 / 10
24 Killers
A surreal, Love-de-Lic-inspired adventure about a cursed intelligence bound to a corpse, helping a desert island's misfits across a game explicitly built around 24 replays -- one of the most positively received games this lane has covered (98.75%), with the tiny negative sample converging on a specific, real complaint about late-game grind and unclear puzzle guidance.
8 / 10
Amnesia: The Bunker
Frictional Games' boldest genre pivot yet — a tense, resource-scarce, Alien: Isolation-style stalker horror game that thrilled a large majority of reviewers, while a real and consistent minority of longtime series fans miss the puzzle-driven, story-rich horror the studio built its reputation on.
8 / 10
Arma 3
A landmark, endlessly moddable military sandbox still going strong 13 years on — now facing a fresh, well-documented 2026 backlash after Bohemia Interactive introduced a monthly subscription pass for a game whose community has spent over a decade keeping it alive largely on its own.
8 / 10
Beastro
Timberline Studio's cozy chef sim ties its farming-and-cooking loop directly into a trick-taking deckbuilder — a review of whether feeding your adventurers is a real tactical decision or just a chore standing between you and the next card fight.
8 / 10
Black Friday Janitor: Clean the Whole Mall
A nostalgic 2000s-mall organization sim with over 30,000 items to shelve, sort and clean up, praised unanimously by an early review sample for how its sectioned mall layout avoids the backtracking that plagues the wider tidy-up genre, with launch-day controller support and a developer who reviewers say confirmed no generative AI was used.
8 / 10
Blood Without a Name
A voice-acted dark fantasy political life sim about raising an island heir from a controlled, secretive childhood into the compromised realities of rule, drawing early praise from its tiny review base for rich lore, meaningful long-term consequences and genuinely strong indie production values.
8 / 10
Bookstore Incremental
A cozy shop-management incremental about growing a single printer and a tiny bookshelf into the world's most profitable bookstore, praised unanimously by an early review sample for its logically paced upgrade tree and refusal to overstay its welcome.
8 / 10
Burger Shop 3
A genuinely beloved childhood franchise, dormant since 2011, returns as an actively developed Early Access time-management sim — landing Overwhelmingly Positive on nostalgia and a faithfully expanded formula, undercut for some by a difficulty curve several reviewers say spikes well past what the earlier games asked of players.
8 / 10
Corsair Cove
The Tropico 6 team builds a pirate haven up the side of a cliff, and the vertical construction turns out to be the best idea in city builders this year. The ship combat it's wrapped around is a dice game with no animations, and that gap is the entire argument about this release.
8 / 10
Cozy Marbles
A genuinely delightful, intuitive marble-run sandbox that reviewers across every age group describe as a love letter to childhood marble tracks, widely praised for its accessible building tools and satisfying physics, held back by a handful of specific quality-of-life gaps, an occasional crash tied to piece placement, and content locked behind grinding some reviewers would rather see purely cosmetic.
8 / 10
Cult of the Lamb
A roguelite dungeon crawler and a cult-management sim share one save file, and the question that actually matters almost four years on is whether they're still lending each other strength or just taking turns.
8 / 10
DateBoy
Brothers Anton and Henri Pätsi, published by Silakka Entertainment, deliver a free, fifteen-to-thirty-minute comedy game about secretly playing a retro handheld console during a first date, earning overwhelming, specific praise for its voice acting, writing and surprisingly sharp commentary on modern distraction from a review base that is almost unanimously positive.
8 / 10
Dave the Diver
A spearfishing roguelite and a sushi restaurant manager share one save file, and the join is the best thing about it — what you catch by day is what you sell by night. The game just won't stop adding new systems on top of that, long after the core two have proven they didn't need the help.
8 / 10
Dragon Tax Return Simulator
A Ludum Dare 33 satire in which you play a dragon filling out a fantasy tax form under a ten-minute deadline, cross-referencing scattered appraisal reports and angry peasant complaint letters — a genuinely funny, complete desktop game confirmed working with real mouse clicks and keyboard input, but built on mouse-only dragging with no touch support.
8 / 10
Dwarf Fortress
A genre-defining colony sim capable of genuinely unmatched emergent storytelling, undercut by a UI that even loyal thousand-hour players still call clunky, a brutal onboarding curve, and real, well-documented performance and bug problems that persist years after its celebrated Steam release.
8 / 10
Dystopicon review
Palitroque's dark-comedy dystopian life-sim about surviving on TV-watching wages under an authoritarian regime lands a perfect "Positive" score on the strength of sharp satire, addictive time-management mechanics, and a huge spread of wild, branching endings.
8 / 10
Euro Truck Simulator 2
A thirteen-year-old trucking sim so meditative and beloved it has its own devoted subculture — now navigating a real, escalating backlash from its own longtime fans over a 2024-2025 UI overhaul many say broke what wasn't asking to be fixed.
8 / 10