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186 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
186 reviews
Erik Asmussen rebuilds his own factory-town formula from the ground up around a controllable avatar, a hungry volcano deity and a full ocean of islands — a sequel that risks alienating veterans of the original in its opening hours before proving, mechanic by mechanic, that almost every change was worth making.
8 / 10
A pixel-art farming and life-sim RPG that spent two years in Early Access proving it isn't just another Stardew Valley clone — jumping, real combat, D&D nights at the tavern, and writing sharp enough to win over players who'd sworn off the genre — reviewed on the eve of its 1.0 launch with 97.7% of nearly 30,000 reviews already behind it.
8 / 10
A voxel colony sim that lets you build up and down instead of just sideways — vaulted keeps, buried cellars, and structural stability all become real design problems. Going Medieval left Early Access after nearly five years with a genuine endgame bolted on, and mostly earns it.
8 / 10
A top-down sandbox RPG that spent six years in Early Access building the one system that actually separates it from the Terraria-likes around it — recruit settlers, hand them jobs, and your colony keeps working while you're off fighting something in a cave.
8 / 10
Arkane Austin's 2017 immersive sim remains Very Positive across more than 54,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's finest achievements — a reputation this review can confirm survived the closure of the very studio that made it, when Arkane Austin was shut down entirely by Microsoft in 2024, and a real controversy over the game's own title, which this review can confirm Bethesda forced onto an unrelated story over the objections of Arkane's own founder.
8 / 10
The game that invented the shopkeeper RPG, sixteen years old and still 96% positive. Every buy-low-sell-high game since owes it something — and most of them dropped the one idea that made it work.
8 / 10
A co-op drug-empire sim that turned into one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the past two years, built almost single-handedly and beloved for exactly the reasons Breaking Bad was — right up until the empire is built and there's nothing left to do with it.
8 / 10
A pure factory-automation puzzle stripped of combat, scarcity and even failure, where the only opponent is a shape's own geometry. The tightest version of this genre's core loop yet built, and a useful test of what's left once every source of friction is removed.
8 / 10
You move to Shenzhen, take a job building circuits, and read a manual you're expected to print out — and the most-upvoted negative review, at 905 votes, recommends it anyway.
8 / 10
One of the most-loved games on Steam at 98% across 155,976 reviews — and the two loudest criticisms on its store page are complaints about an Early Access build it left behind nine years ago.
8 / 10
A tile-by-tile spaceship colony sim where you build the hull, route the gas pipes, and keep a crew of civilians fed, breathing, and sane while you search a procedural galaxy for a new home. Reached 1.0 in May 2026 after six years in Early Access.
8 / 10
A city builder where the antagonist isn't a raid or a monster roster but a drought timer, and every dam, canal and reservoir you build is really an answer to a scheduling problem. Beavers are the theme; water is the game.
8 / 10
The spiritual successor to Theme Hospital that launched rough — pathing bugs, a missing copy-paste room button, repetitive late-game hospitals — and, unusually for this library, has visibly improved rather than declined as measured by its own negative-review volume over time.
8 / 10
A god-game sandbox where civilizations of humans, orcs, elves and dwarves grow, fight and collapse almost entirely on their own while you throw lightning, plagues and dragons at them. Nearly five years into Steam Early Access, it's still one of the most purely enjoyable toyboxes in PC gaming — as long as you never expected it to have an ending.
8 / 10
A colony sim that turns its whole progression system into a programming lesson — you don't unlock better robots, you unlock better scripts, and the game lives or dies on whether that scripting language can keep up with the colony you build with it.
7.5 / 10
A submarine survival-horror sim where the alien monsters outside are rarely the reason a run ends badly — its own review corpus is unusually consistent that the biggest threat is the crew, whether through griefing, incompetence, or seven years of accumulated engine jank.
7.5 / 10
A co-op game about walking and talking with friends, from the Untitled Goose Game studio — shipped two days ago without a separate voice volume slider, so half its reviews are the same polite request written 1,400 different ways.
7.5 / 10
A desktop-postcard idle game about attracting and photographing over 130 real bird species, charming enough to convert players who weren't birdwatchers or idle-game fans going in — held back at launch by a genuinely rough technical start that the developer has spent the months since steadily patching away.
7.5 / 10
A factory-automation colony sim where the terrain itself is a resource — you mine the ground you build on, dump waste that physically piles up, and the island's shape becomes a side effect of every production decision. Four years into Early Access, with two to four more to go by the developer's own estimate.
7.5 / 10
Sad Panda Studios' idle dating sim is a genuine time-blocking resource-allocation game wearing an anime pin-up costume, still shipping new characters and events after almost a decade — and still leaning on the same event-currency pressure its own players complain about.
7.5 / 10
Kojima Productions' sequel arrived on PC nine months after its PlayStation 5 exclusive launch with one of the best-optimised AAA ports in recent memory and genuinely expanded delivery and combat systems, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 26,000 Steam reviews — tempered by a real, remarkably consistent complaint from longtime fans that its writing, pacing and a hand-holding new companion character fall well short of the original's atmosphere and restraint.
7.5 / 10
Rat Monthly's pocket-sized incremental has you excavating relics tile by tile and building a museum around them — a review of whether its two-to-three-hour runtime earns its Overwhelmingly Positive reputation, or just ends before the cracks show.
7.5 / 10
Arkane's supernatural stealth-action sequel remains Very Positive across more than 66,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest immersive sims ever made — a reputation that survived a severe, well-documented 2016 launch-performance crisis this review can confirm was genuinely fixed, though a separate, newer, still-unresolved AMD CPU plus Nvidia GPU launch-failure bug persists in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, alongside real, current uncertainty over Arkane's own future following a July 2026 Xbox restructuring.
7.5 / 10
A factory-automation game whose endgame isn't a bigger number but a visible megastructure eclipsing a star. Five years into Early Access, the premise is still the best in the genre — the question is whether the game around it has caught up.
7.5 / 10
