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186 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
186 reviews
A single-player RPG built to feel like a classic MMORPG raid night, populated entirely by NPC "SimPlayers" who level, group up and loot alongside you — a genuinely novel hook wrapped around an Early Access game still finding its footing on UI, quest clarity and combat feedback.
7.5 / 10
Erik Asmussen strips the conveyor belts and airships out of his own Factory Town and rebuilds the same economy as a menu-driven idle game — a genuinely distinct reimagining that nails offline progression but never quite explains the numbers it wants you to obsess over.
7.5 / 10
A deep, genuinely meditative agricultural sim that reviewers describe finding real therapeutic value in — held back for years by the same specific, franchise-wide complaint about hired-worker AI, and a biennial release cycle some longtime fans feel delivers too little new for the price.
7.5 / 10
A medieval survival city builder from the makers of Grim Dawn that spent three years building the deepest farming and disease system in the genre, then left Early Access in October 2025 to a Very Positive Steam rating and a still-vocal minority saying the milestone patch didn't fix what was wrong with it.
7.5 / 10
A Pomodoro-technique productivity companion disguised as an idle weapon-forging desktop pet — finish a focus session, a blacksmith maiden finishes a weapon, and you both work toward her freedom — loved so far by an almost entirely Chinese-speaking early audience.
7.5 / 10
Bluehood Games' incremental mining sim nails the first ten hours — hand-mining gives way to smelteries, upgrade trees and a claimable world map of parallel dig sites at a fair one-time price. The prestige layer that's supposed to carry the back half is where players keep hitting a wall.
7.5 / 10
A hundred-and-eighteen-hour median playtime and 92% of recent reviews positive — this is one of the best crafting RPGs anyone has made. It also sells a multiplayer mode with no story in it, and NZ$122 of small DLC on top of a NZ$70 game.
7.5 / 10
Barrel Smash Studios' two-person Early Access debut drowns the world and asks you to build a colony on whatever's still floating — rafts, sinking islands, shark attacks and a corporate conspiracy buried in scavenged bunkers, all wrapped around a Rimworld-flavoured survivor sim.
7.5 / 10
A deeply weird, deeply charming farming and creature-collector hybrid that resolves disputes with dance battles instead of combat — arriving on Steam years late and still trailing a genuinely ugly 2019 controversy that has little to do with the game itself.
7.5 / 10
A co-op mining sim where the underground has no fixed layout, bolted onto a genuine factory-automation game — dig your own tunnels with a squad of up to four, then turn what you find into a production line with conveyor belts, robots, and delivery contracts.
7.5 / 10
Six years in Early Access, and the 1.0 landed this week. You play a broke shipbreaker with a loan and a flying coffin, building a ship out of salvage one bolt at a time. Nothing else does what it does — and its own most devoted players think it needed another year.
7.5 / 10
A properly uncompromising immersive sim — hack it, sneak it, or shoot it, in a grimy 2038 California run by a secret society. The most divisive thing in it is the save system, and that's not an oversight. It's the design.
7.5 / 10
You brew potions by physically dragging a pestle across a map of alchemical effects, and it's one of the best crafting mechanics anyone has invented. The argument isn't whether it's good — it's whether a brilliant idea that stopped being developed is worth twenty-nine dollars.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely therapeutic cleaning simulator that reviewers describe helping with anxiety and bad days alike — undercut for a real, growing share of players by achievements locked behind a fast-multiplying string of paid DLC packs.
7.5 / 10
A free reading-habit companion that turns finished books into a growing pixel-art garden, tended by a Siamese cat named Grimalkin — released yesterday, built by a working novelist, and refreshingly upfront about having no ads, no energy bars and no dark patterns.
7.5 / 10
A meticulously accurate recreation of running a 1990s video rental store — verified as authentic by actual former Blockbuster employees in its own review section — undercut by a remarkably consistent complaint that nothing you build ever changes how the game actually plays.
7.5 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
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 city builder that abandons the colonist as its unit of decision and manages a population instead — tens of thousands of citizens, an empire beyond the walls, and an interface that makes you earn every bit of that scale.
7.5 / 10
Nightdive Studios' remake of the genre-defining 1994 original remains Very Positive across nearly 13,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as a remarkably faithful, lovingly crafted recreation — a fidelity that cuts both ways, as the review sample consistently describes the remake preserving the original's genuinely cryptic, maze-like navigation right alongside its atmosphere, and this review can confirm the remake's own development nearly collapsed entirely when the project ran out of money partway through.
7.5 / 10
Build a working CPU from NAND gates upward — a genuinely singular idea, sold as education, and 57 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews say the teaching is the part that doesn't work.
7.5 / 10
Two Point Studios' museum management sim remains Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 13,000 Steam reviews, widely credited by longtime series fans as the best entry yet — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent complaint about its "Thieves" mechanic, which recurring reviewers describe as a poorly-tuned frustration distinct from the rest of the game's gentle, decoration- focused design, alongside a real, repetitive "expedition loot-box" content-acquisition loop.
7.5 / 10
A free, open-source desktop pet with 51,500 reviews at 98.3% — 84% of them Chinese — and a cloud of malware accusations that turn out to trace back to one mundane, long-fixed bug.
7.5 / 10
The week's biggest "new release" is actually a year-old Early Access game that just hit 1.0 — and the 1.0 finally brought the co-op everyone was waiting for. It's funny, generous and hugely popular. It's also a management sim that never lets you stop doing the menial jobs yourself.
7.5 / 10
