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1729 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
1729 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 cozy productivity companion that ties a pomodoro-style focus timer to an idle farming sim living on the edge of your screen, drawing an unusually passionate, near-unanimous reception especially from neurodivergent players who credit it with genuinely changing their relationship to work, held back by a real identity tension between "tool" and "game" that a small but detailed cluster of critical reviewers describes in specific terms.
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
Six Years of Donuts and Baggage High Times launched on Steam on July 23, 2026, from solo-turned-small developer Yangyang Mobile, following a 2024 Kickstarter and a long public demo
8 / 10
inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories is a $19.99 cozy narrative game about a summer spent behind the counter of a small-town Japanese convenience store, and its warm characters and relaxed storekeeping loop have won over most players, even as many wish the six-to-eight-hour experience simply lasted longer.
8 / 10
Read review of inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories Review: A Cozy, Fleeting Slice of 1990s Japan
A coming-of-age sci-fi RPG about growing up on an alien world across ten years and card- battle skill checks, praised by a huge share of its own audience as genuinely moving, undercut for a specific minority by a replay-driven structure several reviewers say betrays its own central promise that choices carry across lives.
8 / 10
A gorgeously illustrated horror life-sim RPG blending fairy-tale folklore, a sapphic dating-sim structure, and genuinely eldritch horror in a rural German setting — celebrated for its striking mixed-media art and branching narrative, but held back at launch by unforgiving, sometimes obscure puzzle and survival segments the developer has since substantially, though not fully, addressed.
8 / 10
A Road Trip Built Around Standing Still Look to the Birds casts the player as a kid on a family road trip through New England and the Canadian Maritimes, camera in hand, stopping a
8 / 10
A deep, one-time-purchase game-development tycoon that over 2,300 English reviewers rate more highly than its own predecessor — as long as you're happy solving its systems rather than expressing yourself through them.
8 / 10
From the creators of Judero, this stop-motion digging adventure sends a friendly robot beneath a whimsical claymation world to mend her community, earning near-unanimous praise for its handcrafted charm and soundtrack even as some reviewers wish its short, simple gameplay loop went deeper.
8 / 10
An exceptionally well-supported, expert-verified milling and lathe simulator that real machinists and trade students praise for its accuracy, backed by one of the most sustained update records this lane has found, let down only by a steep learning curve that leaves true beginners with too little guidance.
8 / 10
A two-person indie team's cozy-creepy library-organizing game asks solo players or groups of up to four to shelve an ever-growing collection of books by their own logic while fending off rats, skeletons, and the occasional poltergeist, and its nearly unanimous praise centres on exactly how good that sorting loop feels.
8 / 10
A short, PSX-styled psychological horror narrative about five crew members stranded on a crashed cargo ship, told out of chronological order as guilt, denial, and complicity unravel among the survivors, whose writing and atmosphere earned it an enormous, devoted following alongside a smaller but consistent counter-current of reviewers who found its back half tedious and its themes less profound than the hype suggested.
8 / 10
A genetics-driven frog-breeding sim from one half of the APICO team, built around discovering and cross-breeding dozens of frog species across a waking and a dreaming world -- beautifully drawn and warmly received, with real friction in its navigation, inventory and pacing that a year and a half of updates hasn't fully resolved.
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
An Early Access cozy creature collector that fuses Stardew Valley-style town life with roguelike dungeon-diving combat and Nimbit creature raising with genuine trait inheritance, drawing a Very Positive early reception for its unusually polished launch and inventive genre blend, tempered by one detailed reviewer's warning that its dungeon, raising and town systems currently compete for the player's time rather than reinforcing each other.
8 / 10
Whetstone Games' Early Access music-tycoon sim disguises a genuinely capable digital audio workstation as a whimsical recording-studio management game, and reviewers who've been scared off real production software by music theory or DAW jargon describe it as the most approachable on-ramp they've found — even with some expected Early Access rough edges.
8 / 10
A cozy-spooky, first-person Slavic-folklore mystery walking sim about a childhood visit to a grandparents' village, earning a unanimous Positive launch reception for its atmosphere and storytelling, tempered by honest early-release bugs and a natural episodic-format cliffhanger.
8 / 10
A 2012 Vita classic finally reached PC in June 2020 and converted thousands of players who swore they didn't like JRPGs — but its near-universal acclaim sits alongside a years-long, well-documented crash bug that the storefront's own review sample keeps returning to.
8 / 10
A Farming Idler That Lives on Your Taskbar, Not Your Screen The desktop-companion idler has become a small, crowded genre since games like Rusty's Retirement proved that people
8 / 10
A Pomodoro focus timer fused with a tiny idle farm, overwhelmingly loved by a review corpus full of people describing real help with procrastination, ADHD and depression — held back from a perfect score by a specific season-transition bug that can quietly lock progress, and a content ceiling dedicated users eventually hit.
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
A js13k 2019 puzzle game built on a genuine real-time fluid dynamics simulation — drag a finger or mouse across the water to create currents and steer stranded boats home, ranked 4th out of 200 entries that year, with touch and mouse controls confirmed working identically.
8 / 10
