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1719 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
1719 reviews
A turn-based management sim that casts players as the owner of a video game store trying to survive 25 years of real gaming history, from the NES boom to the dawn of digital distribution, built on a review sample this review's research found was overwhelmingly Japanese- and Chinese-language, limiting how much direct reviewer quotation this review could draw on.
6 / 10
From One Empty Room to a Working Register Supermarket Empire Together strips out the usual tycoon-sim shortcut buttons and makes you do the actual labor of running a shop. There
6 / 10
Tales of Justice Academy: Winds Arise is a $10.99 story-driven wuxia RPG about a young martial artist rising through a prestigious academy, and while its setting, art, and combat ideas have genuine fans, a large wave of reviews, especially from the game's core Chinese-speaking audience, criticize its writing, translation quality, and combat balance.
6 / 10
Wētā Workshop's long-delayed, licensed hobbit life-sim finally arrived after two separate postponements and a publisher upheaval that saw its original label dissolved mid-development — and landed to a genuinely split reception, with an unusually large minority of its 3,783-review corpus describing a shallow, poorly optimised game that undersells both the cozy-sim genre and the setting it's licensed to use.
6 / 10
Read review of Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game
A restaurant-management simulation crossed with a visual-novel RPG, following a new Chinese restaurant owner as they form bonds with a warmly written cast and chase one of several endings uncovering the mystery behind their establishment's past downfall — a heartfelt, evidently solo-crafted labour of love whose enthusiastic Very Positive reception sits alongside a substantial, detailed run of bug and balance complaints from its most engaged players.
6 / 10
A shop with no debts, no deadlines, and no danger Teddy's Haven puts players behind the counter of a small fantasy curiosity shop on the island of Ursa, gathering ingredients,
6 / 10
A ground-up remake of Chilla's Art's cult job-sim horror game, widely praised by the studio's own dedicated fanbase as one of its strongest entries yet, undercut by genuinely severe optimisation problems that leave a game this small demanding surprisingly serious hardware to run smoothly.
6 / 10
A NZ$4.49 duck-themed incremental whose own store page promises offline income and careful balance — and whose players report an "extremely slow" AFK system and upgrade costs that hit a flat "MAX" wall well before the 15-achievement list is done.
6 / 10
Cute drinks, creeping dread The Boba Teashop opens as exactly what its title promises: a small, cozy management game where you prepare boba tea drinks for a cast of pixel-art custo
6 / 10
To Live Is to Endure The Dandelion Endures. casts the player as a single dandelion sprouting by the roadside, and its entire design philosophy is compressed into its own title: to
6 / 10
A Short, Sharp Slice of Small-Town Horror The Grove drops you into a quiet Indiana town where locals whisper about a nearby pine forest and the children who've vanished into it
6 / 10
An occult card-crafting narrative RPG that wears its Cultist Simulator and Arkham Horror influences proudly, The Horror at Highrook earns a Very Positive score for its atmosphere, art, and writing, but a heavily corroborated complaint holds that its mechanics never grow beyond what its free demo already showed, leaving a short, linear, unchallenging experience that many reviewers feel is overpriced for what it delivers.
6 / 10
The Promise Tree of Alden is a $3.99 short narrative walking sim from prolific solo developer Tonguç Bodur about a man returning to a dying forest to make peace with a broken promise, and this review's full 30-review sample, Positive overall, praises striking visuals and narration while a real minority of reviewers, several of them longtime fans of the developer's catalogue, call its story and structure a familiar retread of ground he's covered before.
6 / 10
A Tokyo Workshop, One Cluttered Box at a Time The Sorting Bureau, from developer Apelsinka Games, launched as a full 1.0 release on August 21, 2026 after a demo period that stretch
6 / 10
A budget-priced solo/co-op stealth heist game from OtherSide Entertainment, scaled back late in development from an originally announced PvPvE format, drawing a genuinely Mixed review sample that credits its polished core stealth loop and rock-bottom price while raising heavily corroborated complaints about thin content, missing basic options, and a mission structure that betrays its abandoned multiplayer origins.
6 / 10
Dovetail Games finally builds an official, fully explorable Island of Sodor on the Train Sim World engine, delivering real nostalgia and a lovingly recreated map undercut by punishing signal rules, day-one DLC, and a rough technical launch.
6 / 10
A Battle Brothers-meets-Mount & Blade mercenary sandbox set during the fall of the Han dynasty, earning a Very Positive reception for its deep recruitment and character-building systems while drawing consistent, well-corroborated criticism for repetitive quests, an underwhelming real-time auto-battler combat system, and rough translation and performance issues.
6 / 10
A short, PS1-styled psychological horror game about a lone worker rationing breath at a remote mountain train station, whose oppressive atmosphere and sound design earn real admiration, tempered by a sharply split reception over its thin, abruptly-ending story and a specific, repeated set of softlock and save-system bugs that cost some players their entire playthrough.
6 / 10
A Raft-inspired survival builder that surprises reviewers by growing well beyond the genre's usual scope into full colony management, night-time pirate raids and underwater leviathan-hunting, praised for a genuinely responsive solo developer, undercut by aggressive, untoggleable sharks, a confusing underwater-versus-on-raft interaction bug, and a rough, clearly early launch state that several reviewers describe in early-access terms despite this being a full release.
6 / 10
A genuinely charming, deep cozy urban-gardening sim with beautiful presentation and satisfying soil, light and cooking mechanics, undermined at launch by severe bugs including crashes, broken drag-and-drop menus and a non-functional cooking timer, an unintuitive control scheme with weak tutorialization, and a specific economic design flaw that can trap new players in an unrecoverable debt spiral.
6 / 10
An Arena Full of Balls, and Nobody Knows Why Too Many Balls launched September 18, 2026 from developer HeartBerry Studio and publisher Twisted Joy, handing the player a basket, a p
6 / 10
A solo-developer factory-automation game that ships complete rather than in Early Access, with a genuinely responsive dev and procedurally generated worlds, but that its own review corpus repeatedly measures against Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program — and finds wanting on the tutorial, controls and combat that stand between you and the automation.
6 / 10
A cheap, cheerfully-written Early Access merchant RPG whose title promises trading and whose actual difficulty curve punishes it — this review's full read of every English-language negative review finds a consistent, two-year-old complaint that carrying trade goods is what gets a caravan killed, alongside a smaller but serious cluster of reports of full system crashes.
6 / 10
A cozy tavern-keeping RPG that hooked players with a tight, creative innkeeping loop in 2020 — six years and a reported studio handover later, a large and specific share of its own veteran reviewers say that original focus has been diluted by farming, mining and Stardew-shaped scope creep.
6 / 10
