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1729 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
1729 reviews
A charming, drag-and-drop sheep-farming business sim whose demo drew over a million plays — undercut by a near-universal complaint that it demands constant, tiring manual clicking with almost no automation, a mandatory sheep-slaughter mechanic that clashes hard with its cozy branding, and a widely repeated accusation that it closely clones the well-known indie game Stacklands.
5 / 10
A genuinely ambitious 50v50 jungle-warfare expansion of the Hell Let Loose formula — tunnels, helicopters, patrol boats and 17 battlefield roles — undercut by a launch several reviewers call "extremely early access," a crossplay aim-assist complaint that dominates the negative reviews, and a NZ$61.99 price competing with cheaper, better-established Vietnam shooters.
5 / 10
A genuinely atmospheric retail-horror hybrid whose day-shift stocking and night-shift anomaly-spotting concept draws real praise, undermined by an overwhelming, specific and widely corroborated complaint that the paid release adds almost nothing over its free demo, unfinished shop upgrades, and a very short runtime with no replay mode.
5 / 10
A Cozy Village, Disturbed Gently Rather Than Threatened Huglings puts players in the role of one of the titular Huglings, small storybook villagers whose home has been "gently
5 / 10
A free-to-play idle RPG about farming, fishing and fighting for scrap, released by solo developer blevsoft in December 2023 and left without a content update since January 2024.
5 / 10
A free solo-developer idle sim about running a weapon shop, prestiging into a town, and sending adventurers out to die for profit — a genuinely distinctive premise undercut by a near-total absence of tutorial explanation and two separate multi-month stretches where updates simply stopped.
5 / 10
A NZ$8.99 solo-developed idle cultivation RPG that reviewers repeatedly call "a cut-price Melvor Idle in xianxia clothing" — Mixed across 87 reviews, with a strong 2025 run undone by a dead-quiet Early Access: no update since 11 June 2025, and its own Steam interface page marks English support as "Not supported," which is why not one of those 87 reviews is in English.
5 / 10
A genuinely novel business-sim sequel -- build and run an internet cafe complete with a working in-game browser -- undone by a single, specific, four-years-unfixed bug that keeps showing up in reviews: save files randomly corrupting or wiping hours of progress, in a game its own last content update predates by over four years.
5 / 10
A charming co-op island trade-empire economy sim with a genuinely appealing production-chain and livestock loop, undercut by a direct plagiarism allegation against an earlier market sim, a save-breaking day-restart bug, co-op lobby-joining failures, and a patch-notes-contradicted timer bug that together leave the game feeling, by its own players' account, unfinished for a full 1.0 release.
5 / 10
A budget post-apocalyptic survival sim from solo studio North Ruins about scavenging, driving and building your way to the last outposts, earning a genuinely Mixed launch reception for an interesting, immersive concept undercut by jank, clunky building, and at least one report of broken core controls.
5 / 10
A SimTower-style vertical building sim whose core lobby-office-condo-elevator loop draws genuine early fans, undercut by a near-total absence of tutorial or explanatory text that a cross-language sample repeatedly and specifically flags as the release's single biggest problem, compounded by no adjustable game speed and unfavourable direct comparisons to a 1998 predecessor.
5 / 10
A pixel-art riff on the old Lemonade Stand formula, swapping juice for weather-tuned lattes and a family home to restore, undercut for seven straight years by the same complaint from its own players — that it never explains how to actually play it.
5 / 10
A free-to-play sci-fi idle game split almost exactly down the middle, with "AI slop" the single most repeated word in its negative reviews — and a store-page disclosure confirming AI tools were used across art, writing and UI text, rather than leaving that complaint unverified.
5 / 10
A genre gap, finally filled LIBRITOPIA: Librarian Simulator stakes out territory the crowded "job sim" genre has genuinely left mostly untouched: running a public library
5 / 10
A genuinely novel Early Access experiment in which every NPC's behaviour is driven by a language model the player supplies themselves, reviewed here on the strength of its complete 21-review Steam record and the solo developer's own unusually candid admission that this is one of three AI-driven projects competing for his attention, and currently not the one winning.
5 / 10
Developer Mindflair Games, published by Excalibur Publishing, delivers an Early Access driving-survival game about repairing and roughing it across a post-disaster American wilderness in a broken-down RV, earning genuine praise for its cozy, cooperative loop from a portion of a Mixed review base, set against a dominant, heavily repeated complaint that its asking price far outstrips a currently thin, repetitive content set.
5 / 10
A tiny desktop companion about a deer tending her meadow, praised for its cozy charm but criticised for running out of content in a single afternoon.
5 / 10
A pocket-sized desktop idler about stocking shelves and laying carpet to draw in more customers, charming enough as background company for other tasks but thin enough that several reviewers finish everything the game has to offer within a handful of hours.
5 / 10
Read review of My Tiny Grocery Store - Desktop Idle Supermarket Game
No Pain No Gain - Ragdoll Sandbox is a 2.49 dollar solo-developer physics sandbox from Rike Games where players build traps to hurt a ragdoll for coins, and this review's small, Mostly Positive sample enjoys the core idea while repeatedly and specifically describing the execution as unpolished and mobile-game-like.
5 / 10
A visually striking, deliberately surreal farming-and-exploration life-sim whose deadpan-comedic writing and stylised world win over a genuine share of players, held back by a rough translation, sparse post-launch support, and NPCs so minimally detailed that reviewers can't agree whether it's an intentional charm or a sign of an unfinished game.
5 / 10
A cozy game genre gets a distinctly different apartment Panelka takes the now-familiar cozy interior-decoration sandbox formula and points it somewhere genuinely different: rather
5 / 10
A NZ$2.99 click-to-build island tycoon with no ads and no in-app purchases, whose entire Steam review history — five reviews, four positive — was written inside five weeks of its November 2023 launch and hasn't gained a single new one since.
5 / 10
Penniless Chef is a free-to-play restaurant-management sim from Team Zerobase whose Mixed review sample praises a genuinely satisfying recipe-discovery cooking loop while describing a launch riddled with bugs, including a save-and-load bug several reviewers call the game unplayable, a broken tutorial, and characters that get stuck and stop moving entirely.
5 / 10
A cheap, genuinely improved sequel to 2018's Gamer Career Tycoon that lets you build a streaming career from a day job upward, undercut by a repetitive, click-heavy interface and content that visibly runs out once you've made your fortune.
5 / 10
