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409 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
409 reviews
A cozy desktop-widget farming sim that lives just above your taskbar, loved by a Very Positive Chinese-majority review base for exactly that "world keeps turning while you glance down" feeling — once you get past a genuinely busy opening few hours the English-language sample never saw.
7.5 / 10
A widely acclaimed post-apocalyptic shooter whose negative reviews cluster around two distinct, dateable events rather than the game's own design — a 2019 review-bombing tied to Metro Exodus's Epic Games Store exclusivity, and a larger, more recent wave of genuine modern- system compatibility problems that this review found dominating 2025 and 2026 far more than any complaint about the game itself.
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
Level-5's sequel swaps Studio Ghibli's direct involvement for a hybrid of open-world action RPG and kingdom-building sim -- gorgeous and generous with content, but eight years on its combat, story and half-baked army battles are the recurring complaints even among fans who put hundreds of hours into it.
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
A one-person-built, Overcooked-inspired restaurant roguelite that sold over 1.5 million copies on the strength of its co-op chaos and permanent between-run progression -- Very Positive at Steam scale, with a consistent, well-documented complaint that its randomised upgrade rolls and multiplayer netcode haven't kept pace with everything else it does well.
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 witch-run potion shop, a card-based haggling minigame that critics singled out as genuinely clever, and a debt-clock structure so demanding that fewer than one in five players who own it have ever actually paid it off -- an IGF audience-award winner whose charm and its exhausting pace turn out to be the same design decision.
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
A fresh, simplified take on the farming-fantasy-action RPG series that plays well for newcomers and won an enormous, healthy Steam audience, but whose own review base — dominated by reviewers who've played every prior entry — argues repeatedly that the series' deeper systems were stripped out rather than modernised.
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
A cozy visual novel about running a D&D-inspired tavern, where the drinks you pour nudge adventurers toward one of several endings. The cast and the accessibility work are the real draw; the drink-mixing and quest-building systems around them are thinner than the premise promises.
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
