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409 Simulation games reviewed and scored, best first.
409 reviews
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
The most completely simulated economy in games, eight years of free updates, and one recurring problem — in a game about giving orders to AI, the AI is what 61 of its hundred negative reviews complain about.
7.5 / 10
A Tamagotchi-raising sim welded onto an idle RPG, charming in exactly the way its premise promises and shallow in exactly the way that premise risks — the hero grows on its own, but you rarely get to decide how.
7.5 / 10
A management-lite slice-of-life game about a thirtysomething punk band that will probably never make it, told through diner shifts, rhythm-game gigs and three meters that never stop draining.
7.3 / 10
A US$5 solo-dev card game about getting obscenely, monstrously rich — Cookie Clicker's number-go-up loop wearing a satirical life-sim's clothes, with real documented flaws (a reset mechanic that still catches players a year after the fix) and none of the monetisation traps this library usually has to warn about.
7.3 / 10
A two-day-old cozy first-person tidying sim that scatters 2,071 jigsaw pieces from 87 real public-domain paintings across a gallery and asks you to sort them back into place, priced at €4.67 and sitting at 91.7% positive on its opening weekend.
7.2 / 10
A 1997 Acorn RISC OS cult classic from future Deck13 co-founder Jan Klose gets its first-ever PC release — a genuinely deep 4X of colonization, law-making and tactical combat wrapped in a steep learning curve and a deliberately period-accurate 256-colour look.
7.2 / 10
A voxel-art city builder that trades money and disasters for a strict web of building adjacency rules, turning city planning into a genuine spatial puzzle — Very Positive on Steam, with a persistent, well-documented complaint that its achievement-gated progression can trap players on the first map for good.
7.2 / 10
A hands-off map simulator where you paint borders, spawn AI-controlled nations and then watch them conquer, ally, revolt and collapse across thousands of simulated years. The scenario tools and Steam Workshop are genuinely excellent; the combat resolution underneath them is close to a coin flip, and that undercuts the "simulator" the title promises.
7 / 10
A post-apocalyptic colony sim where the city is a physics object first and a spreadsheet second — every beam, platform and tower obeys weight and tension, and the rising and falling tide can take a whole district down with it.
7 / 10
A "Soviet BioShock" action RPG whose art direction and alternate-history setting draw close to universal praise, wrapped around combat and pacing reviewers describe as repetitive, a divisive talking-glove companion, and a real, documented controversy over its Russian developer's funding ties that this review reports rather than adjudicates.
7 / 10
A one-person city-building survival game from 2014 that still holds a Very Positive Steam rating across 37,800-plus reviews, built on a genuinely unusual pitch — no money, no skill trees, no combat — that a decade of players keep bumping up against the same mid-game ceiling to enjoy.
7 / 10
A Persona-inspired turn-based JRPG set in a 1960s American town, whose stunning pixel art and ambitious mashup of social sim and monster-taming combat draw real love, held back by combat accuracy problems and a save system its own developers admitted needed fixing at launch.
7 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded "date your weapons" dungeon crawler from the Moon Hunters team -- Very Positive on Steam for its style, music and genuinely distinctive premise, and shadowed since launch week by a specific, heavily-upvoted complaint that its story talks about consent far more than its mechanics actually practice it.
7 / 10
A solo-developed top-down delivery sim across three open cities, where cargo condition and a watchful police force matter as much as your route — launched two days ago with a tiny but detailed early review corpus and no achievement data yet to check its claims against.
7 / 10
A one-day-old, solo-developed turn-based castle-builder that spent over a year in a public demo before launch — 70-plus buildings, 90-plus technologies and 50-plus historical Crusade-era Lords for a budget price, tested so far by exactly one Steam reviewer.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, genuinely soothing pixel-art fishing game that lets you fish actively or let an idle mode do it for you — beloved enough to have gotten real players off the couch and back onto real lakes with their own families, undercut at launch by a real, consistently documented complaint that idling outperforms actually playing, and that there simply wasn't much game underneath the vibe.
7 / 10
A solo-developed first-person cave exploration game about a caver sent to find two missing colleagues, built around unmarked passages, memory over map markers, and a mystery that turns out not to be about the missing cavers at all.
7 / 10
A solo-developed idle aquarium game that nails the cozy, screensaver-adjacent fantasy of collecting fish, but leans so hard on one buy-raise-sell loop that its rarest rewards become a months-long grind with nothing else underneath to fall back on.
7 / 10
A Scottish Highlands colony sim that deliberately swaps RimWorld's raids and pirate attacks for winters, in-laws and beekeeping — four years into Early Access, with monthly patches still landing and the same comparison still following it everywhere.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.10 debut space clicker from a solo Steam developer credited only as "Tom," where tapping a dying star funds a Cookie Clicker-style building ladder, a real anti-farming safeguard on its prestige loop, and a ~40-node Dark Matter tree — checked five days into a launch with almost no reviews yet to judge it by.
7 / 10
A voxel colony-building strategy game crossing Minecraft's block-by-block construction with genuine tower-defense stakes, still in Early Access more than nine years after its 2017 debut — sustained by an unusually transparent weekly developer blog and a loyal Very Positive fanbase, with a persistent, still-current complaint that its mid-to-late game never quite matches the promise of its opening hours.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Kickstarter-backed farming sim whose "1.0" release in late 2023 shipped with main quests literally marked "work in progress" — a real, widely-documented letdown for long-time backers that the game has spent the time since quietly living down.
7 / 10
A pixel-art fisher who sets up camp in the corner of your screen and keeps casting while you work — beloved by 97% of a two-thousand-plus review base, but the same corpus argues loudly about whether "idle" is the right word for it, and the achievement data backs the argument up.
7 / 10
