The Life Sim Games That Got Me Through Nursing School

Hello, Bitchery!!! If you missed me, it’s because I spent basically all of 2021 and 2022 in graduate nursing school, and then the first couple months of 2023 studying for a licensing exam. Through this process, I have found that one of the only ways I find I can actually unwind from cramming my brain full of massive amounts of information at a rapid pace is by playing video games.

As you might imagine, I played many video games over the past 25-ish months. And a lot of them were very good! So good that I thought, “Wow, I really should tell people about this game.” Thus, this mini-series was born. In each installment, I will focus on one (or two related) game genres and provide some of my top indie game recommendations in that genre. (Because as much as I love Animal Crossing, I don’t think I need to tell you it exists).

We are starting with life sim games because it’s my go-to genre for total relaxation. For the uninitiated, a life sim game (sim is short for “simulation”) is one where your avatar character is placed in some kind of personal or professional role and needs to fulfill the tasks associated with that role in the game. This can be a more or less real-world role (e.g. as a farmer in Stardew Valley) or a fantasy role that does not have any analog in the disappointingly non-fantastical reality we live in (e.g. as a person who ferries spirits around in the afterlife, as in Spiritfarer).

The thing that is so great about life sim games from a relaxation perspective is that there is typically a lot of freedom about which tasks to prioritize, what order to complete them in, etc. Most life sim games allow you to completely ignore certain aspects of the game in favor of others if you so prefer.

If you just want to bask in some vibes without having to solve complicated puzzles or weather difficult combat, you need a life sim. While a good life sim rewards a certain amount of cleverness, they don’t generally require it; i.e. if you want to spend 40 in-game days doing nothing but playing the fishing minigame badly, you can! The sandbox-y element is part of what makes them so fun; they can accommodate many different playstyles.

So, without further ado, here are the main life sim games that got me through graduate school, presented in no particular order.

My Favorite Short Sim: Luna’s Fishing Garden

For all that it only took me about 3 hours to beat, Luna’s Fishing Garden was an intensely delightful experience that buoyed up my soul long after I beat it. The premise of the game is that after a storm, your avatar, a lowly human, must restore a magical garden spread across floating islands. This island chain is populated with many charming spirits who make requests and/or demands. You spend most of the game planting things, harvesting things, selling things, fetching things, and fishing (classic sim activities).

What really elevates Luna’s Fishing Garden for me is the beautiful pixel art and the excellent fishing minigame, which is somewhat similar but not identical to fishing in Stardew Valley. I deeply appreciate that you can adjust the fishing difficulty at any time. This was great because I could catch all but the most difficult fish on hard mode, at which point I switched to the easier mode to complete my fish collection. Also, you can get adorable capybaras in boats to help you with your garden. This game is a great little snack for any sim fan looking for a fun afternoon, or a good entry point for someone who wants to try out life sim games but is overwhelmed by the thought of starting one of the games that people commonly sink hundreds or thousands of hours into (like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing).

A Farm Sim for Pokemon Lovers: Ooblets

Have you ever thought, “Wow, I love farm sims, but I wish I could also catch Pokemon in my farm game”? Then Ooblets is for you. The core conceit of Ooblets is that your character has moved to an island, called Oob, to begin a new life. This new life includes farming, cooking, decorating your house, making friends, crafting, running a shop, and exploring the island; all the classic sim activities.

But it also includes adorable little Pokemon-like creatures called Ooblets who can help out on your farm. You catch new Ooblets through dance battles, and different Ooblets have different dance moves you can use, so crafting a strong dance-battling team and leveling them up through battles is an important part of getting new Ooblets.

The vibe of Ooblets is charmingly weird. For all that everything is pastel and adorable, most of the villagers openly display their own fears and foibles (foibles ranging from being a self-centered teenager to “I believe I’m an alien). The humor is sometimes goofy, sometimes dark, sometimes both. This bizarro edge keeps the twee-ness of it all from being cloying.

There is a quest line, involving saving the town (I won’t say more because there is actually a pretty fun mystery at the heart of it that I don’t want to spoil). And there’s still plenty to do once you beat that quest line, like trying to complete your Ooblet collection and participating in seasonal events.

In the course of writing this article, I realized there is a seasonal event happening in the game right now through the end of May, so I will absolutely be picking up the game as soon as I stop writing this.

If You Need A Stardew Itch Scratched: Littlewood or Potion Permit

I love Stardew Valley, but lots of my enjoyment in the game comes from unlocking and exploring new areas. At a certain (sad) point, when you’ve unlocked every area there is to unlock and plumbed its secrets, you get diminishing returns on this particular aspect of the game. If you are like me in this regard, you will probably be delighted by either of my next two recommendations, which are similar to Stardew in many respects but give you whole new worlds to discover and explore.

First, Littlewood. The premise of Littlewood is that your avatar was part of a band of powerful heroes who saved the world from an evil wizard, but now you have amnesia and don’t remember any of it. You and your friends and fellow heroes have decided to found a new town to help participate in the world-rebuilding process. To this end, much of the game involves scouring the world for resources so you can build homes and shops for your villager friends and craft home decor to their tastes. One of the fun things about Littlewood is that you get to design your entire town from the ground up; you decide where everything goes, and you can adjust the topography of the village, Animal Crossing terraforming-style. Other delightful things about this game: there’s an in-game card battler that is pretty fun, and you can romance the (now-reformed) evil wizard you defeated to save the world, which tickles me.

Second, let’s talk Potion Permit. In this game you play as a chemist (basically an herbalist doctor) sent from the city to the town of Moonbury, where you need to earn the trust of the villagers by providing medical care and generally helping them out with their problems. The main activity in PP isn’t farming but is instead gathering resources from the areas around the town and using those resources to make potions. The potion-making minigame really shines; it involves solving a puzzle using your gathered ingredients as the pieces.

I got through the entire Potion Permit quest line in maybe 30ish hours (e.g. I unlocked and explored all the areas). However, there are aspects of the game I haven’t delved too deeply into yet; I have not fished too much, nor have I put too much effort into my social relationships with other characters. Be forewarned that right now you can only romance six characters. However, the developers have said that more quest content and marriage options are coming.

A Life Sim for People Who Like to Cry: Spiritfarer

Do you like to cry? Play Spiritfarer. ( A )

The game, set in an afterlife conceptualized as a series of islands in a vast sea, is a beautifully poignant meditation on life and death. You play as a Spiritfarer, helping spirits resolve their unfinished business from life before they can move on. You sail around on a boat from island to island, ferrying spirits from place to place to help them complete the tasks they need to move on. Gameplay itself is very fun, but the story can get a little emotionally intense; I did cry multiple times.

The gameplay has cross-genre appeal as it involves elements of exploration, platforming, resource gathering, building, and management/simulation. You can build up your boat to basically be a massive floating town, complete with farming and crafting capabilities.

In addition to being a good choice for fans of life sim/management games, anyone who feels nostalgic for The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker will get a hoot out of sailing around the world map. Also, there’s a fishing minigame.

A Life Sim That Actually Helped Me Study: PomoFarm

PomoFarm is an absolutely brilliant idea: a farming sim combined with a Pomodoro timer. You control an adorable little duck and during your “break” periods, you plant crops on your extremely cute farm.

During the “work” part of the built-in Pomodoro timer, your crops grow, and you can’t interact with the farm. Each break/work set is an in-game week, and each “season” lasts 8 weeks. After each season, you can use your profits from the season to upgrade your farm–clearing debris, unlocking new crops, increasing your profit margins, etc.

This game kept me going through many hours of studying, because I knew there was at least a little bit of fun built-in. Pomofarm also motivated me to keep my breaks to the actual break time (a frequent problem for me with Pomodoro…), because I wanted to proceed through more weeks and seasons and upgrade my farm!

A lovely feature of this game is that you can set whatever timer intervals you want. Does this mean sometimes I made my work times 10 minutes, my regular break time 10 minutes, and my long break 25 minutes? Yes. Was I still more productive than I would have been otherwise? Also yes.

My Top Life Sim, Ever: Cozy Grove

Saving my favorite life sim of all time for last!! Cozy Grove is a lot like Animal Crossing except, in my humble opinion, better. Instead of being in debt to a mysterious-yet-benevolent Tanuki in a land of animal people, you play as a Spirit Scout, stranded on a magical island and helping the ghosts of dead bear people make peace with their regrets. In the process, you feed your campfire, Flamey, who gets brighter to reveal more and more of the island. As you help the various islanders, you can decorate your island and your tent, harvest island resources, cook and craft, complete collections of bugs, fish, shells, and other assorted items; and tend to a variety of creepy-cute spirit pets.

The art is incredibly beautiful, like an eldritch isometric watercolor-and-ink painting come to life. The decorations and outfits are fantastical and fun, sometimes twee and sometimes sinister. There are also tons of jokes layered in to the game, especially in the descriptions and names of bugs and fish.

One of the things I love most about this game is that is takes the slight undercurrent of creepiness that is implicit in Animal Crossing (why are you the only human in a world of animal people??) and makes it explicit. Basically everything about the game is just a little bit spooky, haunted, or cursed. The guy who runs the shop is a giant fox and maybe chthonic god. The traveling vendor makes frequent reference to having made some kind of Faustian bargain he is now struggling to meet the terms of. Little imps run around the island and drop resources when fed. This is a sim for the inner macabre goth kid in all of us.

Collectively, these titles have brought me hundreds of hours of joy and relaxation. I hope at least one of them tickled your fancy.

If you have thoughts on these or other life sims of interest to the Bitchery, please share below!!