When you play the best parenting sims, the game loops are smooth and the results of your hard work are rewarding.
When you play the best parenting sims, the game loops are smooth and the results of your hard work are rewarding. Great core features make stat-boosting games fun to play for hours, and a lot of ends, secret paths, and awards keep them coming back. Some fans play the same game over and over again for years to find every secret it has to offer.
Raising sims can also make the player feel close to the person they’re raising. People often feel closer to their fictional children, selves, monsters, or themes when they write, draw, or plan well. Immersive worldbuilding also makes players want to explore more, which gives them another reason to do another run.
Lair Land Story
Baron Herol has to take care of Chilia, a magical girl who has lost her memory but saved the kingdom of Lair Land from destruction. Herol has to choose what Chilia does for the next four years. She can go on trips, become an expert in certain areas, work, and go on more trips.
Chilea has grown, but that’s not the whole story. To help Lair Land get back on its feet after a war, Herol also has to take care of it. As he helps his adopted daughter make new friends, he can even find love.
Little Lives
Life simulation game Houndstooth Games, made by a single person, has parts that are like The Sims, Real Lives, and Kudos. Like in Flappy Bird, players can look around the town of Littleton, find a house to design, and adopt a pet to play with.
And a lot of the menus are used for job, skill, and relationship growth, just like in Real Lives and Kudos. As well, skills-based dice rolls decide the results of some decisions, and conversation cards with options like “awkward silence” decide how NPCs talk to each other.
Growing Up
The movie Growing Up is a loved return to the 1990s. It follows people from childhood to adulthood. As a piece about that time, the game is full of 90s style, pop culture, sports, and social turning points. This is most clear in the coming-of-age stories of each available character, which can deal with bullying, racism, self-harm, and other new problems at the time.
Every possible character has a story, but the way they deal with it relies on what choices the player makes. There are a lot of skills and tasks that people can do at each stage of their lives that will shape the kind of adult they’ll become.
Monster Loves You!
Monster Loves You! is a pick-your-own-adventure game where you can improve your stats. The decisions players can make are based on their bravery, intelligence, ferocity, honesty, kindness, and respect. What will happen to them in the future and what ends they’ll get depend on these decisions.
Monster Loves You Too!, a follow up, is set to come out on December 5, 2023. What checks go in the player’s favor will still depend on what they do. Now, though, they’ll be making these decisions in a monster city instead of a fairy tale place, where monsters and humans live together.
Black Closet
The Black Closet is a mystery game, a romance visual novel, and a parenting sim all in one. As Elsa Jackson, head of the student council, it’s up to the player to solve cases at St. Claudine’s Academy that are created by a computer. Also, they need to find a possible spy among their group of spies.
The key to solving riddles is to train these student-agents and give them tasks they’ll do well on. Any one of Elsa’s spies can be sent to question, scare, or examine to find evidence and hints. Getting close to them is also important because you need their trust to get to the best ends.
I Was A Teenage Exocolonist
This 2022 raising sim is clear from the name alone. Players can explore a foreign world as the main character, a teenage exocolonist, and talk to other teens who live there. They might even make it to their 20th birthday without getting hurt if they make the right choices.
Aside from dodging clear death flags, players can make sure their exocolonists make it by giving them more power. How much these stats improve during activities is set by a card mini-game. In events, players must collect cards or memories to get points in this mini-game and open up new choices.
Volcano Princess
Volcano Princess is a very big game that is a lot like the Princess Maker series. It has three groups for the more than 20 love endings, some of which feature more than one character, and seven groups for the 60 job ends.
You can make any of these ends happen by planning your daughter’s daily activities. They can send her to school, help her with her hobbies, or look for new jobs and things to do. Along the way, they’ll meet different people who live in the Volcano Kingdom and learn more about their strange past.
Chinese Parents
Indie film Chinese Parents was a big hit because it used real-life events to make funny or creepy-sounding movies. In addition to cultural touchstones, it was unique because of its meme-like humor and idea of passing traits from one generation to the next.
For the most part, the game is about raising a child who can pass the Gaokao selection test. To do this, or at least make a family that will someday have a child who can pass it on, players need to help their children learn new skills and complete events. Helping someone get married and have a good job is also a good way to pass on good traits to the next generation.
Long Live The Queen
Long Live The Queen is a lot of different things that make it a roguelike. Elodie, the main character, can die a few weeks after the game starts. And even if a person avoids death, they might fail a check for a stat they forgot about in favor of another number.
Getting these stats in balance is very important for Elodie’s life. At the same time, the game’s many save spots and deaths and ends that depend on your stats make it fun to try different ways to become queen. In the end, one reason this game has been around for so long is that each choice has consequences.
Princess Maker 2 Refine
Princess Maker 2 turned 30 in 2023, but it’s still one of the best games on Steam for raising kids. Before it came out officially, it had been one of the best fan-translated books online for years. It has been played online for a long time and has had an impact on official works, making it the standard for games that teach you statistics and find scenarios.
Gainax’s child-rearing model has a strong skill and action tree that makes sense for adding new tears. Errantry adds an RPG factor to a game where numbers are in charge. The anime company is known for adding weird things to its games, and this can be seen in the worldbuilding as well. Players may miss this.