In short, as a longtime fan of life Sims, I was ready to love Little Sim World as I saw the page. It promises a charming blend of gameplay ideas: imagine The Sims’ life management set in an open 2D town with Stardew Valley’s cozy community vibes. The setting absolutely delivers on the charm, but unfortunately the gameplay in this Early Access build left me more exhausted than entertained. In its current state I cannot recommend it.

One thing I like most in this game is the authentic London city vibe. Little Sim World is set in a mini London and it feels very British. The developers clearly drew from real-life surroundings instead of a cookie-cutter town. You’ll spot red telephone booths, Royal Mail post boxes, and cars driving on the left. Maybe it doesn't matter to people who haven't lived in London since they might not recognize it. But I think it is important as a developer. It shows that they have an intrinsic familiarity with the world-building environment, which gives the game its potential.

What attracted me most in the store page was the 2D art style shines most in the NPC portraits during dialogues. Meeting “quirky locals” really is a treat visually. From what I played so far, I feel like the game’s concept is basically The Sims meets Stardew Valley. You have an open map of Little London to explore, with shops, a pub, and neighbors to befriend or romance. There’s even a hint of town story and building relationships like a farming sim. On paper, this mix of life simulation, open-world exploration, and cozy community is exciting. I appreciate the big dream here – it’s aiming to let us both build a home and be part of a town.

However, those cannot counterbalance the main problems in the game, game interaction is always the core. All I can say is that this game is quite tedious and cumbersome. First and foremost, clunky UI and poor UX design. The interface needs a serious overhaul. Nothing is as intuitive as it should be. The inventory and object interaction system is convoluted, leading to constant confusion. The game rarely teaches you how to do things, so you’ll likely end up scratching your head at simple tasks. Menus are cluttered and not console-friendly, bad map system, and navigating your items or furniture placement feels quite unnecessary. It all feels unpolished.

Then it comes to the gameplay. Basic tasks that should be fun or intuitive become multi-step chores. For example, eating a simple meal is oddly complicated – my character couldn’t just munch a salad from their inventory. I had to place the food on a table and have my character sit in a chair first, or else get a message that there’s “no space to consume this”. Even The Sims 1 from two decades ago would automatically sit your sim down to eat; here I’m wrestling with furniture placement just to have breakfast. This kind of micromanagement isn’t immersive – it’s frustrating and breaks the flow.

What I feel is like, Little Sim World tries to be ultra-realistic in simulating life needs, but it doesn’t have the polish to pull it off. Your character has eight different needs meters to monitor (hunger, thirst, comfort, energy, hygiene, etc.) – even separate food and drink requirements. In theory more realism could be fun, but in practice it’s overwhelming. Without the smooth AI behaviors and animations of The Sims, tending to these needs feels like spinning plates. I found myself waiting constantly to watch my character planning out shower/eat/drink cycles. It’s more boring than enjoyable.

The game fixates on simulating mundane real-life chores—taking out trash, using toilet papers, managing fridge space. Yet your character can only do one thing at a time, as they can only stand in place to drink and perform the time it takes to finish the action. And it completely skips creating a real community. The town itself looks like a grid of function blocks, with buildings crammed together and almost no spatial identity. Doors are often hidden on the far side of buildings, and it’s hard to tell from the screen which side you’re supposed to enter from. Navigating the map becomes a confusing chore.

Besides, NPCs don’t have routines, homes, or community roles. They’re just static extensions of shop buildings, available 16 hours a day like human vending machines. It feels bizarrely unbalanced: hyper-real where it doesn’t matter, and entirely hollow where it does. This isn’t London—it’s a ghost town of storefronts with no community. If this were real London, they’d all be on strike.

Another thing I want to mention is it's cheap-looking presentation. Outside of those lovely character portraits, the overall presentation feels a bit plastic. The environment and UI visuals give off a mobile game vibe. Or maybe a mobile game is actually what developers really want to do at the end of days? Animations are basic, coupled with some early access glitches, it ends up feeling rough and unrefined.

I think the team may also be Sims players, thinking sims in M4 do things like standing in front of the TV just not sitting on the sofa, holding a bowl to eat something everywhere, looks particularly unrealistic. But it turns out that when you really try to make it physically "realistic", it's just to make players feel especially annoying. So the improvements EA made are based on the experience of making The Sims for so many years, stepping over the pitfalls and optimising the trade-offs over and over again. And these things happen to be the parts that I was completely unaware of when I was playing The Sims, but only felt strongly about when I played games from smaller groups like inZOI and Little Sim World. Now I have a feeling for Sims-like game, is that everyone scolded EA in the category monopoly hegemony bullsxxt, so there are always people full of ideals to do a different game out, but really, in a short period of time they just can't beat the damn sxxt fxxking stupid rubbish EA.

What worth reflecting on here is the philosophy behind time and effort in games. Good game usually create invisible friction only in areas that matter—for example, resource production or story progression. Those are where time-gating can feel rewarding. But when it comes to daily tasks, smart games streamline or automate these systems to avoid draining the player. The Sims gets criticized a lot, but the truth is, there's still no true competitor in this space, largely because The Sims has developed deeply interwoven systems over years: autonomous AI, modeled animations, multi-threaded interactions within a scene. That alone creates a kind of complexity and immersion that most other games can’t replicate.

From what I’ve seen, Little Sim World currently isn’t able to reach that level of polish or responsiveness, but I do genuinely feel the team wants to simulate a “real” life. I suspect they’re trying to address some of the so-called “unrealistic” behaviors in The Sims. But in doing so, they may have overcorrected—and forgotten that simulation games are still games. Trying to simulate every layer of real-world physics can quickly become overwhelming.

So yes, Little Sim World comes from a good place. It tries. But the experience just isn’t there yet. I’ll keep an eye on updates since I'm really into this genre, but for now? This one’s going back on the shelf. No matter how much we complain about EA’s monopoly and all their nonsense, the bar they’ve set—however low we think it is—is still a surprisingly high one to surpass for those starter indie devs.

And honestly? Every time I play an indie sim like this, the gold in Stardew Valley just shines even brighter. It’s only when you play a game full of small annoyances that you realize how perfectly Stardew Valley trims the fat, and how rare that kind of clarity is. To make a good game, the real treasure is always in those unavoidable pitfalls.

Little Sim World is a game that feels like a mishmash of ideas stolen from various sources, resulting in an identity crisis that's painfully apparent from the get-go. As an ex-developer and someone who has played this game as a job for over a year, I can tell you that this title is a hot mess.

The city is completely soulless, with no interactivity whatsoever. NPCs are lampposts with legs. Dialogues have no meaning and they drag for too long.

In a game that tries to be a "life simulator," it misses the mark on every front:

- Jobs aren't real jobs. There's no career paths.
- Your decisions DO NOT matter.
- Every thing you do does NOT matter.
- There are no consequences to anything you do.
- Bugs are everywhere, even in something as simple as character creation.
- Lastly, the design of the game does not know which route to take. It tries to do everything at once and it nails a total of zero points, where nothing feels complete or satisfying.

Think of it as a bad mashup of The Sims and Animal Crossing, where the developers clearly didn't understand either. The design and management choices are poor, and the sheer amount of issues makes this game unsalvageable. The programmers and artists did their best, though. Game's pretty!

If you're still thinking of buying this, DO NOT. For the same amount of money, you can purchase TWO months of Game Pass and enjoy Oblivion, Expedition 33 and DOOM. Those studios need your money way more than this guy.

E: just got told that, /apparently/, multiple people are being paid to leave positive reviews to boost the overall rating. Just like this company's Glassdoor page... /apparently/.

E2: after speaking to the devs, they made me understand that some of the wording was problematic so I changed it ever so slightly to clarify some things :)

E3: i got contacted by the devs (again), they wanted to let me know that they REALLY don't want ANYONE to know that they are forcing programmers to crunch. so, that section got removed because they are a chill company amirite

ive been following the development of the game for years and have been patiently waiting for it to come out. unfortunately in its current state, which IS early access which i am keeping in mind, the game isn't really playable. ive been stuck on the main story since the 1st day it was released because of a bug at the gym and ive tried posting about it on discord and havent heard anything. i dont see it anywhere in "known bugs" on here or their discord even though a few other people mentioned having the same issue. ive been working on side story stuff in the meantime, but a lot of it is bugged too. i was hoping all the hotfixes being pushed would fix my issues but nothing in sight yet... so i cant recommend the game as it is now. it probably shouldve been tested more before being released. again, i know its early access but we shouldn't be the quality team, we arent getting paid for that... i hope to update this review in the future to be positive once all of the kinks are worked out