Life Simulator
One life, age five to the end, one choice at a time. Five stats, dozens of scenarios, doors that close forever — and a score that banks every happy year as you live it.
What is the Life Simulator?
This is a decision game about one ordinary life. You start at age five with five stats — health, happiness, money, knowledge, relationships — and the game deals you scenarios as the years pass: school, friendships, first jobs, love, careers, setbacks, and eventually old age. Every choice moves the stats, and there is no correct answer; there are only trade-offs, because that is the genre's one honest claim about its subject. The night shift pays and costs. The safe choice soothes and stunts.
What separates this from a stat-clicker is memory. Many choices plant flags — a degree, a business, a partner, a running habit — and whole scenarios later in life exist only behind those flags. All of it lives inside this single game as data: dozens of scenarios, drawn by age and by what you have already chosen, so two lives rarely rhyme. A run takes ten to twenty minutes, your current life auto-saves, and when it ends the game writes your epitaph and banks your score — of which more below, because the scoring is the game's quiet thesis.
How to Play
The Five Stats, Honestly
Health is the only stat that can end the run — it drains naturally from late middle age, faster if you spent your youth ignoring it, and no amount of money buys it back at 70. Money compounds quietly: choices that pay early make later scenarios kinder, but chasing it costs the other four. Knowledge opens careers and sharpens some choices; relationships soften bad years — several late-life scenarios go very differently for the well-connected. And happiness is not a resource at all: it is the score, banked each round as you live it.
That scoring rule is deliberate. If the game only graded your deathbed stats, the optimal play would be a joyless grind redeemed by a comfortable retirement — and the game would be arguing that a life's worth is its final balance sheet. Banking happiness as it happens argues the opposite: a warm childhood, a reckless-but-alive twenties, a decade of good friendships — all of it stays scored, whatever comes later. Long unhappy lives and short bright ones land closer than you might expect.
Things to Try
Four lives worth living at least once:
The scholar's wager
Take every study option from childhood on, university included. Your twenties will be poor and your happiness bar embarrassing — then watch the career scenarios that only high knowledge unlocks pay it all back through your thirties and forties. Or don't watch, because you died at 34 of neglected health. Both happen.
The golden run
Chase money in every scenario: the night shifts, the flip, the business. It works — the money stat genuinely compounds — and somewhere around 50 the game starts asking what it was for, in the form of scenarios where every good option needs the relationships you never built.
The connected life
Prioritise people every time it costs you something. Mid-life crises, health scares and money troubles all run noticeably softer with high relationships — the stat works like insurance, invisible until the bad year arrives, and several of the warmest late-life scenarios are gated behind it.
The honest replay
Play once naturally, note your score, then replay making the opposite call at every big fork. The scenarios you meet will differ — flags open and close them — and comparing the two epitaphs is the whole game in miniature: not better and worse, just different bills for different lives.
Honest Limits
A real life is not five integers, and this game knows it. Luck here is gentler than reality's — the dice wobble outcomes but rarely wreck them, because a game about pure unfairness is a lecture, not a toy. The scenarios are one culture's ordinary milestones, not everyone's; money is abstract units rather than any currency; and no simulation this size can honour how strange actual lives are. What it aims to keep true is the shape of the thing: choices spend time you do not get back, doors close quietly, the bill for neglect arrives decades late — and the happy years count no matter what came after. That last rule is the one we would defend at length.
FAQ
Is the Life Simulator free?
Yes — the game is completely free and runs instantly in your browser. There is no download, no sign-up, and no in-app purchase.
How long does one life take?
Ten to twenty minutes, depending on how long you survive and how much you deliberate. A life runs from age five to old age with a choice every one to three years, and your current life is saved automatically, so you can close the tab mid-childhood and resume later.
Do my choices actually matter?
Yes, twice over. Every choice moves your five stats immediately — and many choices set flags (a degree, a business, a partner, a fitness habit) that unlock or lock entire scenarios later in life. Skipping university closes some doors and opens others; the game remembers.
How is the life score calculated?
You bank happiness as you live it — each round adds a tenth of your current happiness to the score, so a joyful youth counts even if things sour later. Years lived and your final stats add the rest. A long, miserable life and a short, brilliant one can score surprisingly close, which is rather the point.
Is my progress saved?
Yes. The life you are living is saved in your browser's local storage after every choice, and your best completed life score is kept separately on this device. Clearing browser data resets both.