You're born somewhere, to someone, and nothing is decided yet. Then you get a year, then another. Each one is a single screen you can read at a glance: school, work, money, a home, the people around you, and eventually an ending you don't get to pick.
No download. No account. Plays in the browser, on a phone or a desktop.
OpenLifeSim is a free online life simulator game that runs entirely in your browser. Each new game drops a character into a random family, country and era, and from there the life is yours. Go to school, learn something, get a job, earn and spend, borrow, fall in love, have children, and see how it ends.
The difference from most life sims is that the important stuff isn't buried in text. Every year is a dashboard: what you have, what it costs, what you're short of, and what that will do to you.
Each turn is a year. Everything you do in it comes out of two budgets, your time and your money, and at the end of the year you pay for both.
Sleep, work, study, train, see people, travel. Every choice costs time points from a fixed pot, and there's never enough for everything.
Offers, opportunities and accidents show up as cards. Some you just swipe. Others cost money you don't have yet.
One button moves the year forward. Skills grow, rent is due, relationships change, the market moves, and things happen to the life you've built.
Income, costs, cash flow, net worth, health and happiness. The story feed tells you what happened, and the numbers show what it did to you.
Before school starts you pick one of 13 fields, from computer science to music. Each school year then deals you a board of lessons. What you put your time into shows up on your report card and becomes your skills. Get it wrong and you can leave school qualified for nothing, and the job listings will make that very clear.
There are 25 skills, from programming and law to charisma, handiness and football. University, evening classes, certificates and 45 books all feed into them. A degree is worth whatever the career you're aiming for says it's worth.
Every rung shows its pay range in your country's currency, and the skills it needs as a bar you either clear or don't. You can see the whole ladder from the bottom, including the rungs you'll never reach in this life.
A normal job just pays you. In these eight you run something yourself, and each one has its own screen, its own money and its own ways to fail.
Pick what to build, how to charge for it, how to find customers and how your team works. Then find out if it fits together.
Land, enclosures and 21 species across 7 habitats. Somebody wants a snow leopard badly enough to pay.
A new batch of startups every year to buy into. You'll need a million first.
Enlist, train and go on tours. Some of what happens there comes home with you.
Anyone can turn up to a trial. Your pay follows your second-best attribute, so all six matter.
Write records, book tours and try to fill the room. A half-empty one loses you money and fans.
Commercials and plays until fame reaches 100, then TV and film. A fifth of it fades every year.
Paint commissions and originals. It's the one career where your reputation never fades.
There are 51 homes and 74 cars, and you browse them by swiping through a deck. Rent or buy, take the loan or skip it, furnish the place room by room in 3D, and rent out your old place when you move. Prices change once a year, when the year does.
Five levels of rental and a ladder of houses to buy. The mortgage is a real bill, and sometimes you're the landlord.
Buy, haggle, maintain, modify and drag race. A car loses value every year, and it still costs money to run.
Multi-floor 3D interiors, generated from the building you bought and furnished by category.
Being short of money costs more the bigger the gap gets. Coming up a little short is survivable. Coming up half short usually isn't.
Wages, rent, food, services, tuition and healthcare all have their own prices in each country, so a big salary doesn't mean much on its own. Moving abroad means qualifying for a visa, learning the language (there are 14) and finding your way around a new city. Cities have six kinds of district, each with its own rents, jobs and commute.
United States
Germany
Japan
Brazil
Nigeria
India
Poland
UAEAlso Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, China, Singapore, Australia and Mexico.
Parents, siblings, friends, rivals and partners all have their own lives, their own countries and their own opinion of you. Each one has three bars: how much they like you, how much they want you and how much they hate you. Every chat, joke, date, insult or punch moves them.
You meet people through family, school and work, or at the bar and the gym. You can date, move in together, sign a prenup (or not), get married, have children and pay for their school. If you move abroad, you'll have to work out whether the family comes with you.
Divorce takes up a slot in your year like anything else. So does a funeral.
Sooner or later your health runs out, from old age or from thirty years of sleeping four hours a night. Then you get a summary of the whole life: what you earned, what you built, who was still around, and an epitaph based on what you actually did. You can share it as a card and start a new life.
A business, an endowed zoo, a property portfolio or a fund for your children. Some things keep going after you're gone.
One image with the whole run on it, for sending to whoever said they'd do better.
There's no meta-progression and nothing to unlock. Every new life starts from zero, just like the first one.
They are all life sims and they all start with a generated person. Where they differ:
Anything you're keeping an eye on sits on a bar with the target marked on it. You can see you're failing before you press the button.
You get one character and about eighty turns, and each turn is a year that costs something. You can build and furnish a home, but it isn't the main game.
It runs in the browser on your phone or computer. There's no app store, no account and no ads.
Yes. The whole game is free to play in the browser, with no account and no download. An optional one-time purchase from $9 adds cloud saves, so a life can follow you between devices. There's no subscription and there are no ads.
No. OpenLifeSim is played online, entirely in a web browser, on desktop, tablet and phone. If you want it on your home screen, you can install it from your browser's share or install menu. It still doesn't come from an app store.
Yes. The game was built for a phone screen first: a dashboard you can read at a glance, card decks you swipe, and in-game apps laid out like phone apps.
Each turn is one year, from birth to death, so it depends on how long your character lives. A life usually takes a sitting or two. The game saves in your browser, so you can stop halfway and come back later.
It doesn't unlock any gameplay. The Full Version is about keeping your lives: cloud saves that follow you between devices and survive cleared browser data, five lives on the shelf at once (unlimited from the Support package up), and sharing a life for someone else to play. It's a one-time purchase.
Yes. There are 155 jobs on 22 career ladders, and each rung has its own pay range and skill requirements. On top of that there are eight special careers with their own rules: tech startup founder, investor, zoo owner, soldier, musician, actor, painter and footballer.
Yes. There are 22 countries, each with its own wages, rents, tuition, healthcare costs and currency. To move, you need to qualify for a visa, and the 14 languages decide which jobs you can take once you get there.
It has the same basic idea: one life, one year at a time. The difference is how it's shown and how much you run yourself. You get a dashboard of numbers instead of a text log, 3D characters and interiors, and systems like study, property, business and migration that you actually manage. It also plays in a browser, so there's nothing to download.
Yes, automatically, in your browser, with no account. If you clear your browser's site data, the life goes with it. That's what the optional cloud save is for.
Notes from building it.
