The Sims 4 recently hit its tenth anniversary, which is remarkable in many ways, especially as the first three games each had lifespans of five years or fewer. It's an open secret at this point that EA is hard at work on the next iteration of The Sims, but there's still no sight of it on the horizon while The Sims 4 continues dropping two full-sized expansions each year and will be supported indefinitely. Considering how long in the tooth The Sims 4 has become, it's a good idea to play something else sometimes just to shake things up (it's hard, I know).

To that end, we've put together a list of games that are great for scratching the same sort of itch that The Sims satisfies. Strangely enough, there aren't a ton of true "Sims-alikes"--upcoming games like InZoi and Paralives will be rare examples of such a thing, but we're still waiting on those. But it's easy to swap to a game that manages to be meaningfully different while still satisfying our brains in the same way The Sims often does. And we've got lots of those. Let's dive in. Or if you'd prefer to stick with what you already know, check out our recommendations for the best Sims 4 mods.

Cities Skylines 1 + 2

• Developer: Colossal Order
• Release Date: March 10, 2015/October 24, 2023
• Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbos Series X|S, Switch for CS1. PC only for CS2
• Genre: City builder

Despite being the heir to Sim City’s city-building throne, there's a certain portion of folks who who look down on the Cities: Skylines games as being more of a "city painter" than a true building game, but I've never understood why that's such a bad thing. If I want to micro-manage all the granular details of how my town works, I'll play Dwarf Fortress or Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. If I just want to chill out and build a huge and sprawling city with a huge public transportation network, I'll go with one of the Cities: Skylines games. It's that relaxed nature that makes this franchise scratch that Sims itch--it's hard to fail at Cities: Skylines, and as with The Sims, life usually goes on even when things do go badly. In a sense, Cities: Skylines is The Sims on a larger scale, a city-sized version of a dollhouse.

Disclosure: Fanatical and GameSpot are both owned by Fandom.

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons

• Developer: Nintendo
• Release Date: March 20, 2020
• Platforms: Switch
• Genre: Social sim

It's not the most sophisticated experience, but that's the point. The Animal Crossing franchise is a low-key homeowner experience, in which you've gotta do whatever sort of odd activities--like fishing, collecting various flora and fauna, and doing tasks for your neighbors--in order to pay your mortgage and expand the size of your house so you can decorate it with all the cool stuff you've collected in order to impress your neighbors and anyone who might visit you. So, yeah, Nintendo's little life sim about anthropomorphized animals is like The Sims, but there's a bit of crafting involved, and you will never die from laughing too hard. If you find it's to your liking, we also have picks for more games like Animal Crossing.

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Medieval Dynasty

• Developer: Render Cube
• Release Date: September 17, 2020 (early access)
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5
• Genre: Survival, life sim

We've avoided putting survival-crafting games on this list since those don't tend to reflect the vibe of The Sims very often. On its face, Medieval Dynasty doesn't either, since it initially seems like just another game about surviving in the woods until you've gathered enough materials to build yourself a little house. But it's the "dynasty" part of this one that interests us--you're building a town that NPCs will live in, and you can get married and have kids and pass all your burdens along to them. These life-sim aspects are what set Medieval Dynasty apart in the mire of open-world survival-crafting games.

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Stardew Valley

• Developer: ConcernedApe
• Release Date: February 26, 2016
• Platforms: PC
• Genre: Life sim

In Stardew Valley, you'll take over an old, dilapidated farm and turn it into a fresh and thriving one. It's a simple premise, but after eight years of steady updates from the single developer who makes it, Stardew Valley is an incredibly robust open-world experience that's grown so much over the years. You can make friends and start a family. You can explore a mysterious cave that goes on forever and is full of valuable items. You can grind up your skills so that you're more effective at farming or fighting off baddies. And, most importantly, you can do basically anything else you can think of that would make sense in this context--like fishing, cooking, building, and more. If you dig it, you can also expand your experience with a wide array of Stardew Valley mods.

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Crusader Kings 2 + 3

• Developer: Paradox Development Studio
• Release Date: February 14, 2012/September 1, 2020
• Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux for both; PS5 and Xbox Series X|S for CS3
• Genre: Grand strategy and role-playing

If you love The Sims but sometimes feel as though it doesn't have enough religious scandals, succession crises, or murder, then Crusader Kings may just hit the spot. This grand-strategy franchise is different from most in that you're not controlling a nation, but rather the individual in charge of it--you've gotta keep the people of your realm happy, keep foreign foes at bay, and try not to get murdered by your family members who think they should be in charge instead of you. And, yeah, there's plenty of WooHooing going on here as well--but if you sleep with the wrong guy's wife in Crusader Kings, you might find yourself buried alive or tossed in an oubliette (best not to Google that one unless you enjoy nightmares). While the first two games are famously inscrutable, Crusader Kings 3 is pretty well streamlined and approachable by comparison.

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Spore

• Developer: Maxis
• Release Date: September 4, 2008
• Platforms: PC, Mac
• Genre: Life sim, strategy

The Sims 4 has been around for a long time, and a lot of folks have had the same game running for years--I've had a vampire dynasty going for a few years myself, and it's really cool that I have this whole little universe with a robust history that I've witnessed from the beginning. But the world doesn't really change much over time--it's just the people who are different from one era to the next. But Maxis, the studio that created The Sims, has a game that will give you more of a longitudinal perspective on civilization: Spore. In Spore, you begin as a primordial, single-cell organism and grow from there into land animals, then intelligent beings who create a society, and eventually you'll take over your home planet and head into outer space--instead of living through the life of a person, you're living through the life of an entire species.

See on GOG

Rimworld

• Developer: Ludeon Studios, with Double Eleven on console versions
• Release Date: October 17, 2018
• Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One
• Genre: Management sim

You know how if your sims' needs aren't met they'll throw a tantrum or pass out from exhaustion? Rimworld is like that, if there were potentially dire consequences for the entire family every time that happened. The premise is that you're setting up a colony on an alien world, with a team of people whose needs constantly have to be addressed, and they've got lives and wills of their own--and every time you think you've got your situation under control, the AI storyteller throws some weird and chaotic disaster at you to ruin all your plans and severely stress out or kill your colonists. Rimworld is a game for simmers who want to add a little bit (or a lot) of danger to their simulation.

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Planet Zoo

• Developer: Frontier Developments
• Release Date: November 5, 2019
• Platforms: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S
• Genre: Management sim

Pets in The Sims are great, and I bet it'd be pretty fun to have an all-pets world. That's not really an option in The Sims 4 even with mods, but fortunately we've got Planet Zoo to keep us occupied. Planet Zoo is exactly what the name implies: a zoo builder. But what makes it of particular interest to us, beyond our enjoyment of building stuff, is its emphasis on caring for the animals and meeting their needs--it really does have the feel of a The Sims: Animal Edition in that way. And it's got that same relaxed vibe that makes The Sims work so well. Planet Zoo is a treasure in its own right, but it certainly scratches a lot of itches for simmers.

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Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge

• Developer: Humble Reeds
• Release Date: June 8, 2024
• Platforms: PC, Switch, Xbox Series X|S
• Genre: Casual management sim

If zoos make you feel weird, Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is a palatable alternative that more or less hits the same sweet spot for simmers. This indie delight has you play as a pair of conservationists who are trying to turn some local wetlands into a preserve for frogs--basically, you're building a little town for them, with little frog houses and frog chairs and stuff. Very adorable, very unstressful, and the chillest game on this list.

See at Humble

Fallout 4

• Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
• Release Date: November 10, 2015
• Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and PS5
• Genre: Open-world RPG

While Fallout 4 is mostly just a story-based open-world RPG, there's one particular aspect of the game that proved surprisingly compelling for me: setting up little villages all over the wasteland. And with mods (including on the console versions), you can remove most of the limits on building--restrictions on the amount of stuff that can go into a single settlement, or on where you can build a new town, can be removed easily, and let you turn the Commonwealth into a whole new Sims world that you can manage. Hilariously, you only have to play a new game for about 15 minutes before somebody tries to recruit you to run a settlement--so you don’t have to deal with the story too much if you don’t want to.

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Disney Dreamlight Valley

• Developer: Gameloft Montreal
• Release Date: December 5, 2023
• Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, all Apple devices
• Genre: Action-adventure, life sim

There are two main types of gameplay in Disney Dreamlight Valley--there's the adventuring side of things, where you explore the world and find cool stuff and meet famous Disney characters. And then there's the part where you take control of the titular valley and rebuild it into a thriving little town for both yourself and your Disney pals to live in. You can build and decorate the town and the houses within however you like, but instead of having normal human neighbors, you'll be rubbing elbows with folks like Buzz Lightyear and Moana. If you think this sounds like it could have been called Disney Stardew Valley, you'd be right, but there ain't nothing wrong with that.

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The Crush House

• Developer: Nerial
• Release Date: August 9, 2024
• Platforms: PC
• Genre: Life sim

You've been placed in charge of a new reality show called The Crush House--an amusing fictional reality show in the "a group of strangers live in a house together" Real World style, but with the sort of explicit focus on romance that we see more often on modern reality TV. So you'll play matchmaker and heartbreaker with this house full of hot young things, and more--you've got ratings goals to hit and studio executives to please, and sometimes that means you gotta get your hands extra dirty. But that's all part of the fun here, just as it is in The Sims.

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Builder Simulator

• Developer: Live Motion Games
• Release Date: June 9, 2022
• Platforms: PC
• Genre: Construction sim

If you enjoy building houses in The Sims but want to take your home-building experience to a whole new level, Builder Simulator may be the game for you. Unlike The Sims, where building a wall involves a couple clicks of the mouse, Builder Simulator puts you in a first-person perspective and makes you build the house by hand--pouring cement, putting down individual bricks and tiles, and painting every wall stroke by stroke. If you aren't a construction worker by trade, Builder Simulator will probably give you a new appreciation for all the nonsense that goes into it.

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Dungeons of Hinterberg

• Developer: Microbird Games
• Release Date: July 18, 2024
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S
• Genre: Action/adventure, role-playing

At a glance, Dungeons of Hinterberg is exactly what the name implies: a dungeon crawler. Indeed, by day you'll explore the oddly stylish world and delve into a wide variety of strange dungeons in search of treasure and fortune. But at night you'll return to Hinterberg, where the game turns into a bit of a social sim--it's structured like a Persona game, more or less. The relationships you form in Hinterberg will be crucial to your success, both because it's good to have friends and also because you can learn a lot from your fellow adventurers--to find every secret that this game holds, you'll need to get popular.

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Bitlife

• Developer: CandyWriter
• Release Date: September 29, 2018
• Platforms: Browser, iOS, Android
• Genre: Life sim

This text-based indie and its sequel are very simple: You're presented with a player character at birth, and you decide what they do as they get older and eventually die. For every year of the character's life, you'll be given a decision prompt and the ability to do lots of stuff like dating, going to school, getting a job, gambling away all your money, and so on. The interface is low-key--you pick an action and the game tells you what the immediate result is, and sometimes there will be further consequences later. It's like a Sims Lite, in a sense, since you get to experience a whole lifespan in a much shorter time than it takes for a sim to die of old age. And the best part? The Bitlife games are both free and playable in any web browser and on mobile.

Play free here

Denizen

• Developer: Departure Interactive
• Release Date: April 29, 2024
• Platforms: PC
• Genre: Life sim

This early-access indie is basically The Sims in first-person. There's an open world to explore, several jobs you can take on to make money, a club, casino and clothing shops for spending that money, and you can buy a house that you can decorate however you like. It's not an incredibly polished experience just yet--and it may never be since it doesn't have anything close to a AAA budget--but it's still a pretty interesting and amusing approximation of what a first-person version of The Sims might be like.

See at Steam

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