The Best Indie Sim Games at PAX East 2023

Before video games were ever a thing, would-be sim players instead delighted in crafting landscapes and towns for their model trains to roll through. There’s something inherently satisfying and soothing about creating a perfect little scene, and the best sim games give the same feeling of tinkery fun as a model railroad, with the added benefit that you can instead create a football club or entire city if you want. While not every sim game is about a town or railroads, they all offer the chance to build something, whether that’s a potion-selling business or a settlement in the middle of the ocean.

PAX East featured a ton of excellent indie sim games, and we’ve compiled our favorites below! Some are chilled out and cozy, others offer serious challenge, but they all let you tinker to your heart’s content.

Havendock

• Developer – YYZ
• Publisher – Different Tales
• Release Date – April 20th in Early Access

The brainchild of solo dev YYZ, Havendock is the definition of a cozy game. You start out in the middle of the ocean on a single dock tile, with fish, planks of wood, and crates of resources slowly drifting past. Grab a few planks and you can start expanding your dock; collect enough useful flotsam and you can craft a water pump and a purifier, and start researching new technologies. Other castaways will begin to show up, and you’ll need to provide them food and shelter in order to keep them happy. Despite the “need” for food, water, and shelter, the game is sandbox-y and chill rather than challenging (although you can toggle an option to have your fellow ocean dwellers die from lack of food and water).

Havendock is getting ready to release in Early Access, and the build we got to try out was in a very good state. There’s already a ton of things to build and do, and YYZ has big plans for the game; when we spoke to him at PAX, it quickly became clear that he’d love to expand Havendock as much as possible. Given what’s he’s already accomplished, we’re confident that when Havendock leaves EA, it’ll be as an incredibly rich and fulfilling colony builder — not that it isn’t one already. There’s a demo available now on Steam, so go give it a try!

Potion Tycoon

• Developer – Snowhound Games
• Publisher – Daedalic Entertainment
• Release Date – Currently in Early Access

Let’s get it out of the way immediately: Potion Tycoon is not a cozy potion-making game for everyone. And that’s fine. Because what it is is the kind of gritty business sim that people who enjoy gritty business sims can sink serious hours into. You’ll be managing every part of the production chain, referencing your ledgers, and keeping track of dozens of numbers and terms in order to create the most efficient potion-brewing operation possible. It takes on the mantle of games like Dwarf Fortress, the Democracy series, and classic management sims, gives it a unique art style and aesthetic flair, and then lets you play with it.

Being in early access, the developers are hard at work crafting their product in the same way you’ll be crafting your potions, continuously refining what they have so that it can eventually be as polished and deep as they want. But even now, the game is already is an excellent combination of base-building, business management, potion-making, and a few other mechanics that combines into a complex, satisfying experience for the type of person who really loves their games to require some real thought.

Go-Go Town!

• Developer – Prideful Sloth
• Publisher – Prideful Sloth
• Release Date – To Be Announced

If you like the premise behind Animal Crossing, the feel of MySims, and the gameplay of Slime Rancher, Go-Go Town! will be right up your alley. We had a chance to try out this previously unannounced title, and despite the developers sharing that they are still deciding on which direction to take some of its features, the game’s systems, controls, and overall theme are already extremely polished. And that’s awesome to see, because the game. Is. Adorable.

So many sim games now are bogged down with mechanics that are too deep to casually enjoy, item lists that are too long, and aesthetics that are just too tired, but Go Go Town! is a breath of fresh air. The systems are deep enough to let yourself sink into, but also simple enough to casually enjoy. The feel of the game is light, but the ways you engage with those systems is immersive. And the aesthetic is incredibly fun and fluffy, really letting the escapist part of the simulation genre out in full. This game is for anyone who longs for the days of becoming absorbed by the Sims or Animal Crossing, where you can just exist in and interact with a cozy, whimsical world.

Fabledom

• Developer – Grenaa Games
• Publisher – Dear Villagers
• Release Date – April 13th, 2023

This fairytale city builder is a colorful, unique spin on what is otherwise an oversaturated genre. While it’s wholesome aesthetic and pleasant interaction system truly are highlights, what really sets Fabledom apart is its surprisingly deep sandbox attachment system, which is uniquely tailored to each building. Using this, each individual building can be customized and optimized to exactly your specifications.

While this level of precise development might be familiar to the kind of difficult, challenge-based city-builders, where it takes on an air of urgent optimization, here it has the opposite effect. By letting you control so much in the peaceful setting of Fabledom, it instead feels freeform, like you are able to tailor your personal mini-kingdom to your liking. It is relaxing and positive, and might be the coziest city builder we’ve seen yet.

Homeseek

• Developer – Traptics
• Publisher – The Iterative Collective
• Release Date – 2023

Homeseek is a post-apocalyptic colony sim which is all about scarcity. The space you can build on is limited, you will have to work hard to acquire clean sources of food and water, and a single catastrophe can wipe out your carefully cultivated supplies. Organizing expeditions will require you to pull your workers off of important tasks, but resolving their story events will help you acquire a lot of important materials, which we found to be an enjoyable, if sometimes grim, combination.

In some ways, it is like This War of Mine, but on a larger scale, dealing with an even grimmer apocalypse. Homeseek promises darkness amidst its wasteland, and that tone carries through to gameplay, putting the player in the shoes of someone who has to make hard choices in order to even have a chance to survive. Fans of games like They Are Billions or Frostpunk will enjoy this brutally difficult colony builder that demands you use everything at your disposal to survive.

That concludes our look at the best indie sim games at PAX East 2023! If you’d like to know more about our experiences playing any of these titles, feel free to ask a question in the comments!