Games like BitLife: life simulators worth trying

What makes a good life simulator?

A good life sim gives you real choices with real consequences. School, jobs, love, family, money and the occasional bad decision should all feel connected, so that the life you end up with is a story you wrote yourself.

The best ones also keep surprising you: random events, people who remember how you treated them, and enough depth that your tenth life still plays differently from your first.

BitLife: the text-based classic

BitLife is the game most people think of first. Everything happens through menus and short texts, which makes it fast and easy to pick up. Its strength is the sheer number of absurd situations it throws at you, which is exactly why so many lives end up as funny stories to share.

Other text-based life sims

There are several games in the same style, often with a slightly different focus, for example more social features, other careers or a different sense of humour. If you like the format and just want new events, browsing the simulation category of your app store for text-based life games is a good start.

The Sims on mobile: building instead of living year by year

The Sims takes a different approach. You control a household in real time, build and decorate houses and look after needs. It is great if you love building and decorating, but it plays very differently from a fast, decision-driven life sim.

Agency Life: a life simulator in a living 3D city

Agency Life keeps the core of BitLife, every year of your life is one day in the game and every choice counts, but puts it into a living 3D city. Agency City has traffic, a harbour with a container ship, nightlife, day and night and four seasons, and your life happens on an in-game phone with apps for jobs, banking, the stock market, dating and your crew.

You can start as a baby, a child, a teenager or at 18. From there you go to school, choose between honest careers like software developer, lawyer or police officer and a life of crime that grows from pickpocketing to a heist on the central bank. Heists are played as short minigames, for example cracking a safe by ear.

Your contacts actually reply when you text them, with their own mood and memory of your relationship. You can buy houses, build on your own plots, run shops, invest in stocks, run for mayor and play online with friends, with crossplay between iPhone and Android.

Agency Life is free, has no subscription and is available in 25 languages. Ads are rare, a short video between two years at most, never in the middle of play. New to the game? Start with our beginner's guide.

Which one should you play?

If you want quick, funny lives in a few minutes, the text-based classics are hard to beat. If you would rather build and decorate in real time, The Sims is your game. And if you want the depth of a life simulator but also want to see your city, walk its streets and pull off heists yourself, give Agency Life a try.