Highlights
- Raising sims create emotional bonds between players and their virtual characters, with great writing, art, and worldbuilding.
- These games often have multiple endings, hidden routes, and achievements, keeping players engaged and encouraging replayability.
- Core mechanics and seamless gameplay loops make raising sims addictive, inviting players to spend hours on stat-raising and exploration.
The best raising sims have seamless gameplay loops that give players satisfying outcomes for their hard work. Great core mechanics invite players to sink hours into stat-raising games, while multiple endings, hidden routes, and achievements get them to stay. It’s not uncommon to see fans play the same game for years to uncover every secret they have to offer.
Games That Feature The Biggest Skill Trees
These games feature skill trees so massive it can be hard for players to wrap their heads around them.
Raising sims also often creates emotional ties between the player and whoever they raise. Through great writing, art, and planning, players often bond with their virtual kids, selves, monsters, or subjects. Immersive worldbuilding also encourages exploration and gives players another reason to do another run.
10 Lair Land Story
Baron Herol is tasked with raising Chilia, an amnesiac magical girl who saved the kingdom of Lair Land from destruction. Herol must decide how Chilia spends her days for the next four years. She can go on adventures, specialize in certain subjects, work, and go on other excursions.
But Chilia’s growth is only part of the story. Herol must also care for Lair Land itself as it rebuilds from a war. He can even find love as he helps his adopted daughter make her own connections.
9 Little Lives
The life simulation game by solo developer Houndstooth Games is a mix of features similar to The Sims, Real Lives, and Kudos. Like The Sims, players can explore the town of Littleton, find a home to decorate and adopt a furry companion to spend time with.
And like Real Lives and Kudos, career, skill, and relationship progression are heavily menu-based. Moreover, skills-based dice rolls dictate the outcome of certain choices, while conversation cards like “awkward silence” determine how NPC conversations go.
8 Growing Up
A loving throwback to the 90s, Growing Up follows characters from infancy to their adult life. As an era piece, the game is drowning in 90’s aesthetics, pop culture, activities, and social turning points. The latter is most apparent in each playable character’s coming-of-age stories, which can tackle bullying, homophobia, self-harm, and other emergent issues of the time.
Although every playable character has their story, how they tackle it depends on player choices. Each life stage has dozens of skills and activities to choose from that will shape what kind of adult they'll become.
7 Monster Loves You!
Monster Loves You! is a stat-raising, choose-your-own-adventure game. Bravery, Cleverness, Ferocity, Honesty, Kindness, and Respect govern the choices players can make. Outcomes from these choices determine what will happen to them later in life, and what endings they’ll get.
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A sequel called Monster Loves You Too! is scheduled for release on December 5, 2023. The player’s choices will still determine what checks will go their way. But this time, they’ll make these choices within a monster city instead of determining monster-human relations in a fairy tale land.
6 Black Closet
Black Closet is a detective game, romance visual novel, and raising sim in one. As student council president Elsa Jackson, it’s up to the player to solve procedurally generated cases within St. Claudine’s Academy. At the same time, they must sus out a possible traitor in their coterie of agents.
Raising these student-agents and assigning them to missions they’ll excel at is key to solving mysteries. Any of Elsa’s agents can be deployed to interrogate, intimidate, or investigate to uncover clues and testimonies. Bonding with them is also important, as their loyalty proves crucial to unlocking the best endings.
5 I Was A Teenage Exocolonist
The title alone says everything about this 2022 raising sim. As the titular teen exocolonist, players can explore an alien world and connect with their intergalactic fellow colonists. Depending on their choices, they may even make it to their 20th birthday unharmed.
Other than avoiding obvious death flags, players can ensure their exocolonist makes it by raising their stats. A card mini-game determines how much these stats increase during activities. To get bonuses in this mini-game, and unlock new options, players must collect cards or memories in events.
4 Volcano Princess
Volcano Princess is a massive game that is fairly comparable to the Princess Maker series. It has seven categories for its 60 career endings and three categories for its more than 20 romantic endings, some of which involve multiple characters.
Players can aim for any of these endings by shaping their daughter’s daily schedule. They can choose to put her through classes, focus on her hobbies, or explore new jobs and activities. Along the way, they’ll encounter the Volcano Kingdom’s various inhabitants and eventually discover more about their mysterious heritage.
3 Chinese Parents
Chinese Parents was a huge indie success for channeling authentic experiences in often funny or hauntingly familiar ways. Cultural touchstones aside, it was also distinguished by its memeful humor and concept of passing traits to successive generations.
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For the most part, the game is concerned with raising a child capable of passing the Gaokao placement test. To do so, or at least create a bloodline that will eventually produce an heir capable of passing it, players must help their kids learn new skills and pass events. Arranging a successful marriage and helping them have a good career also helps pass on good traits to the next generation.
2 Long Live The Queen
Long Live The Queen, in many ways, can be considered a roguelike. The player character Elodie can die within weeks of starting the game. And even if players avert that death, they could easily fail a check for a stat they neglected in favor of another stat.
Balancing these stats is critical to Elodie’s survival. At the same time, its dozens of save slots and stat-dependent deaths and endings encourage experimentation with Elodie’s path to queendom. Ultimately, the ramifications of each choice are one of the reasons why this game endures.
1 Princess Maker 2 Refine
Princess Maker 2 turned 30 in 2023, yet it’s still one of the best-reviewed raising sims on Steam. Before its official release, it was one of the best fan-translated works available online for years. Its online longevity and influence on official works have made it the benchmark for stat-raising and scenario-hunting games.
Gainax’s child-rearing simulator features a robust skill and activity tree that unlocks new tears logically. Errantry adds an RPG element to a game presided over by numbers. The anime studio’s infamous tendencies for bizarre elements also shine through in its worldbuilding, which players can easily miss out on.