Life simulation games set outside America

Play enough life simulation games and you start to notice the same house. A lawn, a driveway, a fridge the size of a wardrobe, a town that looks like a TV suburb. That is fine, and some of those games are wonderful. But most of the world does not live like that, life is lived in a lot of other places, and some of the most interesting life and slice-of-life games are set in them.

Here are our picks of games where everyday life happens somewhere else. Not all of them are life sims in the strict sense; some are story games that spend a lot of time on daily life. They are picks, not a ranking, and the facts are sourced at the bottom.

At a glance

Our picks

My Summer Car (Finland)

Made by the Finnish studio Amistech Games, My Summer Car is set in the fictional Alivieska region of Finland in the summer of 1995, around a lake called Peräjärvi. It went into Early Access on Steam in October 2016 and left it in January 2025. It is Windows only. The name tells you what the summer is about. A reviewer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun called it “funny, detailed and thoroughly confusing”, which is fair.

A Space for the Unbound (Indonesia)

Mojiken Studio, from Indonesia, released this in January 2023 on PC and consoles, with an iOS version in April 2025 and Android in August 2026. Toge Productions publishes it. It is set in a small Indonesian town in the late 1990s, and it is a story game rather than a sandbox. It earns its place here because so few games are set in an ordinary Indonesian town at all.

Yakuza 0 (Japan)

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and Sega released Yakuza 0 in Japan in 2015 and worldwide in 2017. It is set in 1988 in Kamurocho, a fictional version of Tokyo’s Kabukichō, and in a district based on Osaka’s Dōtonbori. The main story is a crime drama, but it gives you two real Japanese cities, lightly fictionalised, to walk around in.

Sleeping Dogs (Hong Kong)

From United Front Games and Square Enix, 2012. You are Wei Shen, an undercover police officer inside a triad in Hong Kong. It is an action game, not a life sim, but it gives you a whole Asian city to live in for a while, which is rarer than it should be.

AJ Cities (Lagos, Nigeria)

This one is ours, so read it with that in mind. AJ Cities is a free open-world game in your browser, on a phone or a computer, for adults (18+). It is set on the edge of Ajegunle, Lagos.

The real Ajegunle is a densely populated neighbourhood of Lagos, in the Ajeromi-Ifelodun Local Government Area, near the Apapa and Tin Can ports. People call it “AJ City”, and it is known for the musicians and footballers who grew up there. The game takes its name from it. Its estate, street and characters are invented: Abraham Adesyan Estate is a fictional walled estate where Navy Town meets Kirikiri, and the real neighbourhood is the setting, never the subject of a joke. Read more about the real Ajegunle.

What makes it a life sim, Lagos style:

• Home is a face-me-I-face-you. AJ lives in Room 3 of Iloro House, a rooming house where every door looks straight across the corridor at another, with one kitchen and one bathroom for everybody.
• Food is the street. Chuks cooks for the whole of June 12 Street from his coal pot. Food, snacks and medicine restore your health, from Chuks’s pot, the restaurant at No. 1 or Sarge’s window at the gate.
• Money is naira. ₦1,000 a break as a ball boy at the street football; a ₦2,500,000 debt to the gate police, paid little by little. (In-story money, not real money.)
• Time is Lagos time. The sky follows the real Lagos sun. Funke leaves for the hospital on weekday mornings; music starts at Prizm at 9 pm.
• The words are Lagos words. English throughout, with a light touch of Pidgin: “abeg”, “wahala”, “settle us”.

And AJ’s own life is a story about place. Born in Lagos, raised in south London, deported back to a city he left at seven, he arrives with an accent that, as the story puts it, he had not yet learned was a price tag. Read AJ’s story before you play.

Why setting matters in a life sim

A life sim is a game about ordinary things: eating, earning, sleeping, owing, making friends. Ordinary things are different everywhere. A Finnish summer by a lake is not a Tokyo night, and neither is an evening on a Lagos street. In AJ’s story it is the power going off around eight and the generators starting up, who is cooking, and who you owe. When a game gets those details right, it is not just a different backdrop; it is a different life.

More: life simulator games you can play online free and open-world games set in Africa.

Are there life sims set outside the US?

Yes. Our picks include My Summer Car (Finland), A Space for the Unbound (Indonesia), Yakuza 0 (Japan), Sleeping Dogs (Hong Kong) and AJ Cities (Lagos, Nigeria).

Is there a life sim set in Nigeria?

AJ Cities is set on the edge of Ajegunle, Lagos. It is free in a browser on a phone or a computer, and it is 18+.

Is Ajegunle a real place?

Yes. Ajegunle, nicknamed AJ City, is a neighbourhood of Lagos near the Apapa and Tin Can ports. The estate and characters in the game are invented.