This is probably a sentence that could be said literally any day of the week, but a new cosy farming sim is on the block, this time taking the form of Starsand Island. The flavour on this occasion is of the anime variety, with some slightly goofier farming mechanics (i.e. turning your watermelon patch into one singular, 10 foot tall watermelon), some very Pokemon Legends: Arceus looking combat, and some appropriately cute animals to hang out with. And there's skateboarding! But never do launches go all that smoothly, as developer Seed Sparkle Lab have had to do a dash of damage control regarding some concerns over the game.

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Veteran game designer Jake Solomon, known mostly for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2, and Marvel's Midnight Suns, announced the closure of Midsummer Studios. Solomon had founded the development team after leaving Firaxis. In 2024, I interviewed him to learn more about his next game, a narrative-driven life simulation for which he had already raised $6 million in seed funding. Rather than going for a traditional sandbox-like approach in the vein of the king of the genre, The Sims from Maxis, the game was conceived around player-driven storytelling. It was a systems-based approach where conflict, relationships, and consequences would combine to […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/xcom-jake-solomon-closes-midsummer-studios-life-sim/

Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we've been playing. This week, Bertie plays a classic but finds himself getting a bit bored; Marie adopts a black cat called Salem; Tom can't get out of the menus; Victoria makes a young child cry; Dom Platinums a game and feels very smug about it; and Connor finds an inventive way to play two MMOs at once.

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Heartopia has officially shared initial details about its first-ever collaboration event. The game, which launched a month ago to great success on mobile, as well as Steam on PC, has already been a staple among fans of Animal Crossing and The Sims.

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Though it may seem like we just had a big life sim release in Heartopia, 2026 actually has more than one highly-anticipated release in that particular subgenre of cozy game. The next big one on the horizon is Starsand Island, the life and farming sim from Seed Sparkle Lab.

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Heartopia has officially arrived on Steam, only a little over a week after it launched on iOS and Android. When the game’s release date was announced back in December, developer XD said it was pushing back the Steam release without offering any hints about how long the delay was going to be.

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The Sims 4 developers recently promised an exciting year for the game, and the franchise as a whole, and we just got an early look at one of those first events. After some light teasing, the developer unveiled Royalty & Legacy, the game’s next expansion.

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The Sims 4’s first update of the year is here, though it may not be quite what you might have expected. The game’s latest patch mainly centres around a collaboration with Coach, the luxury fashion brand.

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In their (slightly belated) new years message to players, the developer of EA’s The Sims series of games has lightly addressed concerns about its future within the publisher in a wide-ranging letter to the community.

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Heartopia, the new cosy life sim from XD Games, has officially arrived on mobile, right on schedule. If you’ve been keeping up with Heartopia news, you’re likely already aware that the game has pushed back its Steam release to an indeterminate point in 2026.

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Heartopia developer XD Games has delivered the news anyone who tried out the life sim game had been waiting for. The Animal Crossing-like cozy multiplayer game will finally arrive on January 7 across Android, iOS, and PC - with one caveat.

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EA has stressed to its community that "the values of The Sims are unchanged" as we head into 2026.

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It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.

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Life Lane 2 is an enhanced life simulation strategy game inspired by the classic "Jones in the Fast Lane" (1990). Start with nothing and work your way to becomi...

I think as long as you make a new year's update post before the incredibly arbitrary date of January 13th, you're still able to do so without me thinking "come on, it's almost February", which is exactly what EA did with their new years Sims update post. Perhaps reassuringly, after word came last year of EA's concerning acquisition, the post opens by doubling down on what the team has previously said regarding staying committed to their values (those values including inclusivity is welcome though I wish they'd be more explicit about who is being included). But the post also, sort of, goes into what's next for the series.

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Saturdays are for putting your hand in a bucket of ice, swallowing a mouthful of honey and lemon, and breathing a sigh of relief. All that practice you put into your welcome handshake and 'Here comes trouble!' paid off. Almost every member of the treehouse has been successfully greeted home.

All bar one. But I'll get him. I'll get him good.

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This is proving to be one of the worst weeks of my life, for various reasons (no, not because Jason Schreier is mad at me). In my time of need, I open the magic portal of escapism and find Pathologic 3 looking back at me like a poison toad.

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Most anticipated? Oh reader, you gentle, innocent child. Hark at you, ambling in here with supple joints, eyes clear as springwater, and the scent of hope in your hair. I have grown old, dear reader. I no longer feel this emotion called "anticipation", anymore than I remember the taste of strawberries in the Shire. Years of waiting for another Legacy of Kain game have broken my spirit. My heart is a sponge of sorrow. My beard coils round my ankles like a listless cat. All has become grey.

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