Living In Sim

28 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

This free SETI simulator mops the floor with other job sims

Doing the dishes

If aliens are watching, I hope they can't see the state of my bedroom. Voices Of The Void is a job sim about being a lonely engineer in a remote signals laboratory, pointing big satellites at the sky in the search for extraterrestrial life. You are like Jodie Foster in Contact, except less qualified. It is extremely my cup of hot tea. It is also about living in a disgusting dormitory full of cockroaches.

I spent the first hours in this surprisingly complex and funny sim not pressing buttons on the old analogue machinery required to do my job, but instead sweeping up years of rubbish that had piled up in the abandoned lab before I took over. Chinese takeaway cartons, bottles, fried circuit boards, busted keyboards, indeterminate pulp. If the little grey men do send a message, I might miss it. I am busy scrubbing the toilet.

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Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

You arrive to the lab in the dead of night, your first task to simply go around switching on the lights in every room. You read the emails waiting for you on the computer running on the desk. Your science boss wants you to record signals from space and send the recordings to them every day on hard drives, alongside other data on a big tape reel. I ignore the emails, take a look around, find the cleaner's closet, and come back with a roll of black bin bags. I am NOT working in this absolute shit hole until I have at least cleaned up my desk.

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18 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

The Data Center is where dreams go to die

Join my professional network on 192.168.0.1/24

I suppose it's time to reconcile my love for engineering marvels with the world's collective nosedive into technofeudalist hell. Okay. I can do that. Just as I find fighter jets impossibly cool, but do not actually want them used to explode people, I think data centres are impressive, but I do not like to see them sucking the world dry like a parasitic force beyond any ordinary human citizen's control. And since I am broken in the brain, the only way I know how to settle conflicting emotions like this is to play a videogame.

Data Center (US spelling) is about being a technician in charge of a data centre (UK spelling) and making sure all the wires go into the correct holes. On arrival to this new virtual workplace I find a radio on a nearby desk. I turn the radio on. It plays a sound I shall not classify as music. I turn the radio off. Time to get to work in a very compelling sort of hell.

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

This is an early access job sim all about

10 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Truck Mechanic is the sim you abandon by the side of the road

Let me give you the breakdown

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

I like to test the boundaries of a world, and today I will do so by getting my truck into fifth gear and soaring off a bridge into a river. "Your truck has been destroyed," says a game over screen, bringing a sense of mild relief now that I cannot hear all the heinous gobshites on a walkie talkie who I have quickly grown to hate. I had such high hopes for my inaugural simulator in this much-hyped column, but here I am fully and apologetically sodden in the wet pits of a Latin American waterway. There are some car crashes that simply cannot be repaired. Truck Mechanic: Dangerous Paths is one of them.

It's a straightforward premise: all the simple pleasures of unscrewing wheel bolts and calipers in Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, but with the added terror of doing so on the edge of a deep ravine. Instead of working on bits of other people's cars in a garage for cash, you are now maintaining a single vehicle of your own, taking it screeching and sputtering across a

31 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Living In Sim is our new column on "simulation", whatever that means

Try simulating some enthusiasm

Simulation is a huge genre, no two people will agree where it begins or ends. When a game nails "simulator" to the end of its name, like a big plank of wood, the case seems clear cut. Flight Simulator. Gas Station Simulator. Goat Simulator. But then you have all the high-level systemic games which simulate historical nation building or space exploration. Cities Skylines calls itself a simulation, so does Crusader Kings, Rimworld, Mount & Blade, and Dwarf Fortress. Racing sims distinguish themselves from arcade racers. And sports games can veer that way too. Session is a skateboarding sim in a way that Tony Hawk's is not. Football Manager 2026 is a sim, but Rematch? Hmmm.

As I am constantly reminding Jank readers, all taxonomy is folly. Viewed from the firmament, every game is a simulation. But there is often some extra pedantry or detail that pushes a game into being classified a sim. For the purposes of this column, I don't care where that fuzzy border falls, I only care that it exists. A sim is just any videogame that commits hard to the bit.

Why sims, of all genres? Well, we're a PC gaming site,