Text only life simulator with a wealth of choices offering replay value for several life experiences. Room for expansion but a solid offering for the price.

OurLife is a text based life simulator where the player makes choices from a wealth of options to shape the life of their chosen character.

The game begins in a square windowed mode with settings options included.  A good place to start as the initial window is not a lot of fun to deal with on a small laptop screen.  There is a full screen option (recommended) along with the windowed one, but no full-screen-window.  This is rectifiable with a double click on the toolbar and is therefore not a big deal.  Other options include a full range of colours to choose from for individual fields in addition to an overall colour theme for the main display, audio volume (I’ll revisit this shortly), UI size – the 150% is appreciated for clarity, a choice of four very distinguishable text fonts, and keyboard/controller assignments.  There are far more control options than you might expect for a game of this type, some of which I feel could be put to better use.

Upon choosing a new life, the sheer range of options facing the player quickly becomes apparent.   

A healthy variation of countries of birth to choose from, along with gender (including various non-standard alternatives), sexual orientation, any royal lineage, family history, even connections to the occult are there to be considered after entering your character’s fore- and surnames – and even for these, there are plentiful preset options that you click through if creating your own feels like too much trouble.

Once started, we get to the base meat of the game.

Your history log is displayed in the centre, sandwiched by action options on the right and personal stats to the left, as seen below:

Each of the buttons in the right-hand menu takes you to more in-depth options, as can be seen here.  This example is from the “Mind & Body” button:

You can select as many options as you like during any gameplay year and be given a brief response as to the effect of that decision (which is also listed in the history log when you don’t have one of the action options in operation) prior to selecting the Age Up +1 button to reach your character’s next birthday.  Some choices will impact your stats on the left, for example exercising will improve both health and looks, study will improve intelligence, and so on.

Upon completing a year, usually there will be between 1 and 3 events for you to respond to, as seen here, before returning to the same gameplay loop of selecting your actions for the following year:

As per other decisions, selecting one of these options will provide a brief summary of the result, and may have a small overall impact upon your character’s life.  I’m fairly sure that your karma stat can be affected, although I struggled to spot any other impact of these moments.

Positives

Considering that the game has been created by a solo developer, the sheer amount of available life options when you start digging down to submenus and then sub-submenus, is quite staggering.  From royal lineage to a life of criminality, comfortable Western opportunity to difficult middle-Eastern military upbringing, the choice is yours.

Initially, the wealth of colour options may feel overwhelming, and I did have to change a dark blue in the first instance as black text on it was difficult, but in doing so I got some light grey text on light blue which wasn’t any better.  The colour themes do help, and while “Baby Girl Pink” may not be to everybody’s tastes, it certainly provides a very reader-friendly colour display.  And anyway, pink is cool!  Deal with it.

Negatives

The game has a tendency to pause after some options (such as loading a saved game).  In windowed mode, I could see the toolbar “Not responding” warning, but after a few seconds, this disappeared and the game carried on.  I should emphasise that it never crashed, but does suffer brief progress delays from time to time.

On the store page, the promotional gameplay video is accompanied by a musical score.  There are sound options within the settings, but despite setting them all to high, I had silence throughout all of my play sessions.  I do not know if there is something special which needs to be done to acquire sound in-game, and there is no instruction to aid the user to this end.  I have raised this point to the developer.

Experience

As someone generally without much free time to play games, it is notable that in the first 24 hours after installing, I clocked over 6 in-game.  This clearly shows a level of addictiveness in bringing your character through their early and formative years as you get to shape their life to come.

However, once I reached early-30’s, I’d done the hard work.  My character had come through the care system and a mental health crisis to be a strong independent woman with a high paying job and internet fame as a beauty influencer.. and every year after achieving these goals simply felt the same.  I aged a year, selected the same internet, health and fitness actions, spent time with husband, daughter and a friend or two, rinsed, and repeated.  It got old.  Admittedly, there are many unused life options from my play through which could have significantly prolonged interest in the one life, but doing so would also remove the interest of those for any different replays where the character has a completely conflicting lifestyle.

Further development opportunity

I did feel that some further balancing and expansion of interactivity could further enhance a player’s enjoyment of the game after their character’s first couple of decades.

• Within the control settings are a number of shortcut buttons.  Unsure what these were for, I tried them in game and discovered that they correspond to the action category menu on the right of the screen, with 1 selecting Health, 2 for Mind & Body, and so on.  Which, effectively, renders them as alternatives to mouse clicking, and not actually a short cut at all.  Such key usage would be far more useful if the player could define its purpose rather than just assigning the keys.
  •   – for example, in my character’s life, I trained her to play the violin.  If I could have redefined one key to automatically action the command sequence to Body & Mind – Arts – Violin, then that would have been a useful shortcut.
• After meeting my husband and dropping contraception, I got pregnant immediately, but throughout the game, I could never get naturally pregnant again.  With a character suffering no fertility issues, this felt off.  I also lost the first 3 pregnancies, which also felt extreme and left me  frustrated with the game.
• Game responses to actions are uniformly brief and the same every time.  What you see in the life summary log is exactly what you see initially.  Added detail and some variety to these responses would help significantly.
• Everything which happens in the game is in response to decisions you take.  All non-player-characters, and what happens through the life itself, is exclusively reactive.  Want to retain a friendship?  It’s 100% on you.  Nobody else will ever be proactive, and nothing will randomly happen to make things more interesting.  There is a huge opportunity to improve user experience here.  Throw in some surprises, make the player respond for a change.
• The annual events all come at once after ageing, give very curt responses, and don’t impact anything throughout the year.  These could be so much better if they arrived as one-off events at random times which actually affect the player character’s life.• Relationship interactions don’t take sufficient account of who you spend time with.  I had time with my one year old daughter, to be told that we discussed old times and laughed.  Really?

Verdict

Despite the need to address some little issues and the wide open space in which to develop the game further, OurLife still successfully provides a decent immersive experience at a very low cost.  For the price, the game is comfortably fair value, and if you’re willing to play through several times over with wildly different characters, then it will likely become very good value indeed.

If it is within the talents and scope of the solo developer to push the current boundaries of this game, and to make responses to actions more rewarding, this could evolve from an engaging curio to a positively enticing “other life” experience.

Otome Lovers wishes to thank WaveyGaming Productions for providing a free review copy of this game.

Abridged review posted on Steam ➞

Please follow our curator page, Otome Lovers, if you’d like to see more reviews like this one!