My Little Life Review — A Day In the Little Life Of…

With The Sims’ 25^th anniversary this year, it seems fitting that 9 Finger Games new title, My Little Life, has released onto Steam. The latest entry in what seems to be a trend of fantastic desktop idle games has taken up a part of my screen for the better half of a week now, with my little people going about their lives whilst I go about my own..

Since writing a review for Rusty’s Retirement last year, another indie idle game, I’ve been hanging for another one of these little efficient time wasters. With three kids, a full-time job, and a million other games to play and write about, a low-stakes game that toils away by itself while I do other things is the perfect companion for me.

The core of My Little Life is simple: your character begins their journey in a small and dingey apartment. As you fulfil their needs and advance their careers, they’ll earn enough money to be able to afford furniture, larger living areas, and more.

Starting your town in My Little Life, you have the option of starting in the “suburbs” (Horizontal Orientation) or the “city” (Vertical). Once this has been picked, there’s no going back for that save file. Thankfully, there are five save files in case you want to try something different.

With up to six total villagers, five pets, and countless furnishings to unlock, the game doesn’t solely run itself. Outside of decorating your little abodes, there are plenty of tasks that your little lifers will ask of you. Most of these include simple things to teach you different mechanics, like zoning areas or giving them a break from work.

Another thing that encourages engagement is your little people’s statuses. Ranging from bodily functions like sleep and poop to joy and comfort, keeping these requirements high will help them to work more efficiently, garnering faster money production, which feeds nicely into building bigger and better homes.

While I appreciated the variety of items to unlock, none of them have descriptions or names, leaving me to guess as to what I was buying half of the time. This led to me picking items that adhered to function rather than form, giving me the best stat boosts so I could make money faster rather than properly engaging with things like room themes or aesthetics.

Being such a compact game, I was surprised at how well the UI performs. There are so many menus to go through in game, and the developer did a great job making sure that they felt as intuitive as possible without veering into being intrusive on the screen. The tactile sounds of the interface are made to feel satisfying, with soft clicks that sound as you scroll through items in the shop or switch tabs.

Being an idle game, I found a lot of the rest of the sound design to be a little too distracting. While still pleasant, the constant clinking of currency and bubbles popping when accruing FP was just too much while I was trying to focus on other things. The only audio setting I kept after the first hour or so sadly ended up being the serene music that I’d have in the background.