Game Dev Simulator is a scrappy, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt VR oddity about testing bad games, messing with office junk, and slowly finding the person behind it all
Game Dev Simulator is a short VR game with a lot of heart, even if the title is a little misleading. Going in, I expected something about making games from scratch, maybe balancing budgets or writing code. What I actually got felt closer to Game Publisher Simulator. You sit in front of a PC at Mundane Interactive, take calls, answer emails, invest in tiny projects, test them, give feedback, and mess around with whatever physical junk is scattered around your office.
That might sound small, and it is, but the charm comes from how committed the game is to its weird setup. This is a game about playing games inside a game, and those internal games are intentionally scrappy. You unlock them by spending money, then play them on your monitor using a keyboard, gamepad, or even VR controllers.
The mini-games are bad on purpose, and that is the joke. There is a rhythm game where you press keyboard letters to keep a gerbil dancing. There is a rough OutRun-style racer. There is an MMO that doesn't work. There is even a VR detective game where you slap a suspect with a fish to get information out of him. None would survive as standalone games, but as tiny windows into broken prototypes and strange pitches, they are genuinely funny.
What makes it work is the surrounding office life. You get calls from bizarre developers and colleagues, and the writing lands more often than not. It has that slightly awkward indie comedy tone where everything feels a bit off, but in a good way. Between tasks, you can chase side challenges like breaking windows, throwing paper balls into the trash, bouncing a ping pong ball, and finding other little interactions around the space.
These distractions feed into a light progression loop. Completing tasks earns currency, which you can use to buy desktop backgrounds, songs, cursors, and other cosmetic bits for your virtual PC. It is not deep, but it gives the office a pleasant toy-box quality. There is always something dumb to poke, throw, buy, unlock, or break, and in VR that physical nonsense goes a long way.
Game Dev Simulator is rough around the edges, though that almost feels baked into its identity. The systems are simple, the production values are modest, and some mini-games are so deliberately clunky that your mileage will depend on your patience for the bit. If you want a proper business sim or polished management game, this is absolutely not that.
But then the ending hits. The final doodle-style video, which reflects on the real developer's experience making the actual game, landed much harder than I expected. It reframes the scrappiness, the bad prototypes, the silly calls, and the messy tasks into something more personal. For me, that moment turned a fun oddity into something memorable.
Game Dev Simulator is weird, short, scrappy, and clearly made with love. It made me laugh, kept me poking around the office, and ended on a note that genuinely stuck with me. For the price, I think it is very easy to recommend if you enjoy small VR games with personality and do not mind a bit of jank. Thanks for reading!
