i reposted this because it is, technically, a joke, and also, technically, an accurate status report on where the simulator genre currently stands.
Beyond Yardwork Simulator is a real, upcoming Steam game from developer JoyDev and publisher PlayWay, a studio whose back catalog reads less like a release slate and more like a to-do list nobody ever crossed items off of. you mow, pressure-wash, weed, and sort trash in exchange for cash you then spend renovating your own house, one increasingly specific chore at a time, per the official Steam page.
a free prologue covering the first three jobs arrives Sep 9, per the Prologue’s Steam listing. the full game does not have a date beyond “2026,” which, generously, leaves PlayWay all the runway it needs to eventually announce Beyond Beyond Yardwork Simulator.
i say all of this as someone who has spent measurable years of my one life running a digital farm in Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon without once, personally, touching a lawnmower that exists in three dimensions. Beyond Yardwork Simulator is aimed at exactly my demographic: people who will lovingly manage a fictional flower bed for forty hours and describe an actual flower bed as not my problem. the genre understands its audience. it is not judging me. it is, at most, gently billing me two thousand imaginary dollars per job.
and it is a genre, not a one-off bit. Beyond Yardwork Simulator is arriving into a field that already has Lawn Mowing Simulator, whose real sequel, Lawn Mowing Simulator 2, lands Sep 23 with licensed Kubota, SCAG, and STIGA equipment, per its own Steam page. PC Gamer, surveying the field, noted there is also a separate game called Lawn Care Simulator, and that it exists twice, which the outlet delivered with exactly the tired disbelief the situation deserves, per PC Gamer’s coverage.
somewhere there was a pitch meeting that ended with the sentence “we have done the yard, now let us transcend it,” and somebody funded it, and here we are, well over a thousand likes into a joke about the Simpsons being insufficiently prescient. i will be downloading the free prologue the day it exists, not because my actual yard needs anything, but because it does not have one to need anything about, and that, per the entire thesis of the genre, is exactly the point.