Ophelia Payne

I love a great sim game, and there aren’t many that I won’t at least take a closer look at when I see them pop up on my social feeds or in one of the stores. Ultimate Grandma Simulator looked and sounded just quirky enough to check out. Being an ‘older’ gamer, I often joke about feeling like a grandma in the gaming sphere, and I thought this game, by developers Circo and PlumPointTwo, would be a bit of a laugh. While I did, indeed, have a lot of emotions while playing this, laughter was barely present, unless in frustration.

Ultimate Grandma Simulator describes itself as a ‘walking simulator,’ and that’s true at its base level, like the game Baby Steps is also a walking simulator. At their core, though, both are rage games.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a game with a little learning curve, but this was something I had never experienced before. One button controlled each of your legs in the first section. If you moved too fast, you ran out of stamina, fell and had to start over. If you so much as brushed up against something, you fell and had to start over. Now, this was hard enough to navigate through the first few rooms, stairs, coffee table, Roomba, etc. It was nothing compared to what awaited me when I finally managed to get outside of my house. The game now introduced a button that you had to hold to inhale and release to exhale. Run out of breath, or hold it too long, you start again. This was now starting to get complicated for me. I am not the most coordinated and focused at the best of times, I don’t play a lot of games using a keyboard, and I sometimes deal with mobility issues with my hands. All this to say, the game was a bit rage-inducing for me at times.

Navigating primarily stationary objects in your house was hard enough, but once you’re outside, there are a myriad of other things to navigate. A cat darts out of the bushes, people are running up and down the staircase, and someone else is tossing a ball nearby. What happened to respecting your elders? Get out of Grandma’s way, can’t you see she’s struggling? The number of times I managed to get through an area, only to forget to breathe right at the end, is embarrassing. My patience was running out faster than Grannie’s stamina and breathing gauges. At least there were more checkpoints once you got outside your home.

There are 10 platforming-based levels to complete, including a busy cityscape and your grandson’s rowdy elementary school. If you choose to make the game more challenging for yourself, you can take more difficult routes and collect gold coins. Collect every coin and unlock a special secret ending.

Whether I am a sucker for punishment or just too stubborn for my own good, I continued to move through the world at a frustratingly slow pace, hoping that I would eventually figure out a rhythm that worked for Grannie. While this never happened, I did find myself slightly less ragey as the game moved along; perhaps I was resigned to my own elderly fate. Please check on your elderly family member and neighbours. Hopefully, you won’t let them struggle like this in the real world.

There is a demo available on Steam, though, and the full game is less than $7USD, so it’s an inexpensive game to try out your patience and skill. Hopefully, you’re much better at it than me.

**Game Code graciously provided through Press Engine and reviewed on PC (Steam)**