Growing Up Reviews

The music. The art. The writing. What more can I say. Honestly I can't believe how much this game has sucked me in.

Its fun would pay for dlc but needs a bit of work like how the game keeps calling me They/them even though i'm a female and that maybe more of a bonus for the job deepening on the parents who get's married to and stuff

This game is fun, and lets you determine a character's skills, much more easily than you could in a game like The Sims. That being said, I feel that the game would be more enjoyable for me if a kid started off with more skills in a particular area, based on their parents' skillset. I say this, not as a person looking for 'cheat codes,' but as someone who had a high reading level at an early age. Needing to wait until a character is seven to teach them spelling or reading feels disingenuous to me. If you're more patient than I am, you'll appreciate this game more than I do, and I love it.

I love this game. for a couple reasons. It has a cozy charm, wholesome vibes all throughout. I felt for the most part I could become who I wanted, and teh little cutscenes were interesting. But why did I donwvote, you ask? The ending. Not the best. Felt like it essentially came down to what you managed to get on the SAT score married with whichever skilltree you maxed out. Great, you did A level in the "skilltree 3" career. congrats. with no honorable mentions to the skill trees I did most of, or even also finished but did not give as much mastery. Lastly, I was a biut diappointed in how the game dealt with the friends sories. I got to hear how some of them did, but I want more details. And I wanna hear about more of them. Especially if I finished their "story". like how did computer science guy do? Over all, a good game, but the grind to get to certain points where IO could explore "what if" scenarios is what's stopping me from replaying the game, and also what is stopping me from giving it a thimbs up. Get it on sale and try it out.

Highly addicting, the graphics are cute and amazing. Love that each play through is different!

Genuinely a lovely game. Has bits of resource management, puzzles, and visual novel elements. Hits the right emotional beats and offers you freedom of choice. It's one of my favorite games because it dabbles in so many things but does it well. It's also easy to pick up and understand, great if you need a casual, sweet game to relax with.

Each life takes around 3-4 hours to complete, and I played through four lives before I noticed repeat characters. Therefore, you can easily get more than 12 hours of unique content from this game. I also enjoyed following the different career paths. In three consecutive lives, I was an Olympic athlete, a gourmet chef, and a Supreme Court Justice!

Loved this game so much! it's super cute and fun to try all the different paths.

Fun game!! It's a lot more stats driven rather than story driven, and leaves a decent amount of potential on the table, but its a fun little adventure ❤ It's a very vibey style game and the music is INCREDIBLE, definitely the highlight of the experience. The story choices do a pretty good job of giving genuinely real choices instead of a "good vs bad" obvious choice. One big gripe I have is the ending. The game ends after you reach age 18 but could've SOOO easily have had a college level and SPOILER [spoiler] The fact that in your next playthrough the parents are you and your spouse from your last playthrough is an awesome little detail, but its dissapointing that they get the default "mom/dad" lablel instead of actually being named after your first character, that little bit of detail could've made it feel way more real. [/spoiler] Speaking of the ending, the game encourages you pretty hard to play several playthroughs to get different endings, but the early years before middleschool are kind of a slog since they primarily serve as a tutorial in the first playthrough, I wish there was some way to speed through to the interesting parts. All in all its a fun little game, definitely reccomend! Just don't expect a game about social life, its much more of a stat builder game rather than a social game 💞

I really enjoyed this game (if you couldn't tell by my run time). and I honestly wish we had more life sims like this out here. This game has just the right mix of being a visual novel but also having a playable aspect that causes you to actually think. Despite loving this game, I have a lot of complaints, but I'll get the things I enjoyed the most out of the way first. Loves. 1. Realistic diversity and inclusion This game is very diverse with its characters in a way that doesn't feel forced (there are some games that seem like they're just checking off boxes, while this game makes everything feel natural). There are several different ethnicities you can choose from in the dating pool, and for yourself, mixed races are added as well, which I don't see in a lot of games. The game also has great LGBTQ representation; it's cool to see characters that have specific sexualities instead of having every character be "player sexual" (which works great for games like Baldur's Gate but gives more realism to games like this). The only main complaint I have here is that there aren't more body types, but I talk about that more in the complaint section. 2. Story rich with dark undertones. The game tackles several heavy topics/stigmas such as different mental illnesses, substance abuse/usage, gangs, and bullying in a realistic way. Every character has their own unique storyline and their own virtues and vices. This game can manage to make you feel touched, or it can break your heart. 3. Replay value. Each run randomly selects three bachelors from its pool for each stage of life (elementary, middle, and high school), so you have a good bit of variety for different playthroughs, and it doesn't feel stale. Complaints. Main complaints. 1. Parents serve as nothing more than a plot device/punishment system and don't add anything meaningful to your character's life. You're given the illusion of choice early on in the game, especially when you start your first profile. The "letter from your parents" doesn't affect anything in-game, and the choices you make anytime you interact with your parents are meaningless. Your parents are pretty overbearing with how they act; they don't like it when you do things such as play hopscotch as a six-year-old or spend time doing things like listening to music, going shopping, and daydreaming. Because entertainment options make your parents angry, you have to try to balance it out by working jobs that stress your character out to make money to buy food daily to keep your happiness from dropping into the negative. The parent's demands can also be pretty steep when they ask you to go do a work action ten times in three rounds, which takes up all of your time to study. When you marry your love interest and get carried over to play the next child, your love interest completely loses all of their personality that you fell in love with in your previous playthrough. They go through the exact same dialogue as if you didn't choose a love interest or the "starting parents." 2. Customization feels lacking. You're only able to choose an outfit and a hairstyle as a preteen, and that's it. You can't choose to dye your hair any unnatural colours, and while I love the choices of colours, they gave for each outfit, it only affects your torso, and that's it. You feel very lacking in makeup and accessories when you're standing next to characters like Vivca, Wendy, and Felicity, who have on full faces of makeup and are decked out in chokers, glasses, hairbands, etc. There are no choices for body type, and there is only one heavyset person in the entire game, and her weight is a huge point of mockery in her story. 3. You can't be a "bad" person or a failure. While on certain routes, you can smoke weed, drink beer, skip school, etc. There are no options to actually go down a bad path and end with a game over. The only "game overs" are from either disappointing your parents three times, and they send you to military school, or you let your happiness meter run out three times, which causes you to have depression and makes you drop out. With both these options, you still end up with a randomly selected partner and have a kid to start your next run. I feel like there could have been more options with stuff like struggling with addiction or flunking out of school. Some of the romanceable characters have these "bad endings," with even some of them dying if you don't help them in your route, so it isn't like this is a topic not touched by the game. Minor complaints -The male MC's look is off compared to the male bachelors. All of the guys except for Richard have these chiseled faces that are conventionally attractive, and your character just looks like he's baby-faced throughout the entire game. -Vivca/ Patty doesn't get a spoken song like Nate does. Equality for the edgy bachelors! Glitches. There are two glitches I encountered while playing the game, and one of them is game breaking. The first and major glitch is being unable to load any character files. When I'd try, the game would take me to a glitched-out version of the game where you're in baby mode. The background gets turned to the illustration of the school with the bike lying outside. The portrait of your character is gone, your name is shown as "Player Name," and the interface turns green. I'd have to exit back to the menu and hit "continue," where it would take me back to whatever profile I was on before trying to load another one. The second glitch is I was unable to delete character profiles. I would click the X and then "confirm" when prompted with the "Are you sure?" pop-up, and then nothing would happen. The profile would still be there no matter how many times I tried deleting. All in all, I would recommend this game myself, but I understand how others may not like it. I do think there are a lot of things that need to be polished and a lot more customization options need to be added, but otherwise it's an amazing game, and I had fun on all of my playthroughs!