10 Best Simulation Games on Xbox Game Pass (October 2026)

Simulation games have this weird pull where you sit down to try something for twenty minutes and suddenly three hours have disappeared. Whether you’re flipping burgers, fixing engines, or running a convenience store, these games turn ordinary jobs into something you genuinely want to spend your evening doing. Xbox Game Pass has a pretty solid lineup right now, so here are the best simulation games on Game Pass you should be looking into this year.

What Defines the Best Sim Games?

A good simulation game pulls you straight into its world through believable systems and steady engagement. It should let players step into everyday tasks or extraordinary jobs in a natural, easy way. The best ones offer space to experiment, learn, and see real progress from effort. Whether it’s cleaning, building, or farming, a proper sim delivers satisfaction through steady improvement and clear results. Every small action should lead to something visible, something that feels earned through consistency and curiosity.

For this list, the goal was to pick titles that capture that sense of steady involvement and detail. Each game here gives you control, purpose, and a satisfying loop that feels grounded in real-world logic.

With that in mind, here are ten simulation games on Xbox Game Pass in 2026 that offer strong day-to-day tasks, meaningful detail, and a steady sense of growth. Starting at number 10, these picks cover a wide range of jobs and routines, from kitchens and farms to workshops, stores, and cleanup work.

10. Cooking Simulator

Full kitchen, full freedom, full permission to burn everything down

Cooking Simulator became a huge favorite among content creators on YouTube, and part of the reason is that you can absolutely destroy the kitchen. But before all the mayhem, the cooking part is legit. You walk around a fully equipped kitchen, pick your recipe, grab ingredients, and go through the actual steps of preparing a dish. Slicing, seasoning, boiling, frying, plating, all of it. Ingredients react to what you do by changing temperature, appearance, and taste, while the physics handle everything from flipping steaks to pouring liquids. So if you leave a steak too long on the burner, it chars. If you pour too much liquid into a pot, it overflows.

However, the cooking side of Cooking Simulator gets seriously intense once orders start piling up. You’re managing multiple dishes at the same time, keeping an eye on cooking times, and racing to get everything plated before it sits too long. It gets hectic. Plus, when you’re done being a responsible chef, you can always go full destruction mode, throw knives across the room, stack cutting boards like dominoes, set the kitchen on fire, or even blow up the oven and scramble for the fire extinguisher. Microsoft also reportedly paid around $600,000 to bring Cooking Simulator to Game Pass back in 2022, which is a staggering amount for a cooking sim.

9. Stardew Valley

Inherit a run-down farm, grow crops, befriend a small town

Stardew Valley is a farming sim where you move to a small countryside town after inheriting your grandfather’s old, overgrown farm. But calling it a farming sim barely scratches the surface, since on any given day you could be fishing by the river, exploring underground caves, gifting flowers to someone you’re trying to marry, or just wandering around town talking to villagers who all have their own schedules, routines, and backstories. The creator, Eric Barone, built everything himself, the pixel art, the music, the code, all of it over four years. And somehow there’s still a hidden secret message buried inside Stardew Valley that nobody has found even after a decade.

Barone himself has confirmed it multiple times, and he doubts anyone ever will find it given how obscure it is. Additionally, you can raise animals, cook meals using ingredients you’ve grown or collected, decorate your farmhouse however you want, or spend an entire in-game season doing nothing but mining for rare gems underground. Villagers react differently to the gifts you give them, and their dialogue and personal events open up as your relationship grows. A number of them can also be romanced, married, and eventually start a family with you. Stardew Valley takes a spot on our Xbox Game Pass sim games list mainly due to the sheer amount of content packed into it, which borders on ridiculous for a game originally made by one person.

8. theHunter: Call of the Wild

Track wildlife across open reserves where patience matters more than aim

theHunter: Call of the Wild is a hunting simulation set across massive wilderness reserves full of deer, elk, bears, ducks, and plenty more. However, Call of the Wild plays nothing like a typical action game. It’s deliberately slow. You might crouch through brush for twenty minutes straight, reading animal footprints, checking which way the breeze is blowing, and still come up empty because your target caught your scent before you ever got close. Animals have daily routines here too, meaning they feed, drink, and rest at different spots depending on the hour. Even moving through thick vegetation makes more noise than crossing quieter terrain, and wildlife reacts to all of it.

Ballistics are simulated down to bullet drop and wind, which means distance and projectile behavior matter when lining up a shot. You also need to match the right weapon and ammunition to the animal you’re hunting, because using the wrong setup can hurt penetration and your harvest result. You can carry lures, callers, scent-related gear, rifles, bows, and plenty more depending on how you want to hunt. It also supports multiplayer for up to eight players, so you can hunt alongside friends across the available reserves. For a simulation game on Game Pass, theHunter offers a remarkably calming pace once you settle into it, long stretches of walking, listening, and scanning the terrain, punctuated by moments where everything comes down to one well-timed shot.

7. Car Mechanic Simulator

Diagnose, strip down, repair, and rebuild cars from the ground up

Car Mechanic Simulator hands you the keys to your own repair garage. Customers bring in vehicles with all kinds of problems, from basic brake jobs to full engine rebuilds, and your job is to figure out what’s wrong, strip out the damaged components, order replacements, and put everything back together. Everything plays out from a first-person perspective, so you’re constantly walking around cars, raising them on lifts to reach the underside, pulling components apart, and using different tools and workshop stations depending on the job.

Beyond regular repair jobs, you can hunt down barn finds and buy battered cars to restore from rust-bucket condition into something worth keeping or selling. Car auctions let you bid on vehicles in different conditions too. And once you’ve finished working on something, you can take it onto the test track to check things like acceleration, braking, steering, and suspension behavior. Your garage also grows as you move forward, with upgrades unlocking extra workspace and equipment such as an engine crane, repair benches, a paint shop, and diagnostic facilities.

6. Crime Scene Cleaner

Mop up gruesome crime scenes to pay your daughter’s medical bills

Crime Scene Cleaner casts you as a single father struggling to cover his daughter’s hospital bills after insurance fails him. His regular job isn’t bringing in enough, so he starts taking well-paid cleanup jobs from the mob. So yeah, the premise alone is darker than your average simulation game. You show up to blood-soaked crime scenes armed with mops, buckets, sponges, cleaning chemicals, and whatever else you need to make the evidence disappear. The cleaning itself is methodical and weirdly calming once you get into it.

Mechanically, it feels a bit like PowerWash Simulator mixed with House Flipper, only with a grim crime story stitched through everything. You’ve got mops and sponges for everyday messes, a power washer for tougher outdoor jobs, detergents and odor-removal gear, plus equipment upgrades for things like your lights and cleaning tools. There’s also a Cleaner’s Sense ability that highlights things around the crime scene you may have missed, which is incredibly useful when one tiny stain or piece of evidence is holding up the job. The game launched as a Day One title on Xbox Game Pass, and players on Reddit called it “absolutely addictive” and “therapeutic” despite the morbid subject matter.

5. Construction Simulator

Build structures from scratch using heavy licensed machinery

Construction Simulator is about operating heavy machinery across two open-world maps, picking up contracts, hauling materials around town, and watching a structure slowly go from dirt foundation to finished building. You’ll spend a good chunk of your time inside excavators, cranes, dump trucks, concrete mixers, and plenty of other machines licensed from real manufacturers. Driving between job sites is a big slice of the experience if you want it to be, because you can physically haul materials from suppliers to construction zones yourself. You can also skip some of that travel with the game’s transport and fast-travel options. Still, a lot of the appeal comes from taking the long way and letting the commute become its own routine.

Plus, there’s an open-world loop to it where you accept a contract, figure out what equipment you need, rent or buy it, and then head to the site to do the digging, pouring, lifting, or roadwork yourself. The machines are faithful recreations of real construction equipment, and excavators carry genuine weight, crane work takes patience, and concrete jobs have that slow, methodical pace you’d expect. Construction Simulator leans completely into steady productivity. There’s no combat and no real stakes beyond completing contracts, managing your equipment, and growing your construction company at your own speed.

4. Farming Simulator 25

Grow crops, raise animals, and expand your agricultural empire

Farming Simulator 25 is the kind of game you boot up after a rough day, and two hours later you realize you’ve been plowing the same field in complete silence. There’s an oddly peaceful quality about it. You pick a map, pick your crops, and just… farm. Wheat, corn, rice, spinach, peas, whatever you feel like growing. The rice paddies are a highlight, particularly regular rice, since you have to flood the field and use a dedicated planting setup instead of treating it like a normal crop. So even if you’ve been doing traditional grain harvesting for sessions, switching to rice on the East Asian map changes the feel of your routine completely.

There are over 400 machines and items from 150+ agricultural brands, including John Deere, CLAAS, Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and plenty more. And the ground plays a bigger role here, since tractor weight, tires, wet soil, and the ruts you create can all affect how the machine handles. Weather can throw you off too, given that hail and twisters can damage crops if you’re unlucky. GPS-assisted steering is also a welcome touch for those longer field jobs. Plus, you’ve got water buffalo, goats, and baby animals alongside the usual livestock. For me, it’s easily one of the most convincing farming sims in the Xbox Game Pass library.

3. Supermarket Simulator

Design, stock, and run your own grocery store from scratch

Supermarket Simulator became a massive hit on PC before it even arrived on consoles, so by the time it dropped on Game Pass, there was already a huge community of players who’d figured out every pricing trick in the book. And speaking of pricing, the funniest part about Supermarket Simulator is how it accidentally teaches you actual retail psychology. Players figured out you can jack up base prices to absurd levels, then slap a “discount” label on them to bring the cost back down to normal, and customers will flood in thinking they’re getting a steal.

You’ve probably seen the same trick at actual stores during holiday sales, right? And yeah, you’re essentially learning shady retail tactics while scanning barcodes and stocking cereal boxes on a virtual shelf. Still, beyond the pricing shenanigans, there’s a proper day-to-day grind of running the shop. You order stock through a computer, unpack boxes in the back room, sort everything onto the right shelves, then hop on the register to scan items and make change for customers. Meanwhile, shoplifters sneak products off your shelves if you don’t set up cameras or hire security. Your electricity bill goes up depending on how many appliances you’ve got running. Even your store layout affects how smoothly customers move through the aisles.

2. Shift At Midnight

Serve late-night customers while figuring out who’s actually human

Shift At Midnight mixes two things you’d never expect together, retail work and horror, and somehow it just clicks. You’re working the night shift at a gas station in 1993, stocking shelves, scanning groceries, keeping the place clean, and hitting your sales quota before the shift ends. Later on, even more jobs get thrown at you, including pumping gas. Totally normal stuff. But some customers who walk through the door could be doppelgangers pretending to be human. So while you ring up their snacks, you’re also questioning them about things like their birthday and job, checking their ID and barcode, searching their details in a database, and comparing their appearance against the information on file. One contradiction can be enough to expose them. And if you miss one, well, that person can walk out the door and return later as something much worse.

So the paranoia creeps in because later shifts pile more responsibilities on top of the detective work at the counter. You can bring up to two friends along in co-op, and proximity chat makes the experience even more frantic since their voices get quieter as they move farther away. Plus, the shifts are randomly generated, so customer lineups and situations can change between runs instead of letting you simply memorize one playthrough. Shift At Midnight is easily one of the more unusual simulation games Game Pass added in 2026.

1. inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories

Work a summer job at a cozy Japanese convenience store

inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories is a convenience store sim set during one week in the summer of 1993, but it cares way more about the people walking through the door than the products on the shelves. You play as a college student helping out at her aunt’s shop during break, stocking shelves, scanning items, and tidying displays between customers. All of it moves at a crawl by design, since there’s no timer pushing you forward. Each shift winds down once the final customer and their story scene are finished. So the store routine is there, but it’s mostly background noise compared to the conversations you end up having during the night shift.

Regulars stop by across different nights, and through branching dialogue, their personal stories slowly come into focus. The whole game is rooted in a Japanese philosophy called “ichi-go, ichi-e,” built around the idea that each encounter is unique and can’t ever happen in exactly the same way again. And since inKONBINI is such a short, focused game, its small cast gets plenty of room to breathe. Little details stack up too, like sticky notes left behind by the daytime staff or customers reacting differently based on choices you’ve made earlier in the week. With so many simulation games available on Game Pass Ultimate, inKONBINI still manages to stand apart by caring more about a quiet conversation than a busy screen.

FAQs

Which of these Game Pass simulation games can I play with friends?

A few of them support multiplayer, but the count is smaller than you’d expect. Supermarket Simulator lets you co-op with up to four friends, and it’s cross-platform between Xbox and PC Game Pass. Shift At Midnight supports three-player online co-op with proximity chat, which honestly makes the horror side of it way more intense. Construction Simulator also has four-player co-op, so you can split the workload on bigger contracts. However, the rest of the list is strictly solo. inKONBINI, Stardew Valley, and Crime Scene Cleaner are all single-player experiences, so keep that in mind before jumping in with a group.

Which Xbox Game Pass game should I start with if I’ve never tried a simulation game before?

Stardew Valley is probably the safest entry point, since the pace is gentle and you can figure things out at your own speed without penalty. Supermarket Simulator is another solid pick because the loop of stocking shelves and scanning items clicks almost immediately. If you want something more story-driven, inKONBINI eases you in with minimal mechanics and focuses mostly on dialogue. On the flip side, Farming Simulator 25 and Construction Simulator have steeper learning curves with their machinery controls, so those might feel overwhelming at first if you’re brand new to the genre..

Which of these are safe for younger players?

Stardew Valley, Cooking Simulator, and Farming Simulator 25 are all safe picks for a younger audience. Supermarket Simulator is also fairly tame, since the most stressful thing happening is a long checkout line. However, Crime Scene Cleaner is graphic and deals with mob violence, blood, and body disposal, so that’s an easy skip for kids. Shift At Midnight has horror elements with jump scares and monster encounters, so it leans more toward teens and adults. theHunter: Call of the Wild involves realistic animal hunting, which some parents may also want to consider before handing over the controller.

How long does it take to get through each of these sim games?

It really depends on the type. inKONBINI wraps up in under ten hours, and Crime Scene Cleaner sits in a similar range per chapter. Shift At Midnight has a thirteen-shift story mode, so you can finish it in a few focused sessions. But then you’ve got open-ended games like Stardew Valley, Farming Simulator 25, and Construction Simulator that can easily eat up hundreds of hours if you let them. Supermarket Simulator also has no real endpoint, since the goal is to keep expanding your store indefinitely. So it comes down to whether you prefer a contained experience or something you can return to over and over.

Which ones are the most relaxing to play after a long day?

inKONBINI is the clear winner here, since there’s zero pressure and the pacing is deliberately calm. Stardew Valley is another reliable choice for winding down, especially once you’ve settled into a farm routine. theHunter: Call of the Wild is surprisingly mellow too, because most of your time is spent quietly walking through forests and tracking animals. Even Supermarket Simulator has a zen-like quality once you get into the rhythm of restocking and scanning. On the other hand, Shift At Midnight and Crime Scene Cleaner aren’t exactly chill, so save those for when you’re in the mood for something with a bit more edge.

Do any of these simulation games have an actual storyline?

Yes, a few of them lean heavily into narrative. inKONBINI is the most story-driven game on the list, with branching conversations and character arcs that unfold across your summer shifts. Crime Scene Cleaner has a dark narrative about a father trying to pay for his daughter’s medical bills by cleaning up crime scenes for the mob. Shift At Midnight also has a thirteen-shift story mode with specific plot beats and a choice near the end that affects the outcome. Construction Simulator has light campaign stories tied to each map, but they’re more of a framework for the contracts than anything deeply emotional. Meanwhile, games like Farming Simulator 25 and Supermarket Simulator are purely sandbox experiences with no scripted storyline at all.