If your favourite part of The Sims was building the house and then immediately forgetting the Sims themselves existed, Architect Life: A House Design Simulator might be drafting its way into your library next. During the 8th edition of Bigben Week in Paris, I had the chance to sit down (and briefly tinker) with Shine Research’s upcoming title, published by Nacon. Promising a blend of design freedom and light project management, Architect Life is shaping up to be a low-pressure, high-creativity simulator that lets you embrace your inner architect.
Easy to learn, Satisfying to Shape
Architect Life is pitched as a simulator with depth, but not one that requires an architectural degree or AutoCAD certification to get started. Using a helpful grid system, building begins in a familiar fashion: placing rooms, shaping spaces, and defining roofs and windows. The process feels intuitive, and since you can adjust just about everything on the fly, it encourages experimentation—ideal for players who like refining their layouts until every wall and window feels just right.
Career mode: More than just floor plans
Career mode serves as the game’s structured backbone, offering around 20 missions designed to test both your creativity and your adaptability. You’ll tackle a range of projects across different terrains, each with a unique client brief, a fixed budget, and clear architectural goals. Whether you’re building a sleek hillside home or a rustic countryside cottage, the challenge lies in balancing aesthetics with functionality.
But your job doesn’t end with the blueprints. Once the design is approved, construction begins—and that’s where things can get complicated. During the demo, we encountered bad weather that delayed progress, a sick worker who needed replacement, and even a surprise strike. These events add a layer of project management to the experience, pushing you to make strategic decisions to stay on time and within budget.
Just you and the Blueprints
If juggling client demands and crises isn’t your idea of fun, Architect Life’s free mode offers a completely different experience. Here, you’re given total freedom to build whatever you like, without the constraints of budgets, deadlines, or practicality. Whether you’re recreating your own house, designing your dream home, or crafting a villa shaped like Pikachu, the only limit is your imagination.
The developer mentioned that players in testing have used this mode to create both real-world blueprints and abstract architectural art. And from what I saw, the building tools seem more than capable of supporting both. Even in a short session, the appeal of this sandbox-style mode was clear—there’s something genuinely soothing about building for its own sake, especially when you’re not bound by gravity or zoning laws.
A promising Foundation
My initial impression is that Architect Life is carving out a thoughtful space between hardcore simulation and casual design. It seems to find a solid balance between realism and accessibility, with enough challenge in the structured missions and enough freedom in the sandbox mode to appeal to both ends of the creative spectrum. The visuals aren’t aiming for photorealism, but they’re clean, functional, and easy on the eyes, well-suited to a game that values clarity over spectacle.
Architect Life: A House Design Simulator seems to be shaping up as a feature-rich builder that encourages creativity without leaning too heavily on complexity. Based on what I saw during my time with the game, it looks like the kind of leisure game that offers just enough challenge to stay engaging, while still being relaxing and approachable. If the full release stays on this path, it could potentially earn a place among other genre favourites when it launches on June 10th across PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo Switch.
