Growing Up

I had my eye on this game for a bit and decided to purchase it while it was on sale. In the end, it felt pretty frustrating and borderline confusing to me. I opted for understanding parents but they were also weirdly passive aggressive. I also felt that the penalties for choices were weirdly inconsistent. I ignored Alicia frequently and became her friend, but then I was (accidentally) mean to her once and then it was over.

I also feel as though there should have been more middle ground. I ran into Richard who obviously had a crush on MC when they reached high school but he started to ghost and ignore my character but when mine pushes to find what's wrong their relationship blows up and it's completely on MC which feels unsatisfying because if my choices matter I should have more of them rather than "Be super nice or the relationship is over"

Spoilers.

Choices don't matter that much
Parents are monsters. jesus christ
You end up with a woman that is 99% your mom lol (If you chose to be with a woman.)
Everyone seems to be gay?
Everyone seems to either have Autism, ADHD or some other Disorder.

TLDR. Game made me feel weird and uncomfortable.

Its a simple game. You'll quickly learn how the different mechanics work and it's nice that they've found a way to keep it somewhat fresh as you progress through the game. It has replayability value, but maybe not to do so back to back between playthroughs

The brain game mechanics are simple and addictive. I really wish I could find more games with a similar mechanic.

I ike how you can just keep chugging along

This is a cute but shallow life sim that is heavily inspired with the blessing of the original devs of Chinese Parents. You get stat grinding via mini games, and exams by doing essentially candy crush, the rest of the game is a visual novel.

The art direction, music and presentation is really good as well.

Now here is the interesting part, the game is frankly a Chinese parents clone with one distinct difference, the difference being that there is almost no difficulty involved. You will win by committing to a single path of study or career and see it through. The actual difficulty lies within the visual novel aspect that is also choice based and not value based (characters will specifically react to certain choices you've made). I personally find this to be a positive change, there also isn't stat inheritance via generation pass down.

The inheritance element in this game is cosmetic only, if you managed to successfully romance one of the three friends growing up they will be the parents of the next child along with the character you played as. All events in game are pre scripted and mostly identical throughout. This will break some immersion.

With all being said I had a good time playing this, but if you plan to get it on the steam deck, I recommend you opt for the mobile version instead. The steam version does mesh with touch screens but the mobile version is. It's also cheaper depending on where you are located, this game is actually best played on a tablet due to it's text and mini game heavy nature.

i love my wife nathan prior

So fun already played for 145 hours and too many lives to count just wish u could go to college and live life in adulthood and stuff but other than that awesome game solid 9 outa 10

I honestly love this game, and find myself coming back to it after a few months wanting to play more! I've finished it multiple times and end up with a new ending or friend that I didn't have before. It's very relaxing and the story lines are compelling. I would love to see another game like this in the future, and can't recommend this game enough. :)

i died from playing too much volleyball

A cute little life-sim / raising sim that is borrowing heavily from the paths paved from the game Chinese Parents. With a blend of VN elements, a match-3 game, and small strategy segments, it gets this very wholesome and cozy vibe of watching your kid grow up.

But there's a problem underneath the surface. I feel like this game leans a bit too hard into the visual novel elements. It has dedicated stories, and characters with whole plots, and all that good stuff. And I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the stories they told; they were serviceable if a bit trite, but they did tug on a single heartstring here and there with the relatability.

The issue is this game is inspired by and wants to be Chinese Parents. And the issue therein is that Chinese Parents is more dedicated to being a game. While it has many of the same features as Growing Up, Chinese Parents is more dedicated to randomness. The goal is not to experience the story, so much as it is to instead experience the simulation of raising a kid from a toddler to adulthood. That game also heavily emphasizes a lineage system, and stacking bonuses upon; its almost like a life-sim mixed with a roguelike, which is a weird concept, but it works. It gives this earnest sense of emergent gameplay that's really fun; each of your new characters feels not only unique because of your choices, but also directly influenced by your previous playthrough, leading to this sense of progress, even though you're playing the same game again; each playthrough DOES feel different.

Growing Up doesn't have that dedication. It's more explicitly about experiencing the narratives that they have on offer: meeting their characters, interacting with them, and following their story while managing your various stats alongside. But because nothing is carried over from your previous playthrough expect your past adult character, that emergent gameplay - that bit about telling a story through your actions and raising a child to adulthood - feels much less meaningful.

This game is more focused on its narratives, and they were engaging, and there are also quite a large cast, most of which you won't see on your first playthrough. But that's the problem, I DON'T see those characters; I didn't even really know even half of them existed. The idea being if you want to experience all these stories, and meet all these people, you should replay the game and take a different route.

But I don't want to do that. There's not enough soul in the characters to make the ones I haven't met seem appealing or endearing. And with the lack of focus on a lineage, and with no real tangible benefits in subsequent playthroughs, I just know I'm going to play the same game again, basically in a dice-roll that I enjoy the next set of characters I get. And maybe that's cool if I got the itch to play this game again.

I don't really have the itch to play this game again, not like I did with its peer. Growing Up was a bit cumbersome and tedious at times. And holy crap, the BGM and ambient sound design was awful, and a very distracting and poor choice. I didn't hate this game, but it left me with enough frustrations that I can't really forgive it. It was a fun experience as a short, one-and-done VN with a unique raising sim premise. But I don't really feel the need to roll the dice with this one for a second playthrough unless I'm quite bored.

I think this is such a cute and cozy game. There are so many different possibilities while playing. Each life is different from the last!

Game is broken. Stuck in the start menu without being able to do anything, Steam Cloud activated or not (game messes with it also).
See the discussions for details.
Unfortunately too late for a refund.

Repetitive and boring. Severely limited choices and customization. Story is uninteresting. I feel like nothing was accomplished by the end. Not re-playable.

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

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!

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.

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

Fun, replayable game.

Fun !!!

An endearing game. Not everything makes perfect sense as the skills aren't all set to force prerequisites. Some skills seem silly this way because you can learn a higher level skill before you've learned to read. That kind of thing. However, it is a fun game. An emotionally the game works beginning to end. Let yourself dive into the story or your life. Have fun. Experiment.

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

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.

had me sobbing, wonderful game!!!!

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 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.

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 💞

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'll be honest, the issue with this game is how... oof feels bad for saying this but, how uninteresting this is. the mini-game that allows you to evolve is RNG Minesweeper. This Minesweeper like game is how your determinate your stat basically. You can super focus on one path and one individual with who you wanna have some relationship, but you also can also play an asshole, a loser etc etc.

For a single "life" it took me under 4h. It's pretty straight forward. And completing that allowed me to do unlock 45% of all achievement.
Yah, that's the amount of content we're looking at.
I had my reservation, read the good and the bad reviews buy at 10$ (CAD$) it's pretty easy to just press buy. So yeah, super sale/ way reduced may recommend if you're looking for a small easy game with some visual novel with some pretty - boring - mini games.
Easy pass.

It's a pretty realistic demonstration of expectations, studying and friendships, the only thing I think needs improving though is I would love to see even more LGBTQ+ representation in the romanceable characters, for example there is only one gay romanceable character, 'Hoffer' or Charles, I played as a guy, went through his story and got rejected by him, I was pretty sad there was no actual gay relationships you could go through in this game. Also I think it would be amazing to have trans representation, they could add a new character that if you develop your friendship with, they open up to you about gender dysphoria and their trans backround. Other than that this game is so good! I wish real life was that dramatic tbh XD. The characters have interesting stories and dialouge options to choose from. It's pretty realistic to the real world, its expectations and how people react and communicate with others, I've played 4 playthroughs so far (2 of them were speedrunning bad endings though). I really love this game and I am so thankful for all the effort the devs put in this. Good luck in future to the devs! Thanks for reading my rant about this, and see you never.

Listening to the music really made me sad, i fell like i miss a lot of thing in my life hahaha, Playing this game make me thinking about my life, i love my parent yet i don't, I just fell like growing up too fast and skit so much event in my life, i wish i was born in europe or america

boring

fun

I thought I sucked because I struck out on the first playthrough, just before finishing high school, but then I restarted and was randomly assigned to a lesbian couple, so... things work out for the best!

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

1. Every game is the same. 2. Your adult life has nothing to do with what skills you were choosing during your school career! 3. You care about the NPC - they succeed. You don't - they fail. 4. The exam results doesn't matter.
Such a potential and such a disappointment.

I like the brain points aspect

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!

As a total clone of the game Chinese Parents, it's polished and pretty, but less funny and ironic. Accidentally buying a skill before the brain map instead of after, and having no ability to undo the choice, really takes me out of the game. I don't want to constantly think about what I'm doing in something so casual and fluffy.

This game is such a beautiful experience. There’s so much to love about it; the variety of possible outcomes and the absolutely amazing music (seriously, chef’s kiss). It even hit me on an emotional level, almost like it healed a part of my childhood. That’s rare for a game, and it really makes this one stand out.

That said, it could’ve been even better if there was an option to choose your childhood friends. Being stuck with characters I didn’t like as friend options? Honestly, that was pretty annoying. It felt like I was wasting time, especially since friendships are such an important part of the game. A bit more freedom there would’ve made the whole experience so much more enjoyable.

Still, I loved the strategic side of things. Figuring out the "math" behind it all, planning ahead, and seeing how different choices shaped the outcomes? That was super satisfying. And while the variety of people you could meet wasn’t huge, it was enough for me. Each one had their own little story, which made the world feel somewhat rich and alive.

Despite its flaws, this is still an experience I’d recommend. It’s heartfelt, thoughtful, and offers a surprising amount of depth that just pulls you in.

Does this game make anyone else's pc sound like a spaceship taking off? I stg I can run so many games on my pc but this one just bricks my computer for some reason.

This was a really fun game, I really enjoyed the math of it all and trying to figure everything out. And the different people you could meet and hear their stories.

Teenager Alex is very cute, but not so for mature Alex.

The reason for why I don't recommend this game is mostly because of the lack of checking on it of the producers. I bought it on sale, played it a lot from time to time, trying to get all achievements. The game is good, a little bit repetitive, but good. It's literally what they sell to you; you either like it or you don't.

The thing is: I liked the game. I liked it enough I wanted to complete all achievements.
Problem? There's multiple achivements that are completely bugged. They don't give them to you. There's so many of them I had to replay multiple times to get that it was exhausting. I could still let that slip if just it worked with all of them. But no. There's ONE achievement the game doesn't want me to have even tho I 100% know I did more than once. It's not even the hardest one to get, 16% of the persons that played the game have it. It's just farming!

Tried to contact with them for help but you can guess what happened. The last update they did was in december of 2021 if my mind is not failing me. They don't check the state of the game, I didn't get any answer. So yeah. Will try to do a full run from time to time to see if it decides to work someday but it pains me so much to see I'm at 61 of 62 achievements.

Don't play this game if you like to have them completed.

It's a nice version of real-life sim with a lot of choicec picks.
I don't like the points earning system and the expectations short timing to do, but overall it's nice!

I found it very charming and well presented.
My first run was the run I felt most attached to and that could never be replaced no matter how much I tried.

To help me achievement hunt I had friends give their first runs on my account and it was cute watching everyone get their random rolls in life and what they do.
BUT it did show an rng thing that is often fine but caused a mild huff where my friends actively got NPC rolls that I knew wasn't ideal for them. They would end up fine and enjoy it nonetheless, but it does means its VERY possible for your first game to be middling and possibly turn you away if you aren't connecting to the classmates you were randomly assigned. There's no REAL fix to this, but its worth bringing up that even if you don't feel connected with whoever you're with now, maybe the next game will give you some that you connect with better.

I did not like this game. I've only put like five hours into it, but that was long enough for three playthroughs. All the characters are one-note, and not even in a good way. One character's main trait is that she's fat and everyone makes fun of her for it, which felt kind of weird. Plus, the way that your character is just a combination of your parents with no real way to customize is really annoying. It feels like they only allow you to meet three of the characters every run to force you to replay, but the replay value is bad, and the Candy Crush minigame kind of sucks too.

It's really annoying how your parents seemingly hate you if you go jump rope as a child, which is weird. I get that it's to balance the stress and approval meters, but it feels incredibly unnatural. Plus, your parents are just really fucking annoying. They are constantly making you do things like mow the lawn 8 times in 2 rounds, which if you devote that much time to these things, you will fail your tests, which in the end honestly don't matter that much.

This is just my personal tastes, but I found the music and sound effects to be kind of terrible. I feel like there's no reason for a visual novel level of reading to be accompanied by music with lyrics, I've literally never seen another game do this, it was distracting. I also don't personally love the art style, something I would overlook easily if the game was actually good, but it just isn't.

In general, do not recommend this game, I really wanted to like it, which sucks even more that I can't recommend it. I bought it at a sale price of nine dollars, and I really wish that I had stopped playing in time to return it, instaid of trying to stick it out to see if I would start to like it.

need more of this game

Let me keep my clothes, why do I revert to this dripless adult form when I grow up I WAS A MAGICIAN.

This game could have been better if there had been an option to choose childhood friends. Seeing only the characters I hate for the friend option is annoying and a waste of time for the entire game.

Fun and entertaining, but dark and kinda sinister storylines. I played the first generation in about 5 hrs. SPOILER - The second generation your first character becomes your parent.

LGBTQ+ : I suspect that you cannot get a gay dad pair, but I am going to test it out to see. I tried out a gay mom pair and was able to get that and adopted a son. But I think it may always force you to always have a mom. You can only be gendered as boy or girl.

A real miss for the game is it DOESN'T provide a NAME GENERATOR. I had to use google.

I'm not much for reading instructions so the CANDY CRUSH type EXAM at the end of each semester threw me off. You have to capture each color to win points to raises your grade. Depending on how well you did during the semester you would have been given a certain number of tries for your candy crush. This is annoying, but you get used to it. You can find youtube videos if this still doesn't make sense.

The dialog does repeat itself, even on character two. So, dialog is limited.

R-RATED CONTENT: I didn't get ANY friends or ANY romance in the first character because i turned down the drugs / alcohol lol! And then my would be "friends" all ended up dead or in jail - like seriously - this game is kinda dark. One of my friends "unalived" themself and the other was killed in a gang shooting.

The parents are awful - they do nothing but push you to succeed. One of the dialog's says that they want you to cure cancer and are disappointed in you that aren't already curing cancer and proving for world peace (at 8 yrs old...)

The only way I can see that you can lose the game is if you get three strikes from having low happiness or low parent pride. I'd suggest buying / eating all the food available from town each turn strategically while lowering your parental pride. That way, when you get to your turn you can then match your school tasks against fun tasks. School tasks will always lower happiness and raise parental pride, while fun tasks do the opposite (the art gallery will raise parental pride so check that place out if you want to buy some single turn boosts). Most other place you buy from, I believe will maintain your boost (other than food).

Skills vs School: Don't get trapped in raising side skills vs. school skills. I made this mistake and kept getting D's in school because I had no points to use in candy crush. Raise your school skills and then you'll get tons of turns on candy crush to raise your points towards selecting topics to raise your grade.

Even though I started out with a decent grade, I ended with a D grade, so I ended up being in construction. But at least I was alive lol! You do not get to choose your profession in the end, it kinda ends like MASH, spitting out your future based on your points.

All in all, a fun way to pass the time and challenging enough that I want to beat that freaking candy crush's a** and get better than builder. 7/10 would recommend.

Played my life, chose the best answers I thought, I ended up as a waitress with a random man who has the same name as my partner. 10/10 the odds of getting the same job and partner as real life must be insane.