Simulator games come in all shapes and sizes. Long gone are the days of cheap game titles “[X] Simulator” dominating the Steam marketplace with all the programming skill of a one-armed monkey on a broken typewriter behind them. There’s now a huge selection of simulation titles out there made by people who genuinely care about the subject matter and create something that, while niche, is bursting with love.

We’ve picked out the top simulator titles on sale now in the Steam Summer Sale 2024, so you can try something new.

American Truck Simulator

Truckin’ across the USA sounds like the American dream come to life, and the team behind both this and its sister game, Euro Truck Simulator, were the ones who proved that simulator games don’t have to be a joke. Trucks and their cargo have extremely realistic weight and controls while cruising along the highways has never been so relaxing.

Kerbal Space Program

While its recent sequel may have been a disaster, don’t overlook the fact that the original Kerbal Space Program is a masterpiece. Here you’ll have to carefully design every rocket for all your galactic missions. At first, you’ll be lucky to get anything more than a burning crater where the launch pad used to be, but if you take the time to learn it, landing a craft on a distant planet is one of the most satisfying victories in all of gaming.

House Flipper 2

House Flipper 2 and its predecessor let you live your interior design dreams. In one half of the game, you can follow strict checklists of things to clean, renovate, and design in a home, but on the other half, you can buy a dilapidated shack and turn it into the home of your dreams. Every system is carefully designed to be as tactile as possible, letting you capture the rewarding feeling of construction while flourishing creatively.

Tabletop Simulator

No matter how willing your friends say they are to come round for a board game night, we all know that actually getting them all in the same place at the same time isn’t that easy. Tabletop Simulator helps you with this, letting you play just about any game you can imagine on your PC thanks to Steam Workshop support. Plus, you can buy a 4-pack of the game while it’s on sale so your friends have no excuse not to get it.

Supermarket Simulator

Supermarket Simulator walks the line of the janky simulators of old, but it’s captured the imagination of a big enough community that we’ll give it a pass. It does exactly what it says on the tin, you run a supermarket where you have to worry about buying inventory, stocking shelves, and running the checkout to slowly grow your business.

If you like skateboarding games like the Tony Hawk series but want a bit of a different take, Rooftops & Alley is as good as you can get. Currently in Early Access, this game takes the robust control schemes of skateboarding games and recontextualizes it for a free-running/parkour game, with all sorts of fun obstacle courses and environments to try it out on.

PC Building Simulator

This may only be for the nerdiest of nerds, but if you’re looking for sim games on Steam, that’s probably you anyway. In this, you’ll be running a PC build/repair business. You start off with people’s rigs being sent in for repairs or cleaning and eventually build up to constructing incredible custom rigs for your customers, all while your own high-end machine begs for something more challenging to run.

Universe Sandbox

Ever wanted to know what would happen if you threw the Moon into the Sun? Or if you doubled the speed of Earth’s rotation? Or if you lined up all of the planets in the Solar System for a game of pool? Well Universe Sandbox lets you find out the answer to all of those questions with very details physics you can play with an a VR mode that lets you marvel at the true size of the planets in our universe.

BeamNG Drive

Driving cars is fun, crashing them is even better. BeamNG has a fantastic destruction engine that, while not necessarily the most realistic, is definitely the most fun. It gives you tonnes of environments and cars to experiment with until they're all a pile of rubble on the tarmac.

Space Engineers

A lot of things become a lot more difficult when done in zero gravity, but they also become a lot more entertaining. If you want you can set up a space station and explore the stars, or you can set up on a moon somewhere for a more robust base. It's a great hybrid between survival/crafting and creative expression in a fully unique setting.