A whole life takes about twenty minutes in BitLife: birth, school, first love, career, scandal, retirement, and a short obituary at the end. It is a text-based life simulator by Candywriter, which means there are no graphics to speak of — just an 'Age' button, a stream of events, and the choices you make about them, year after year, from childhood to old age.

The choices steer everything: your happiness, health, relationships, and bank balance. Study hard and you might become a doctor or a CEO. Chase fame and you could end up an actor or an influencer. Or skip all of that — the game happily supports the other road, the one with scams, robberies, prison sentences, and the occasional escape attempt. Consequences are real, persistent, and often funny in hindsight: bad decisions made at seventeen can still be embarrassing you at sixty.

What makes it compulsive is the randomness. Thousands of events can land on any life — illnesses, windfalls, betrayals, strange strangers — so no two lives ever play out the same, and the story generator in your head does the rest. Players end up genuinely attached to these little text people and their ridiculous biographies.

It is free to play and perfect in short bursts, though one life reliably turns into five. If you enjoy choice-driven storytelling, dark humour, and the question 'how badly can one life go?', BitLife is the life simulator to beat.