Games Like The Palace on the Hill, Beyond Farm Sims
The short answer
Play Tchia first. It is the one game here doing the job The Palace on the Hill does: a real place, built by people who grew up in it, handed to you at a kid’s eye level with a whole summer to spend. If what held you was the tea shop counter, go to Wanderstop. If it was the cooking and the family around it, go to Venba. If it was being handed small jobs by neighbours, go to Mika and The Witch’s Mountain.
Why the standard list misses
The Palace on the Hill has 109 Steam reviews (as of August 2026). That is the whole problem with this query. We read the first page of results for it in August 2026 and counted six aggregator pages, every one of them an automated similarity engine, and nothing written by a person. At 109 reviews an engine has little to work from beyond the tags players voted onto the Steam page, and the ones at the top of that list are the broad ones: RPG, Life Sim, Exploration, Adventure, Cooking, Casual. Story Rich and Emotional are on the same list, further down. So the answers come back Stardew Valley, Coral Island, Palia, open-ended life sims whose calendar keeps running long after you stop caring.
Relaxing is on that tag list too, and it is the one that does the most damage, because it names a mood and gets read as a genre. What a cozy game actually is is the longer version of that distinction.
The Palace on the Hill is a story-driven life sim: a written coming-of-age story about one boy’s summer in a rural India of the nineties, with farming, cooking and errands hung on it, and it reaches an ending. You play Vir, a teenager taking odd jobs because his father has had a bad year on the land, cooking at the local tea shop for money, and collecting reference images for the paintings he wants to make. The Steam page counts over 25 regionally and culturally diverse characters and a 15th century royal palace to explore. The watercolour art is by Mala Sen, who came to games from textile work, and the collectible paintings are inspired by India’s historical miniature art, which the studio walked through in an Xbox Wire piece about the game.
Almost none of that is a farming mechanic. So before you pick anything, work out which of the four parts you were actually there for.
The four things people mean by this query
| What held you | What The Palace on the Hill does with it | Where to go next |
|---|---|---|
| The place | A rural India of the nineties, written and painted by a studio in India | Tchia, Detective Dotson, A Summer’s End |
| The counter | Cooking at the village tea shop as the way you earn | Wanderstop, Venba, Tiny Bookshop |
| The errands | A boy carrying small jobs across a village he can cross on foot | Mika and The Witch’s Mountain, A Short Hike, Lil Gator Game |
| The farm | Sowing and harvesting between story beats | Fields of Mistria, Coral Island, My Time at Portia |
If you were there for the place
Tchia is an open-world archipelago modelled on New Caledonia, made by Awaceb, a studio founded by two childhood friends from those islands. Its characters are voiced in traditional languages by local talent, and Kanak choirs and musicians were recorded for the soundtrack, as the game’s director laid out before release. Tchia leads because the place is the content: you spend the game moving through the archipelago the way Vir spends his summer moving through one village. The catch is size, register and platform: it is a large sandbox with combat in it, Windows only on Steam, and you will spend more time gliding than talking to anyone.
Detective Dotson is a mystery adventure set in present-day India, made in Ahmedabad by Masala Games, whose founder came home to start the studio, as PreMortem Games reported. Expect a murder case, a chase and a Bollywood dance number where The Palace on the Hill gave you a quiet afternoon. Play Detective Dotson when India was the substance of the game for you and you can take that substance at a much louder volume.
A Summer’s End - Hong Kong 1986 is a visual novel about two women in 1980s Hong Kong, hand-drawn in the register of that decade’s cinema. You read it: there is no map to cross and nothing to do with your hands. What A Summer’s End has is one place at one exact moment, held to a single year and a single city, which is the job a nineties Indian village does in Palace.
For the wider shelf of games built on real, unglamorous places, games set in ordinary places collects more of this instinct.
If you were there for the counter
Wanderstop puts you behind a tea shop in a forest clearing as Alta, a fighter who has stopped being able to fight, brewing for whoever wanders in while the game works out what she is avoiding. Wanderstop treats the counter as the place the story happens. The Palace on the Hill does the same with its tea shop, so Wanderstop is the pick if that counter was where you slowed down. Fair warning: it is a game about burnout and it does not stay soft.
Venba is a short cooking game about a Tamil mother who moves to Canada in the 1980s and restores recipes damaged in the move. No other game here puts food and family history as close together as Venba does. It runs short and it closes: one evening, and you are done.
Tiny Bookshop parks a book cart around a seaside town and asks you to choose stock, set prices and read whoever walks up. Tiny Bookshop is the shopkeeping rhythm on its own, with no family and no culture attached to it.
If you were there for the errands
Mika and The Witch’s Mountain is a delivery game on a small island: you fly parcels to people on a broom and learn the town by working out who lives where. Palace’s core loop is being handed something small by a neighbour and carrying it across the map. Mika rebuilds that loop and almost nothing else.
A Short Hike sends a bird up a mountain and fills the path with people asking for favours on the way. A Short Hike keeps the errand structure, drops the shop and the farm entirely, and it is the cheapest game in the table below. One evening covers it.
Lil Gator Game is a kid on an island inventing an adventure out of cardboard swords and talking their sibling into playing along. The summer-holiday feeling is the whole of Lil Gator Game, told a few years younger than Vir.
If you did want the farm sim after all
Some people typing this query really do want the calendar and the crops, and for them the automated lists are accidentally right.
Fields of Mistria is a pixel-art farm and town sim with an anime line: a farm, a mine, fishing, twelve marriage candidates and more than thirty villagers with festivals to show up to, which is Stardew Valley’s shape drawn softer and with more animation in it. Of the three farm sims here it has the highest positive percentage, 97.3 percent in the table below.
Coral Island is a tropical farm with a reef to clean and a large cast to get to know. Coral Island is the community half of The Palace on the Hill scaled up until it becomes the whole game.
My Time at Portia runs a workshop on commissions: someone asks for a thing, you go and gather and build the thing. Vir’s odd jobs and Portia’s commissions have the same bones, and Portia runs them at a scale The Palace on the Hill never attempts.
None of these three ends the way The Palace on the Hill ends. They are built to keep going, and the calendar outlives your interest in it.
When a finish line is the point, short cozy games you can finish in a weekend is sorted on exactly that.
What each one costs
Prices, review counts and positive percentages below are US Steam figures we checked in August 2026, with The Palace on the Hill at the top as the yardstick. Five games named above are missing from it: Tchia, Mika and The Witch’s Mountain, Wanderstop, Detective Dotson and A Summer’s End. We did not check their Steam figures, so read their prices off their own store pages. One row needs a footnote: the 2026 against Fields of Mistria is its 1.0 date, so it is released now, and the studio put it on sale in Early Access on 5 August 2024, which is how a game dated this year already carries 32,635 reviews.
| Game | Released | Price | Steam reviews | Positive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Palace on the Hill | 2024 | $19.99 | 109 | 95.4% |
| Venba | 2023 | $14.99 | 3,719 | 92.5% |
| Tiny Bookshop | 2025 | $19.99 | 7,648 | 96.2% |
| A Short Hike | 2019 | $7.99 | 22,583 | 99.1% |
| Lil Gator Game | 2022 | $19.99 | 6,097 | 98.5% |
| Fields of Mistria | 2026 | $13.99 | 32,635 | 97.3% |
| Coral Island | 2023 | $29.99 | 27,476 | 88.9% |
| My Time at Portia | 2019 | $29.99 | 44,270 | 91.5% |
Where our own game sits
Our debut, Grandma Left Me a Building, is a 2D apartment management game that sits beside this list rather than on it, and it is the odd one out here: the village disappears and you are left with a single address. You inherit a run-down building from your grandmother, find tenants, collect rent, upgrade the place and hire staff. There are more than thirty tenants across four social tiers, and which of them knock on your door shifts with the building’s reputation, so an awkward third floor traces back to something you chose. There is an opera singer who bursts into an aria in the elevator. It is unreleased, so there are no scores or sales to point at yet, and it runs on Windows and macOS only. Its store page is the place to judge it from, and the best apartment building management games is the rest of that shelf.
Quick answers
Is The Palace on the Hill like Stardew Valley?
No. They share crops and a village and stop there. Stardew’s calendar loops: year two brings the same festivals round again, and you can keep going as long as you like. Palace’s calendar runs out with the summer, and the story finishes with it.
Which of these games run on macOS?
Six of the twelve. Venba, Tiny Bookshop, A Short Hike, My Time at Portia, Detective Dotson and A Summer’s End all list macOS on their Steam pages (as of August 2026), and so does The Palace on the Hill itself. The other six have no macOS build there, the first pick included: Tchia, Wanderstop, Mika and The Witch’s Mountain, Lil Gator Game, Coral Island and Fields of Mistria, which lists Windows and Linux.
Are there other games set in India worth playing after this one?
Yes, two. Venba cooks South Indian food through a family that emigrated to Canada, and Detective Dotson runs a murder case through modern Indian streets and Bollywood auditions. Both are written from inside the culture they show, and neither asks you to farm.
Does the low review count mean The Palace on the Hill is bad?
No. The 109 reviews and 95.4 percent in the table above are a small, warm sample: the game was barely seen. Watch ten minutes of footage before you decide, because at that sample size the percentage moves on a handful of opinions.
Updated August 2026.
