Games Like Project Highrise, Hardcore to Cozy
Start with the lineage, not the genre tag
Updated August 2026. Every Steam figure on this page was checked then, except the four cells marked Not checked in the table below.
SimTower shipped in 1994, designed by Yoot Saito at OPeNBooK and published outside Japan by Maxis. It asked one question on a loop: can the people inside this building get where they are going? You placed offices, condos, hotel rooms and restaurants, then spent the rest of the run fighting your own elevator layout while the tower climbed a star rating. Saito’s follow-up, Yoot Tower, arrived in 1998 through OPeNBooK9003 with Sega publishing it in North America.
That family tree is what makes Project Highrise specific, and it is a narrower thing than “management sim”. Wikipedia’s entry on Project Highrise records it as SimTower’s spiritual successor, and SomaSim never hid the debt. The 2016 game keeps the vertical grid and moves the bottleneck one step sideways, from elevator capacity to service supply. An office tenant will not sign a lease until its floor has the utilities and support offices it wants, and the Steam page describes the tower as “an intricate ecosystem” that puts you in charge of “every wall and wire, every office and apartment”.
What sorts these recommendations is how much of the building the game makes you simulate. A management sim is a game where you run a system instead of a character: you lay out the space, place the people, spend money and time you never have enough of, then watch the system push back. What varies between them is how much of that system is handed to you, and Project Highrise sits unusually far along it.
| Game | Year | Made by | The bottleneck it hands you |
|---|---|---|---|
| SimTower | 1994 | Yoot Saito and OPeNBooK, published outside Japan by Maxis | Elevators. Can everyone reach their floor? |
| Yoot Tower | 1998 | OPeNBooK9003, published in North America by Sega | The same tower with more building types |
| Project Highrise | 2016 | SomaSim, published by Kasedo Games | Services. Will this floor support the tenant you want? |
If that lineage is new to you, the history of the management sim is where the rest of the branches are.
The one to buy
If you buy a single game off this page, make it Project Hospital: it runs deeper systems than Project Highrise, spread across one flat hospital floor plan instead of a tower. If what you want is the SimTower layout back, elevator tuning and a star award included, the answer is Mad Tower Tycoon. And if the ledger layer was the part of Project Highrise you endured, drop three rungs to Minami Lane.
The depth ladder at a glance
The rungs run from the games that make you simulate the most of a building down to the ones that simulate the least. Rung 4 is the odd one out: the building stays where it is and the simulation moves into the people living in it. Project Highrise is in the table so you can measure the other nine against something you have already played.
| Game | Rung | Released | Steam price | Reviews (positive) | Steam platforms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project Highrise | Reference | 2016 | $19.99 | 4,811 (84.9%) | Win, Mac |
| Project Hospital | Deeper | 2018 | $24.99 | 9,285 (88.9%) | Win, Mac, Linux |
| Software Inc. | Deeper | 2015 (Early Access) | Not checked | Not checked | Win, Mac, Linux |
| Mad Tower Tycoon | Same tower | 2020 | $14.99 | 444 (77.7%) | Win, Mac |
| Hotel Architect | Same tower | 2026 | Not checked | Not checked | Win |
| Tavern Master | Tycoon | 2021 | $14.99 | 13,237 (92.1%) | Win, Mac, Linux |
| The Tenants | Tenants | 2022 | $19.99 | 7,761 (78.9%) | Win |
| Minami Lane | Cozy | 2024 | $4.99 | 6,667 (97.4%) | Win, Mac, Linux |
| Hotel Galactic | Cozy | 2025 (Early Access) | $34.99 | 716 (73.9%) | Win |
| Rise of Industry | Branch | 2019 | $29.99 | 4,191 (73.1%) | Win, Mac, Linux |
Prices, review counts and positive percentages are the US Steam figures as of August 2026, and the platform column is what each Steam page lists. Prices move in sales, so the money column is a list price and your checkout total may well be lower. Software Inc. and Hotel Architect sit outside the sweep those figures come from, so their four cells read Not checked instead of a guess. We name them, link them, and put no number behind them.
Rung 1: more machine than Project Highrise
Project Hospital
Project Hospital is the deepest machine on this page, and the one that keeps running without you once the layout is right. You contract insurance companies to decide which patients walk in, then build the diagnostic chain that handles them: examination rooms, laboratory tests, imaging, hospitalisation, surgery. Staff are hired by specialisation and get unhappy in ways you have to trace back to a room you placed. Its Steam page offers sandbox, campaign and six challenge levels that each narrow onto one department. What you give up: the interface is dense, and a hospital sprawls sideways, so the vertical stacking is gone and the whole layout happens on flat floors. Our roundup of games like Project Hospital carries the rest of that branch.
Software Inc.
Software Inc. is the closest thing on Steam to Project Highrise’s actual job: an office building you draw floor by floor and then have to make work for the people inside it. You buy plots on an open map, put up a free-form building of up to ten stories plus a basement, then furnish it and staff it. Its Steam page lists staff you hire for nothing but repairing furniture, cleaning the office, cooking, guarding the place and greeting visitors, which is Project Highrise’s support-office demand wearing different clothes. Above that sits a second machine the tower game never had: a randomised software market where you design products, take contract work, file patents and trade stock. The trade is the tenants: you are the only company in your own building, so nobody signs a lease and nobody moves out, and the building stops at ten floors. It has been in Early Access since 2015, so the build on sale is unfinished, and it is one of the two games on this page with no figures in our table.
Rung 2: the same tower, rebuilt
Mad Tower Tycoon
Mad Tower Tycoon is the closest anyone has come to rebuilding SimTower’s shape on Steam, a vertical building you lay out floor by floor. You stack more than 100 floors of offices, apartments and shops, then tune an elevator system that lets you cap waiting times and skip floors, chasing a six-star award for the finished building. Random events keep the tower from settling: fires, earthquakes, and tenants abducted by UFOs, according to its Steam page. It is a small game from a small team, and the review count in the table above tells you how few people have tried it.
Hotel Architect
Hotel Architect takes Project Highrise’s build-and-furnish half into 3D and points it at a single business. You design a hotel from an empty plot or take over a neglected building, hire the construction crews that put it up, then fill floor after floor with themed zones, amenities and furnishings on the way to a five-star rating. Its Steam page puts the pressure on the guests themselves: disturb them, or take away something they were using, and your reviews fall. It arrived in May 2026 with a career campaign and a sandbox mode for every location, and it lists Windows only, no macOS. Our August sweep never reached it, so read its price and its review standing off that store page.
Rung 3: the tycoon end
The Two Point games are where most people land on this rung, and each of them has a page of its own here rather than a row in the table above: games like Two Point Hospital and games like Two Point Museum and Campus. The pick that belongs on this page is the smaller one.
Tavern Master
The smallest complete version of this loop is Tavern Master, and it is the least demanding way to find out whether you like the loop at all. You open with a couple of benches and a barrel, then grow into kitchens, guest rooms, musicians and special events with picky food and drink requirements, per its store page. There is no vertical building here, and the same page puts the pressure in the queue: keep enough drinks and seats for the guests, or they leave angry from waiting too long.
Rung 4: the building shrinks to the people in it
The Tenants
If signing tenants was more interesting to you than laying pipes, start with The Tenants. You buy run-down apartments, renovate them room by room, choose who moves in, and then deal with what they do: noise complaints, angry neighbours, police turning up, the occasional profitable flip. Its Steam page frames the whole thing as a real-estate career with an interior-decorating layer bolted on. It is Windows only. Our roundup of games like The Tenants goes further down this branch, and if what you are after is the restoration work itself, down to holding the tools, our list of games where you manage a building covers that side of it properly.
Rung 5: the cozy end
Minami Lane
Minami Lane is the shortest game here and the one that asks least of you. You build one short Japanese-inspired street, stock the ramen shop and the boba cafe, set prices, then watch villagers walk it and tell you what they thought. Its Steam page advertises 2 to 4 hours of play and then lists what the game does not offer, hardcore strategy and new levels after release included. If that is the size you want, our list of games like Minami Lane has more of them.
Hotel Galactic
Hotel Galactic is a hotel manager with the accounting turned down and the guests turned up, and it is the pick if you want the cozy end without giving up a hotel to run. You settle a floating island called Imoshima, build bedrooms, dining rooms, arcades and a spa, and tailor each room to a traveller whose backstory tells you what they need, in a hand-drawn style its Steam page traces to Japanese animation. That same page carries the Early Access label, so what you buy today is an unfinished build. Both its developer credit and the one on The Tenants read EndGameLoop Games, which is why the two games spend their attention on the same thing: who is in the room, and what that person needs.
A branch off the ladder: Rise of Industry
Rise of Industry is Project Highrise’s supply chain with the building taken away, and it is the one to take if the logistics were the part you liked. Its Steam page drops you into a procedurally generated 1930s map where you gather raw materials, run them through factories into over 150 finished products, and haul the result to towns that grow as you feed them. It sits off the ladder for one reason: there is no interior to lay out, so on the axis that sorts the rungs above it scores nothing. Kasedo Games published both this and Project Highrise, which is worth knowing when you are working out who it was built for. Its Steam score is also the weakest of the checked figures in the table above.
Where our own game sits beside this ladder
Our debut, Grandma Left Me a Building, sits next to this ladder rather than on it. It is a cozy 2D apartment management sim where you restore the run-down building your grandmother left you, find tenants, collect rent, hire staff and upgrade the place. Tenants have traits that decide how they get along with the neighbours you put them next to, and tenant happiness drives what the building earns, so the placement decision is the one the game keeps handing back to you. One line on its feature list reads “No time pressure, plan at your own pace”. It is unreleased, coming to Windows and macOS, so there are no scores or sales to point at yet. Its store page carries the feature list.
What none of these replace
Nothing here reproduces Project Highrise’s office-service loop at full strength. Project Hospital runs deeper systems across a flat hospital floor plan. Software Inc. runs the closest thing to the same loop, in a building with one occupant and a ten-floor ceiling. Mad Tower Tycoon rebuilds the tower and runs a thinner simulation inside it. Below rung two the games trade simulation depth for readability, on purpose. Project Highrise also still ships Steam Workshop support and, per its Wikipedia entry, five DLC packs, so the game you already own has more left in it than this ladder suggests.
If you are here because you want the tower on a phone, at a tap-along scale, that is a different branch: games like Tiny Tower. And if the building matters more to you than the height, the apartment and building management roundup is the wider hub.
Quick answers
Is Project Highrise still worth buying today? Yes. Nothing on this list reproduces its office-service loop at that depth, it ships Steam Workshop support, and its Wikipedia entry lists five DLC packs on top of the base game.
Is there a modern SimTower remake on Steam? No. The nearest things are Mad Tower Tycoon, which brings back elevator tuning and a star award, and Project Highrise itself, which Wikipedia records as SimTower’s spiritual successor.
How many of these games run on macOS? Six of the nine recommendations list macOS in the platform column above. Hotel Architect, The Tenants and Hotel Galactic are the Windows-only three.
Can I play any of them with a friend? One of the nine. Software Inc. carries Co-op and PvP among its Steam categories, and its store page offers up to three other players on the same map, either competing with you or splitting the work with you. The other eight list Single-player and carry no co-op or multiplayer category at all.
