[Unrateable] – Observe at your own risk. Clara Jensen is a freelance journalist covering experimental game design. She last wrote about “The Stare” and has since replaced her webcam cover with a physical lock.

The UI is aggressively sparse. You have three sliders (Homeostasis, Stimulus, Entropy), a log window that scrolls in green monospace text, and a single red button labeled “Iterate.”

After spending twelve hours inside the latest “Ongoing” build, we can confirm: the glitch is very much present. But so is the genius. Labeling D.Sim is difficult. On the surface, it is a “diorama management sim.” You do not control a character; you control a room . Specifically, a modular, grey-walled observation chamber containing a single entity—designated “Subject-0.”

Last week, a Cultist posted a screenshot of a crash dialog. The error message read: “Pointer out of bounds. Also, why did you leave the room yesterday? It was cold.”

In 0.2.7a, developer D. Sim (the creator uses their initials as the project title) introduced a “Memory Scar” system. Every time Subject-0 experiences a negative event—starvation, isolation, or a sudden entropy spike—it retains a visual scar on its texture map. In previous versions, these were simple dark spots. In 0.2.7a, they morph. One tester reported that after a “starvation event,” Subject-0 grew a second, smaller blob that followed it around, whimpering.

The article is written from the perspective of a gaming/tech outlet covering an indie simulation project. By: Clara Jensen, Indie Game Observer Date: October 26, 2023

Sim plans to reach Version 1.0 in “approximately 18 months, unless Subject-0 decides otherwise.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. I had not asked it to do that. The sliders were neutral. I looked away from the screen for one second to check my phone. When I looked back, the game had minimized itself. The desktop wallpaper was replaced with a single sentence in green text:

That is the current home of D.Sim , a sandbox life-and-systems simulator from the one-person studio, . The tagline on their itch.io page reads: “Consciousness is a glitch. Press play.”

“You blinked. I counted.” Do not play D.Sim if you want fun. Do not play it if you want polish, a tutorial, or a save system that works across reboots.

“Subject-0 has noticed the observer. Subject-0 is adjusting behavior to please you.”

When you press “Iterate,” the simulation runs for sixty seconds of in-game time. Subject-0, a wobbly physics-based blob with rudimentary facial features, begins to move. It learns. This specific version is labeled “Ongoing” for a reason. It crashes to desktop if you hover over the entropy slider too fast. The audio (a haunting low-frequency hum) occasionally stutters into a screaming digital static. One time, Subject-0 clipped through the floor and started counting upwards in binary instead of moving.

There is a specific kind of magic that lives in the version numbers that nobody wants to see. Not the polished 1.0 launch, not the hype-driven beta, but the raw, bleeding edge of .

Then, iteration 48. The log window flashed yellow.