Graduated

Graduated is a life simulation RPG where players abandon their corporate city life to start anew in a peaceful seaside town. You can choose from various jobs like town salesperson, farmer, diver, or fisherman to earn a living, gradually acquiring a home, vehicle, and relationships. The game emphasizes managing your health, mood, and energy while building skills, making friends, and eventually investing for financial freedom. Once established, you can explore deep-sea adventures for hidden secrets and wealth, all while enjoying the relaxed pace of small-town life.

Graduated: Review

In the vast and ever-expanding library of life simulation games, few titles arrive with as much quiet ambition and subsequent enigmatic disappearance as Graduated. Developed by Love7 and published by BD Games, this 2022 release promised a poignant blend of rural escapism, economic struggle, and personal growth, set against the backdrop of a sleepy seaside town. It is a game that speaks directly to a generation grappling with burnout and the search for meaning, yet its own story is one of unfulfilled potential and digital ghosting. This review seeks to excavate the brief, flickering existence of Graduated, analyzing its proposed vision against the stark reality of its troubled release and the silence that followed.

Development History & Context

The Studio and The Vision

Love7, the developer behind Graduated, remains a deeply enigmatic entity. In an industry increasingly dominated by either massive corporate studios or highly visible indie darlings, Love7 operated with notable opacity. The game was published by BD Games, which appears to be linked to Bento Duck Games based on the community information in the official description. This connection suggests a small, perhaps nascent, studio operation.

The vision for Graduated, as articulated in its extensive Steam description, was remarkably ambitious. It aimed to be more than a simple farming sim or life manager; it positioned itself as a gritty, systemic “art of life.” The developers sought to create a experience that mirrored the real-world anxieties of modern young adulthood: the pressure to achieve financial freedom, the importance of managing physical and mental health (through systems tracking stomach, mood, and energy to avoid “chronic diseases”), and the complex social navigation required to build a support network. This was a game that wanted to acknowledge the struggle before allowing the player to enjoy the peace.

Technological Constraints and The Gaming Landscape

Built in the ubiquitous Unity engine, Graduated opted for a 2D side-scrolling visual style. This choice placed it in a interesting space technologically. It was not attempting the 3D fidelity of something like My Time at Portia, nor the pristine pixel art of Stardew Valley. Its 2D scrolling perspective suggested a focus on accessibility and perhaps a smaller team size, leveraging a well-established engine to build a complex web of interlocking systems—from job simulation to property investment and deep-sea diving.

It was released on July 29, 2022, into a market hungry for life sims. The colossal success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons had recently reaffirmed the genre’s mass appeal, and a wave of indie titles like Coral Island and Roots of Pacha were in development, promising deeper narratives and more refined mechanics. Graduated’s differentiator was its purported focus on the grind—the unglamorous work required to build a life, a theme that resonated with a post-pandemic audience re-evaluating their life choices.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

Plot and Characters

The narrative premise is immediately relatable: the player character abandons a stifling white-collar job in a big city to follow friends to the small, beautiful seaside town of Lihua Bay. This setup taps into a powerful modern fantasy of rural flight and simplification.

The game’s story was not a linear plot but an emergent narrative dictated by player choice and systemic interaction. The walkthrough document sourced from Scribd, which outlines 50 in-game days of specific locations and conversation choices, reveals a structure akin to a visual novel layered on top of the simulation. Players were meant to cultivate relationships with townsfolk, where making the “correct” dialogue choices would unlock further story content and, as the description notes, “bring unexpected surprises to your life.” The promise was that these social fetters were not just cosmetic; they were mechanical necessities that could provide critical support, making the theme of community integral to survival and success.

Underlying Themes

Thematically, Graduated is rich with potential. Its very title is a double entendre: it refers both to the player character’s recent college graduation and the ultimate goal of “graduating” from a life of financial struggle to one of freedom.

• The Anxiety of Choice: The game repeatedly emphasizes that “choice is more important than hard work.” This is a profound and somewhat cynical thesis, suggesting that skill development and strategic decisions in how one spends their time (e.g., choosing which job to pursue) hold more weight than mere grinding.
• The Illusion of Escape: Even in a peaceful town, the pressures of capitalism remain. You must work jobs—as a salesperson, food deliverer, or taxi driver—to stave off want. The game doesn’t promise an escape from work; it promises the chance to do different work toward a self-directed goal.
• Holistic Well-being: By tracking metrics like stomach content, mood, and energy, the game argues for a holistic approach to life. Neglecting any aspect could lead to “chronic diseases,” a mechanic that mirrors real-world concerns about burnout and health management. It’s a system that encourages balance over min-maxing.
• The Endgame of Capitalism: The final phase of the game shifts from labor to investment—playing the stock market, engaging in real estate speculation (“buying low and selling high”), and becoming a landlord. This progression is a stark, almost satirical commentary on the prescribed path to “financial freedom.”

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Core Gameplay Loop

The proposed core loop was a tight cycle of management and progression:
1. Work: Perform jobs to earn immediate capital.
2. Sustain: Manage your character’s health, energy, and mood through food, sleep, and entertainment.
3. Improve: Invest earnings into skills, better tools, a vehicle, or home furnishings to improve efficiency and well-being.
4. Socialize: Build relationships to unlock bonuses and narrative depth.
5. Invest: Once sufficient capital is accrued, shift from active income to passive income through stocks and property.

This loop is compelling on paper, aiming to simulate the slow, often painful crawl from subsistence living to economic stability.

Innovative and Flawed Systems

The most innovative system was the focus on health management. The threat of “chronic diseases” from neglect adds a layer of persistent stakes missing from more idyllic sims. The inclusion of a full economic simulation with stock markets and property flipping is also unusually complex for the genre.

However, the potential for flaw is inherent in this ambition. Without exquisite balancing, such systems could easily feel punitive rather than challenging. The walkthrough suggests a rigid, almost prescriptive path to success (e.g., “visit X location at Y time and say Z”), which could undermine the game’s promise of meaningful choice. The sheer number of systems—farming, diving, fishing, driving, investing, socializing—risks making the game a mile wide and an inch deep, with none of the mechanics receiving the polish required to stand out.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Setting and Atmosphere

The setting of Lihua Bay is a classic, effective one for the genre: a small seaside town. This environment promises a relaxed atmosphere juxtaposed with the player’s self-imposed drive. The description paints a picture of a friendly, peaceful community, serving as the tranquil backdrop against which the player’s personal struggle for progress plays out.

Visual and Sound Direction

With its 2D side-scrolling perspective, the game likely presented a visually simpler experience than its top-down or isometric peers. Art direction would have been paramount to create a distinct identity, though no screenshots are available to judge its success. The sound design would have carried immense weight in selling the atmosphere—the crash of waves, the quiet hum of the town, the distinct sounds of different jobs—to immerse the player in the daily rhythm of life in Lihua Bay. The absence of this media makes it impossible to evaluate the execution, leaving only the promise of what could have been.

Reception & Legacy

Critical and Commercial Reception

The most defining characteristic of Graduated‘s reception is its absence. As evidenced by the MobyGames and Metacritic pages, the game garnered no critic reviews and no user reviews. This is highly unusual and points to a catastrophic failure in visibility, marketing, or distribution.

The smoking gun is found on the Steam Community forums. A user’s post from May 2023 asks, “Is this game still available? I can not see the game in Steam store.” This confirms that at some point between its July 2022 release and May 2023, Graduated was pulled from digital storefronts. The MobyGames entry also lists it under the group “Games pulled from digital storefronts.”

Its legacy, therefore, is not one of influence or cultural impact, but of caution. It serves as a stark case study in the challenges facing small indie developers. A game can have a compelling premise, ambitious systems, and a relatable theme, but if it cannot achieve a stable launch and maintain a storefront presence, it effectively ceases to exist. It becomes a digital ghost, known only through archived descriptions and walkthroughs.

Conclusion

Graduated is a fascinating artifact of what might have been. Its design documents reveal a game of profound ambition that sought to refine the life simulation genre with a grittier, more systemic, and economically realistic take on the “start over in a small town” fantasy. Its themes of anxiety, choice, and the relentless pursuit of stability are more relevant than ever.

Yet, a review must ultimately judge what is, not what was intended. And what is is a void. The game’s removal from sale and its total lack of critical engagement render it a non-entity in the gaming landscape. Its potential remains forever unproven, its systems unjudged, and its narrative unexplored by the public.

The final, definitive verdict on Graduated is that it is a poignant but ultimately tragic piece of video game history. It is a lesson that in the modern digital marketplace, a game’s existence is as fragile as the servers it’s hosted on. For all its talk of avoiding “chronic diseases,” the game itself succumbed to a fatal one: obscurity. It is a title that, much like the life it simulated, was defined not by its dreams, but by its struggle—a struggle it ultimately lost.