I have a massive obsession with sandbox job simulator type games, you know the type of games where you can slap a YouTube playlist on your second monitor while you perform menial tasks on the other monitor inside whatever world is being simulated, it’s relaxing, and also lets me put a dent in my never ending ‘watch later’ playlist. I suspect it also might be some type of major mental illness on my behalf, I sit there for hours managing businesses, performing tasks and dealing with virtual customers, yet I don’t get paid a single cent for it, working from home is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Naturally when I had a chance to check out Waterpark Simulator, a game that requires building a waterpark, looking after customers and managing a business my ears perked up, this was right up my alley. Developed and published by Cayplay released into early access on Steam in August 2025 and is described as a simulator where you build and run your own waterpark where you can design slides, manage staff and fully design and customise your very own waterpark and turn total madness into a five-star business empire.

For an early access simulator game, which are quite frankly known for hall of fame levels of ‘jank’, I was quite impressed with how polished Waterpark Simulator is, you boot into the game and name your waterpark and are then presented with a quick tutorial showing you the ins and outs of how to serve customers, maintain your waterpark and also how to build new attractions., after around ten minutes learning the basics you are then left to your own devices on a journey to build your own business empire.

The basic gameplay loop is the same as most other simulator games, you build attractions to attract people to your waterpark and then sell them tickets to enter, the higher rated your park the more you can charge to enter, with the ultimate goal of having your park reach a five-star level rating. You gain star ranking by building up your park and completing various tasks that the game throws at you such as building a specific number of pools or ejecting customers that haven’t paid from your park. The work doesn’t stop once people enter your park though, things will start to get dirty, trash will pile up, rides will break and people will also want snacks and drinks and it is up to you to make sure your punters leave happy.

Once you have installed some attractions and upgraded the capacity of your park things will start to get hectic and you will find yourself rushing around cleaning up trash, repairing pools and slides and serving customers, thankfully for each of these tasks that you complete you receive experience which leads to research points that you can use to spend on better attractions, decorations and staff training. Speaking of staff, once your park reaches above a capacity of around 15 then staff become absolutely essential otherwise you will be overwhelmed with tasks to complete and not enough time to do them, which will lead to bad reviews from your customers.

I had a blast playing Waterpark Simulator, for an early access game it is extremely polished and the roadmap for the coming updates to the game look extremely promising, I spent around 20 hours in the game before I started reaching the end of its current content and if you are into these type of simulator games I recommend you give this a try!

The access for this review was provided by Cayplay, with the game now available in early access on Steam