18-year-old Romanian student Claudiu Kiss managed to hit it big when his indie title PC Building Simulator managed to become a viral hit on Itch.io. After managing to acquire a sizable audience, Kiss decided to expand his horizons by porting the game over to Steam for everyone to enjoy starting this fall.
PC Building Simulator isn’t like a lot of those other meme simulators out there. This is the sort of program that you would classify as edutainment. It’s fun insofar that you get to take real life computer components and parts and attach them together like a Lego set, and then boot up your PC to see if it works.
The simple enough design affords for players to completely experiment with the custom PC design process while actually teaching gamers about building a real life custom-built desktop computer. You can get an idea of what the gameplay and simulated assembly process is like with the Steam trailer below.
The game managed more than 350,000 demo downloads while on Itch.io, so Kiss felt it was fairly important to expand upon that success and bring the edutainment title to a much broader audience.
PC Building Simulator allows you to pick and choose from a wide variety of different parts, including CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, hard drives, cables, thermal paste and standoffs.
Now this sim is no walk in the park. You will have to deal with incompatibility, hardware failure, short circuits, overloads, and all the other hiccups and heartaches that come with building a custom PC. But once you find a decent build you can then power up your PC, give it a benchmarking test-run and see if all the hardware components work as intended.
Of course, the best part about it is that no matter how much in-game money you spend to build your perfect gaming rig, you don’t have to worry about spending a dime of real life cash.
I think this is probably one of the most important and useful sims to come out in a long time. A lot of people still fear the perceived daunting task of building their own custom built PC, but it’s really not as scary as it was back in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Things have become a lot more streamlined and easy, unless of course you’re into the whole liquid piping thing, which can get a little bit more complex than the standard builds.
Even still, it’s cool to see a new sim coming out that can hopefully be used to dispel some of the myths that continue to perpetuate thanks to insecure console fanboys and uneducated game journalists.
You can learn more about PC Building Simulator by visiting the Steam store page.
