In the app stores BeMatrx is listed as a life sim, and that's a fair place to start. You pick a career, settle in a city, earn a salary and pay rent. The difference is that you don't live there alone. Other players have picked the same city, and their days carry on after you put your phone down.
What a life sim usually is
Life simulation games have been around for decades, and most people know the shape: you guide one life from choice to choice and the game answers. Text-based life simulators made the format very fast. You can live through a whole life in an afternoon, on your own, at your own pace. People love that, and it's a good format.
BeMatrx keeps the parts that make a life sim work: a career, money, a home, small decisions that add up. What it changes is time and company. Days pass at the pace of real days, and you share your city with other players.
Two choices you make at the start
When you create your character you pick one of 12 careers, from Doctor and Pilot to Chef and Musician, and one of 90 cities in 54 countries to live in. Both choices stay. You can't switch careers later, and your home stays in the city you picked, though you can travel to others. It makes the first five minutes count for more than they do in most apps.
Your career decides a lot after that: which jobs you can apply for, which skills you can learn, and how high each of your stats can go. A Pilot's main stat is Intelligence, a Chef's is Physical, a Musician's is Influence.
Salary, rent and where you sleep
You find work at the Job Center in your city, and you only see jobs in your own career. The salary is paid in BeCoin, the in-app currency, on the 1st of each month, in the morning by your home city's time. Rent is charged the same day, for the month ahead.
A home isn't required, but it changes how your days end. Every night your character sleeps somewhere: at home, in a hotel for 90 BeCoin, in transit if you were travelling, or on the street if there was nowhere else. Where you slept decides how much stamina you wake up with, and a notification tells you each morning.
Nothing here unlocks step by step. Everything that's switched on is open from your first day. A few actions have their own requirement; a loan, for example, needs level 10.
The city keeps going while you're away
This is the part that's hardest to explain until you've seen it. When you close the app, your city doesn't pause. Salaries arrive and rents leave on the 1st. Other players post, go to work and send messages. When you open the app again, a few things have changed while you were gone.
Each city also has a few things of its own. A named street animal lives at every city's landmark, usually a cat, sometimes a dog, and in the app you can go and feed it or give it a pet. The city page shows its own clock and a Founders' Wall with the number of every founder seat taken. On the website there's a Landmark of the Day: a historic place, six guesses to find which of the 90 cities it's in, no sign-in needed.
Who you meet
Because other players live in the same cities, the social side works more like a small town than a game lobby. You message people, react to what they post and run into them at the same venues. Signing up doesn't ask for your real name, and your avatar can be a generated face instead of your photo. Your feed shows posts from the people you follow, newest first, and no ranking algorithm decides the order. I wrote about why in a separate post.
Is it a game?
Not in the usual sense. There's no ending to reach and nobody to beat. Your character grows through what you actually do: the work you put in, the skills you learn, the people who'd notice if you went quiet for a week. If you're looking for games like the text-based life simulators you already know, BeMatrx will feel slower and more social. If you want a life sim whose choices land in a world other people share, that's what it is.
BeMatrx is free on the App Store and Google Play for anyone aged 18 or over, with no invite code and no waiting list. The longer idea behind it is in What Is a Living World?
