It's good. It is indeed even worse than life, at least from my experience on a restricted income. At one point I had to choose to pay one of two bills, gas or electric, and I chose to pay the gas because I know (from experience) that electric companies are really slow and really reluctant to cut you off, and are super willing to work with you, and I think fairly regulated as to keeping shutoff as a last resort. But the game cut me off immediately.

Also, my car got repo'ed on just Day 22.

It's a great game for delivering some very much true learning points about low income life.

At one of my jobs, we ran a simulation for kids on homelessness. It was sort of similar - the game began with everyone homeless, and we gave them character cards with different reasons why, which illustrated that it's not usually just a single problem that causes homelessness, but a few negative events or conditions occurring at once in a household has no cushion of resilience, monetarily (illness is one of the top ones; mental illness, illness of a family member, other medical problems) and the kids then had to run around to various locations to acquire services and try to get a job. We made sure to spread out the shelter, the aid offices, the food pantry, the soup kitchen, and the job office so as to require long timewasting walks between them. We also had long, inscrutable forms for them to fill out, and, in character, would harangue them if they didn't have the proper documentation or ID. It was depressing for the kids, but a good eye-opener about why it's difficult to recover from homelessness.

Wow. I've had to live for a month on a couple of pounds of cheese, with some stale bread that I got half price and some veggies that my house-mate donated, to manage the rent + gas to get to work. But I didn't have to contend with the exploitation that inner-city workers have to deal with in the USA. Plus, the UK Government regulates usury carefully, so you can always get a reasonable credit rate if you have a job. Which of course is the problem here. People are squeezed at both ends.
I ran out of cash on day 9... I'm off to donate to Project Home.

It was pretty extreme — I mean, my landlord raised the rent with no notice and "report him the Landlord and Tenant Board" wasn't an option, I had chest pains, my pet got sick, my kid was failing math (and helping him myself wasn't an option), I forgot to take my lunch to work, I had bills I couldn't pay, I got fired for talking to co-workers who were trying to organize a union, and some other stuff I can're remember now all in one week.

I lived well below the poverty line for basically the entire nineties and it was never like that. Though I didn't have a pet or a kid, I was healthy with access to universal medical care and there were rent control and employment laws. Canada is a much better place to be poor.

Ugh, that was depressing. The worst part was letting my pet suffer. That bothered me more than leaving my kid home alone, lol.

I took the warehouse job because I knew I had the back for it. So much for realism.

how'd you guys get a pet? they didn't give me one, or chest pains either...I played it twice, and the exact same bad things happened to me. God, it IS like real life!!!!!

I enjoyed this, but yes it's as bad as the game of Life is optimistic.

I'ma gonna call foul on the temp job part. I was a successful (?) temp for years and have zero typing skills. I have computer skills, front desk experience, and can operate a PBX switchboard, so poor typing isn't an automatic dis-qualifier for temping. You make more money if you can type, but you can still get a job is you can't.

I just realized that one simple change in detail would have made the game just a bit more believable: running the gametime as weeks or months instead of days. It's implausible that things would pile up so swiftly and serious actions would take place so fast. I don't nitpick because I think the game is bad, because it is actually a pretty good window into the one-two punch that shortage funds will create in someone's life, but because I would wish a game with a point like this isn't something a scoffer could easily dismiss.

Yeah I made it through the month relatively ok (I didn't get a pet, I did get tutoring for my kid) and had some money left but I wanted the game to go on longer so instead of just "surprise! you have credit card debt" I actually had to go into that debt myself and deal with it.
I like this game though.
It reminds me of a tragedy of the commons-style game we played in an environmental science class where groups of students were all fishing companies trying to maximize their own profits while not wiping out the fish and saving up for new boats etc.