BitLife - Life Simulator

My first BitLife character was Joey Hooper, a baby boy born in Tucson to a hairdresser mom and a wedding planner dad, conceived in a park on a picnic blanket, with a family cat named Aldo waiting at home. That's the whole idea of this game: a life told one year at a time in short diary lines, and you decide where it goes.

What made me stop wasn't the writing, though. Joey hadn't even learned to walk and the top of the screen already carried a gold Become a BITIZEN button, a Marketplace button sat next to Age, and his bank balance read $0. Most of the toys this game is famous for, from God Mode to Boss Mode, are paid packs.

So I played it through VipMod with every pack unlocked, the golden items in my pocket and a bank balance held at $1 Billion, and then I went shopping for islands to see if the money would hold. Below is how a life plays out, where the game asks for your wallet, and what the mod really changes.

One green button, one year of your life

The main screen is a diary. Your name, your job and your bank balance sit at the top, the story of each year runs down the middle, and four bars at the bottom track Happiness, Health, Smarts and Looks. Baby Joey started out 81% happy and 12% smart, which felt fair for a newborn.

Everything turns on the big green Age button. Each tap moves you forward one year and adds a few lines to the diary, and every so often a popup stops the clock and asks how your character reacts. If all you want is adulthood, you can keep tapping and let the childhood years roll past.

Around that button sit four tabs that let you act instead of just watching: Occupation (it reads Infant while you're a baby), Assets, Relationships and Activities. A good life comes from mixing the two, letting time run and stepping in when something worth doing turns up.

The diary writes jokes you didn't plan

The part I enjoyed most is how much happens without you. At 13 Joey began to suspect his dad was a fan of Jelly Roll, at 14 the news reported a trend in Estonia of pro athletes getting corporate logos tattooed for endorsement deals, and at 16 he failed his driving test.

Some lines come from your own choices. At 17 Joey sneezed during a school presentation and excused himself to the bathroom, and at 18, when his friend Mike Twain asked to become best friends, I had him keep things exactly as they were.

My second life went the same way. Joshua Sanchez got hired as a banker at Little Rock Savings & Loan for $68,672 a year, later got a 9.59% raise, and somewhere along the way became proud of playing Amazing Grace on two recorders with his nose.

When his friend Billy Joe asked whether he should invest in cryptocurrency, I told him to go for it. None of these moments has a right answer, and that's the point, because the stories people trade about this game come from exactly this mix of random events and your own questionable calls.

Assets, islands and a cleanup bill

Money in this game goes out through the Assets tab. Finances and Investments handle the boring side, and the rest is where you buy homes, cars and, if you can afford one, an entire island. Joshua's diary at 20 lists a 24.97-carat diamond ring for $3,773,400 and a futuristic home at 332 Cassi Cake Way for $15,080,029.

The island listings are where the numbers get silly. Life's Porpoise Island, sold as an untamed Estonian island, was a large icy plot priced at $651,101,655 with a monthly expense of $442,207, and the only button was Buy it with cash.

Buying it wasn't the end of the bill either. The next diary line says Joey spent $27,593,688 cleaning the place up, which is roughly 400 years of Joshua's banker salary. Then he bought a second one, Slippery Surface Island in the United States.

Relationships is the other half of adult life. It holds your parents, siblings and friends, and that's also where God Mode lives, since a relative's page has an Edit button for changing their name, looks and attributes.

Generations, 410 achievements and a Time Machine

When a character dies, you move on to a new life, and there's a list of 410 achievements to chase across all of them. The first time I tapped Age after the mod money landed, one called Resourceful popped up right away, before Joey could even talk.

There's a Challenge Vault on top of that, and Bitizenship advertises unlimited generations, so you can keep playing the same family line after a death. With the unlock switch on, a Time Machine button also appeared right under Age.

Where the game reaches for your wallet

The Marketplace is huge. The first thing it pushes is a Best First Purchase bundle of Bitizenship and God Mode, followed by Boss Mode, which bundles all 11 Job Packs, then Ultimate Fighter Mode, Vampire Mode, Movie Director and an A-List Director Bundle that adds Hollywood Star.

Below those come Luxury Lifestyle and Outdoor Lifestyle, the expansions (Cult, Racing, Secret Agent, Black Market and Zoo) and a row of golden items like the Golden Resume and Golden Pacifier. On Google Play in the US, each item costs anywhere from $0.99 to $89.99.

Bitizenship sums up its own pitch in one line: get rid of ads, play unlimited generations, and more. Without it, a banner ad with a red ✕ sits at the bottom of the screen and pushes the whole diary up, and a pack offer pops up when you open the game.

None of this stops you from playing a plain life. But the parts people actually talk about, like editing your mom in God Mode or running a casino, sit behind one pack or another, and you hit that wall within the first few years of a life.

What the MOD menu actually unlocks

In VipMod, a red VIP button floats on the game screen and opens the MOD menu with five switches. Play offline and No ads are free and already on, while Unlock everything, Unlock golden items and Unlimited money need VIP 1. Flip the paid ones on and a Restart to apply changes button appears, so I tapped it and let the game reload.

Unlock everything is the big one. The Marketplace now listed only two free items and a pack of Streak Savers for sale, with everything else under Owned. The Become a BITIZEN button turned into a BITIZEN badge, and Assets grew a Premium Assets section with Auction Houses, Casino, Museum, Race Car Garage and Zoo.

Then I tested God Mode for real. I opened Joey's mother, tapped Edit, and got the editor for Ashley Hooper, a 35-year-old woman, with her name, appearance and attributes all open to change and no checkout screen in between.

With both unlock switches on, Joey graduated high school at 18 and used a Golden Diploma to get a graduate degree from medical school on the spot. The Golden Resume then opened a list of qualified jobs that started at Psychiatrist for $145,704 a year and ran through plastic surgeon and brain surgeon, all for a kid who'd just left school.

Unlimited money took my balance from $0 to $1 Billion. I bought Life's Porpoise Island for $651 million and the balance still read $1 Billion. Then I turned the switch off mid-session, and the island cleanup took Joey down to $972,406,312. I switched it back on, bought Slippery Surface Island for $56,357,775, and the bank went straight back to an even billion.

A few things to know up front:

• Aging up still takes a small bite for living costs each year, but the next thing you buy puts the balance right back at a billion.
• The billion works as a ceiling too, so my banker's salary and the yearly bonus from a Golden Neko Statue never stacked on top of it.
• If a screen was already open when you flipped a switch, back out of it and open it again to see the change.
• The unlocks aren't bought on your BitLife account, so once you turn Unlock everything off the packs show up for sale again.

I tried No ads with the internet on. With the switch on there was no banner at all, and when I turned it off and reopened the game, the banner and its red ✕ came right back at the bottom of the screen.

How it feels to actually play

The best thing here is the sheer number of situations. Two lives gave me a failed driving test, an Estonian tattoo trend, a recorder solo played with a nose and a pair of islands, and every choice nudges the bars in a way that makes you want to try the opposite next time.

The weak spot is that it's a reading game first. The whole thing is text in English, and it stays in English even on a phone set to another language, so if long diary pages bore you, the jokes will slide past. The pack offers popping up at launch also get old quickly.

Play offline cuts the game off from the internet completely, and I still aged a character to 22, bought houses and islands and used God Mode with it on. You only need to switch it off to sign in to a BitLife account or browse the BitLife Community.

On Google Play the game holds 4.4 stars from about 1.3 million ratings and more than 50 million downloads, with a Mature 17+ rating. That rating makes sense once you've seen a few diary pages, because the humor doesn't hold back.

So who should download it

If you like text games, absurd stories and seeing how far one bad decision can take a character, this one packs a surprising amount into a screen full of text. Every tap is a whole year, and almost every year adds something new to the diary.

And if you played once, reached 18 and gave up because every fun option asked for Bitizenship, God Mode or an expansion pack, the mod fixes exactly that. With the shop unlocked and a billion in the bank, you get to spend your time on what the game does best, which is inventing a different life every round.