There's a famous scene in 'The Simpsons' where Bart Simpson, sporting a ponytail, taunts a graduate student with "Look at me, I'm a grad student! I made $600 last year!" to which Marge Simpson replies, "Bart, don't make fun of grad students. They've made poor choices." before walloping him with her purse. This spawned the 'mocking grad students' meme. While the path of a graduate student involves enduring hardship for a better future, this humour arose due to excessive research demands, the tyranny of some supervisors, and lingering absurdities in the system.

Indeed, the daily lives of graduate students in certain fields are so challenging that 'tough' barely scratches the surface. Under the guise of being at the forefront of knowledge, they often find their youth mortgaged to the absolute rulers known as supervisors, confined to labs for less than minimum wage. Today, we've gathered games that intensely simulate the tear-jerking plight of the graduate student. We offer our condolences (?) to all graduate students nationwide as we explore the TOP 5 Grad Student Games.

The title alone is enough to make you gasp. This game brutally skewers the reality of graduate students who are not only underpaid but also subjected to such harsh treatment that even basic human needs are a struggle. After all, one needs to eat to pursue truth, right? To earn enough for the bare necessities, the protagonist must take on a technical support role at a call centre for an unnamed (yet suspiciously familiar) corporation. The noble intellect that should be honed in graduate studies is instead channelled into the emotional labour of dealing with infuriating customers.

Working at the call centre gradually corrupts the protagonist into a shallow, unethical agent. Instead of solving customer issues, they become a monster focused solely on hitting targets by passing customers around. It's a black comedy that illustrates how systemic poverty can destroy one's innate passion for research and morality. The reason this game ranks fifth is that the graduate student here at least has the time to hold down a part-time job.

Developed by the one-man studio Bamsem Games, Graduater is a brutally difficult hardcore platformer, often compared to games like 'Getting Over It' or 'Jump King'. Players embody a graduate student who, after surviving exams, enters the lab to scale the treacherous mountain known as 'graduation'. The key lies in the controls. Instead of the familiar WASD, you navigate an electric unicycle with the ASDF keys, managing a sensitive acceleration system. This is a masterful translation of the pressure from meticulous thesis formatting and experimental equipment demanding zero error margins into gameplay.

This game is reportedly based on some real-life experiences. The mid-boss, 'Professor Sign', is modelled after the developer's own university professor, and the protagonist reflects the developer himself. The game's introductory video even includes the tongue-in-cheek line, 'If the game fails, I'll have to go to graduate school.' Perhaps because it was born out of a sense of urgency after observing countless graduate students around him, rather than just a meme, the game feels remarkably real.

Set to release on Steam, this game is a simulation adventure dealing with the psychological breakdown experienced during a two-year Master's program. Throughout the Master's course, players must juggle experiments, conference presentations, job hunting, and thesis writing. Various disruptive events constantly occur, and excessive lab work relentlessly grinds down the character's body and mind. The realistic depiction of chronic sleep deprivation after a few nights of overtime, and falling into alcoholism while trying to relieve stress, is all too familiar.

Failure to manage the stats can lead to a critical point, plunging the player into severe depression and madness. What awaits is not just a delayed graduation but the ruin of one's humanity. Dropping out or going missing are minor concerns; the worst-case scenario leads to a catastrophic outcome. It's expected to chillingly and starkly expose the mental collapse and mental health crisis of Master's students within higher education, driven by blind competition.

This game is an idle academic management simulation where you play as a newly appointed professor (or adjunct lecturer) climbing the power ladder, not as a graduate student. Of course, becoming a full professor requires grinding down countless graduate students. In this game, students are not individual beings but mere disposable commodities valued solely for their labour efficiency. Doctoral students are prone to depression spikes due to fragile mental states, while Master's students fall into a 'slacking off' status that raises one's blood pressure. Yet, the professor (player) wields absolute power to exploit them.

You can demonstrate the utmost villainy by threatening their survival by reducing scholarship funds, stealing first authorship on papers, and even legally prohibiting personal relationships. For students in a slump, you can wield the 'iron fist of academia' by imposing a 'graduation delay' penalty, permanently binding them to the lab. The addition of a feature in the full version to re-summon graduated Master's students for unpaid labour is truly beyond even Satan's imagination. The PTSD of graduate students seems to emanate from the screen.

This text-based survival game was created by a University of Washington alumnus to commemorate (?) his own arduous doctoral journey. As such, it goes beyond a mere depiction of a pitiable graduate student, accurately portraying the daily life in a lab. Experiments where perfect hypotheses are subject to the random chance of a dice roll, or absurd experimental results and meaningless menial tasks – these are details that only someone who has personally experienced them could describe.

Upon admission, the 'Hope' stat is at a full 100, but as one lives the life of a graduate student, this number plummets uncontrollably. Conference presentations merely chip away at motivation, and the professor reminds you of a mountain of tasks via email. If you try to sneak in some sightseeing during a conference to avoid burnout, encountering the 'Run-in with Supervisor' event sends your Hope stat plummeting. According to actual graduate student players, maintaining a Hope score above 50 in the game is virtually impossible, and you're left to endure 5-7 years in a soul-crushed zombie state. This game perfectly captures the cruelty of the graduate school ecosystem, which cannot be overcome by individual effort, earning it the number one spot.