Pelham Row: Certificate of Occupancy

Pelham Row is a normal building. Certified structurally sound this year and every year. After all, it is good for those wanting to be normal to live in a normal place.

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Pelham Row is a life sim about sixteen flats and the people who are provisionally living in them.

Your residents are applicants. They applied to be people and were approved pending review. This desire is not malicious: they are bright-eyed, curious, and impossibly earnest, and they are trying very hard.

You are the manager. You decide what they call you.

The Personhood File

Each applicant holds a file of 24 items across five categories: Preference, Interior Life, Bodily Habit, Conduct with Others, and Prior Existence. They are not difficult things.

Has a favourite colour.
Knows one joke.
Can be sad about something small.
Can want something she cannot have.

They practise one area a day and bring you what they came up with. Some of it is right. Some of it is almost right, in ways that are hard to put your finger on and harder to mark down. Whether an answer earns its tick is your call and nobody else's.

Eight hours and too much to do

Sit with someone through a bad afternoon, or get the filing done. Answer the door, or don't. Somebody will knock while you are mid-task, and what they want is rarely on the schedule.

Reviews and Renewal

Every fortnight each file comes up for review. An applicant who has done enough graduates. They leave with their certificate, and something they would like you to keep. One who hasn't is reverted: sent back to the beginning of themselves, with everything they had worked out gone.

Relationships and Convergence

Residents form friendships. Some of them fall in love. And residents who spend enough time together start to have things in common: a turn of phrase, a favourite food, a middle name. Which is sweet, until you notice how far it has gone, and have to decide whether to do anything about it.

Kindness and Strictness

Every decision has a warm version and an efficient one. You can be careful with these people or you can treat it as a job. They notice which you chose, they remember it, and they tell each other.

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• Plays in the browser or as a downloadable .zip.
• Saves to your browser, with export and import if you want to keep a building somewhere safer.
• An optional content layer acknowledges that some residents' relationships are intimate. It is off by default, and the game asks once, at the start.
• Text scaling, AA contrast throughout, and no tiny type.
• Three different card layouts to try: Compact, Comfortable, and Wide.
• A clock-free mode, if spending hours isn't the part you want.
• Bring your own portraits, or use the ones included.
• Unfortunately not very good for mobile, even after looking for ways to optimize it. Apologies!

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This game was created with a lot of assistance from Claude Opus 5, guided through adding new elements and playtesting by yours truly! The included portraits were generated with NovelAI's 4.5 model at very low prompt strength, in order to evoke the oddness of early image generation. We hope you enjoy!