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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Keeping Up
Nice Try Studios · Published by Nice Try Studios · Official site ↗
2 user reviews — 100% positive (2 reviews) · 30 achievements
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
Three jobs. One life. Zero savings. A satirical British life sim, spiritual successor to Jones in the Fast Lane. Move your marble token around a city of 16 buildings. Take jobs, study, eat, save, and dodge the weekly Algorithm. See how far you can climb!
£7.99
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Price history
Indie, Simulation, Strategy, Early Access · 2026 · More £5 - £15 games
About this game

Three jobs. One life. Zero savings.
Keeping Up is a satirical British life sim, a spiritual successor to the 1991 classic Jones in the Fast Lane. Move your marble token around a 16-building city. Work the till at McSking Guys or pull a graveyard shift at GMW Vehicle Factory. Study for a degree at a university or upskill online with a digital online course. Eat from CheapCo or splash out at Tate Rose. Save your money, invest, gamble. Upgrade your whip from banger to beast! Check out the latest news, dodge the Algorithm, and try to come out ahead.
Features
A city of 16 buildings, each with its own characters and bespoke pixel-art faces. Pick where you live, where you work, where you study, where you eat.
Real jobs at real employers. Climb the ladder at Yahoogle. Get fired from McSking Guys. Quit the factory because Jordan just walked into a corner office.
Gigs to scrape by between jobs: deliver leaflets, ride for food apps, drive courier runs. Each one gated by what you own.
A weekly newspaper with markets, weather, sports and classifieds, plus an unpredictable Algorithm that can up-end the economy for a month at a time.
An AI rival named Jordan playing the same game by the same rules. Race them to the top, or play solo and just see how far you get.
Two difficulties, hidden win conditions, and the kind of slow drip of small choices that compound into a life.
A Game About Status, Not Stats
You won't find a UI full of progress bars and percentages here. Keeping Up runs on vibes: the way a good week feels different from a bad one, the way envy creeps in, the way the dream you started with keeps quietly rewriting itself. The numbers are there. We just don't think they're the point.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
- Processor: Dual-core 2.0 GHz
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 3.3 / Vulkan 1.0 compatible (any integrated GPU from ~2015 onwards)
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Recommended
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
- Processor: Quad-core 2.5 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Any dedicated GPU with Vulkan support
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
The Seasons and Credit Update 27.07.2026
The town has discovered the calendar, the bank has discovered you, and your weekends have discovered work. This is the biggest update since launch. THE YEAR TURNS A year is fifty two weeks now, and the town knows it. Summer bakes, autumn rains, winter snows, spring blooms, and the map changes with each of them. The clock face will tell you where you are. Weather is real: rain and snow sweep the whole town on their own calendar, including storms and blizzards. Learn the rhythm. It pays. Winter bills run hotter. Heating costs money, and the council knows where you live. The seasons reach your weekends too: beer gardens, pumpkins, black ice, hay fever. THE BANK GROWS TWO NEW DESKS LOANS. Gerald will lend up to what your payslip can carry: a taster, half, or the lot. A hundred weekly payments and it is done. Spend it on anything you like. That is not advice. CRYPTO. Three coins of varying honesty: Fitcoin swings like a door in a storm, Brithereum mostly behaves, and Dodgycoin costs about a pound for a reason. The desk remembers what you bought in at, and checking on your coins means walking to the bank like everyone else. Investments now tell you what you put in versus what it is worth today. You are welcome. WEEKENDS ARE FOR HUSTLING Gig Guys now offers weekend hustles: driving, streaming, a market stall, an Etsy shop, drone photography, dog walking, private tutoring, golf days, and one deeply impractical option for Sports Car owners. One at a time, swap whenever you like. A hustle replaces your weekend. You earn instead of resting, and the comforts you have bought for your home finally earn their keep by softening the grind. Walking the dog is its own reward, plus pocket money. Stick with one, and the money grows: ratings, regulars, word of mouth. The stars take a while. They are worth it. Pay follows the calendar: driving owns the winter party run and any wet weekend, the stall owns summer and drowns in rain, tutoring booms every September. Plan accordingly. Streamin...Read full article on Community Announcements (Jeff BeZues)Patch NotesOfficial
The HR Update 12.07.2026
WORK Attendance quotas: every employer has a hidden expected shifts-per-week (scales down as pay rises). Short weeks can accumulate. Misses trigger an HR performance, get your fired etc. FINAL WARNING notices now distinguish their cause — performance strikes get their own copy instead of wrongly telling you to "show up". Job lockout: involuntarily losing a job blocks re-applying for that same role for 4 weeks. Dress codes moved from job title to workplace: Why would a Scrum Master wear a suit?!? Strain thresholds raisedv(roughly one extra shift of headroom). SURVIVAL Junk food sustains: any till meal counts as eating for the week — no more starving to death holding a McSking bag. Follow-on: DODGY GUTS (a 70-hour week, wellbeing hit, "Living on junk" in the info strip). Real groceries clear it; true starvation now needs two consecutive weeks of nothing. THE STRANGER All his dialogue rewritten so the road reads as shut-to-everyone, not a stat gate you can grind. He's now a proper map marble (coat-black glass, flat cap, cigarette ember, his rain), repositioned to the player's side of the road mouth. FIXES Loading a save (including from the pause menu) fully rebuilds the game — no more surviving panels, stuck maps, or stale positions; every loaded week opens at your own front door, and that applies to title-screen loads too. Clicking Electronics R Us / Rental Office while standing at the gate no longer opens the shop remotely. Layoff notices arrive after the market event that caused them, not before. Purchased clout diminishes at high clout (full below 60, half to 79, quarter at 80+); earned clout unaffected. Long messages no longer overlap the gold border on the message strip.Read full article on Community Announcements (Jeff BeZues)Patch NotesOfficial
The Career Update - 07.07,2026
We've seen the money, we've seen the wellness, now let's dive into what gets you there. Welcome to v0.9.3: The Career Update. The middle of the game was bugging me a bit so I decided to add some more rungs. I've increased pay across managerial and executive roles, and the path from shift work to boardroom has some stops along the way. NEW WORK McSking now promotes beyond Director. Regional burger royalty is real, and it pays like it. ASOPS is hiring a Designer, and a Model. The Model job cares about exactly one thing, and it is not your spreadsheet skills. The university added a Chemistry Professor chair for those who walk the long academic road. SCHOOL FEES The Bachelor's Degree is cheaper and faster. It is a foundation, and it is now priced like one. New at the university: the Chemistry Degree, and the MBA. Executive offices have started insisting on the latter. Finish a PhD, and everything you study afterwards comes quicker. You know how to learn now. Academia pays better across the board, and it remains the calmest work in town. THE GRIND A little more headroom before a heavy week starts to wear you down. A shift or two more, if you insist. Top jobs now tire you out the way top jobs do. VPs were somehow coasting. They no longer coast, shocker! The job board shows what employers actually pay during a boom, and a raise now shows you exactly what changed. MONEY AND FAME Fame fades at the top unless you keep feeding it. Stay interesting. Landlord life is calmer: fewer disasters in good times, more in bad, and struggling tenants get back on their feet quicker. Weekends stopped repeating themselves. You will not take a box at the football twice running. A new opportunity may find its way to you at the end of a week. Most of them are still terrible. Most. JORDAN A SKIP JORDAN switch lives next to the clock. Flip it once and his turns fast forward until you flip it back. It remembers. Skipped weeks leave a one line summary of what he got up to, so he cannot quietly buy ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Jeff BeZues)Patch NotesOfficial
The Wellness Update - 04.07.2026
The Money Update taught us how to be rich, the Wellness Update will teach us what it will cost us. BURNOUT Working now builds weekly strain, and stressful jobs build it much faster. An exec feels a heavy week long before a cashier does. Any real break will reset the stress/strain. The healthier you are, the more strain you can shrug off before fading; run yourself down, and you buckle earlier. You can only feel so good sleeping in the Flats. Apartments raise your maximum wellbeing. Only the Home lets you reach the top, which feeds straight back into how hard you can work. HOLIDAYS Seven trips bookable from home, from a £500 caravan week in Wales through Rome and a California road trip to Vegas, safari, and a £9,000 Maldives villa. A holiday consumes the week (you need it clear to book), the job is always safe while you're away (your employer will still have opinions), the wellbeing boost on return is the biggest in the game, and it wipes the burnout slate completely. Luxury Luggage owners come back with extra swagger. TRACK DAYS Hot hatch, supercar, or single-seater track days available at GMW. Six hours, a big lift on wellbeing, counts as proper downtime. JOB AND ECONOMY LINKING Ask for a raise. Your own job row at the Unemployment Office finally has a button. It only works while the market favours workers (a boom, or wages running hot), once per upswing, and a landed raise is written into your rate permanently, surviving every downturn after it. Struggling tenants are a real issue. In a recession, tenants can slip to half rent and stay there until the economy recovers or you evict them (a new button at the Rental Office, one empty cycle while you re-let, and word gets around) DIRECT ECONOMIC IMPACTS Investments are no longer liquid. Shortfalls draw from savings only, and spending power counts cash plus savings, full stop. That lock-up is what the higher return was always paying for, and it finally gives savings a job. Buy-to-let priced to actually pay. Options che...Read full article on Community Announcements (Jeff BeZues)Patch NotesOfficial
The Money Update - 02.07.2026
Thanks for bearing with us while we launch, fix, and try to balance things from start to finish. Some players felt that there was a distinct lack of mid to end game content, and it's something we know we'd need to address. As a result of that, we move into v0.9.1: The Money Update. In addition to the below, we have added new achievements, and some assorted fixes and polish. In more detail: WIN, THEN KEEP GOING Winning no longer ends the run. Bank the victory, roll the credits whenever you fancy, and keep living the life you built. On Realistic, the win now requires the full fantasy: the money, the career, and your own front door. Renting your way to victory was never the dream. PROPERTY, GLORIOUS PROPERTY The Home now comes with an actual mortgage: a balance, interest, and a payoff. Overpay at FirstPound Bank whenever you're flush. Clear it and the payments stop forever. The council tax does not. Speaking of which, Council tax and utilities now land every month, scaled to how fancy your address is. Everyone pays. Forever. NEW: Buy-to-let. Put a deposit on a rental at the Rental Office, let the tenants cover the bank's payments, and work toward the day the whole rent is yours. Tenants leave, boilers die, and the bank wants paying either way. THE ECONOMY HAS MOODS NOW The economy or Algorithm has been one of my biggest and most amibitious tasks in the back-end of the game. I've decided to let a lot of them run on in order to mimick real life rather than have some set for a certain amount of weeks. Booms and recessions arrive unannounced and stay until something changes. Nobody will tell you how long they'll last. That's the joke, and also how economies work. Good times lift pay offers, rents and markets. Bad times sink all three, and your tenants start struggling with the rent. BUY THE McSKING Once you're worth noticing, McSking Guys will sell you a stake: first a partnership, eventually the whole thing. Weekly takings, occasional inspections, and a small chance of go...Read full article on Community Announcements (Stop the Boots)






