The best simulation games like Harvest Moon are Stardew Valley, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life and Rune Factory 5. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to simulation costs you.
Filtering to simulation means you want a system to run or a routine to inhabit. It is the right filter when what you liked was being somewhere rather than beating something.
What you get: A game that does not need you to be good at it, and that rewards paying attention over reacting quickly.
What made Harvest Moon worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the simulation part of that answer, and only the simulation part.
The game that took the Harvest Moon formula and perfected it.
The actual continuation of the original series under its new name.
Harvest Moon with dungeons and combat layered on.
The most complete modern take, with a bigger town.
Crafting and building rather than farming, same rhythm.
If the daily routine and the neighbours were the appeal.
The closest in tone to the SNES-era games.
For the same slow build of a place that becomes a system.
The dark version, and much more of a management puzzle.
Urgency. Simulations are deliberately slow, and the ones with no fail state give you nothing to push against.
The full list is on games like Harvest Moon — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Stardew Valley. The game that took the Harvest Moon formula and perfected it.
No. Harvest Moon released on the Nintendo Game Boy, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A simulation with no fail state and no time pressure. The label describes how it feels to play rather than what genre it is in.
No — one is about running a system well, the other about inhabiting a routine. Recommending across that line is where most simulation recommendations go wrong.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Harvest Moon list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is simulation — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the simulation guide for where to start in the genre generally.