What Traditional Chinese Medicine Simulator is
Traditional Chinese Medicine Simulator is a solo-made game built to help people with no background get into traditional Chinese medicine, and to help students and enthusiasts study it more efficiently. It plays out as a text-based simulation where seeing a patient works like solving a case: the four examinations are your scene investigation, symptoms are your clues, and the known syndrome patterns are your suspects, each with its own combination of clues. You gather symptoms, pick the matching syndrome pattern, then choose an appropriate Chinese patent medicine based on the accompanying symptoms. The game leans on its own annotation panels rather than requiring you to memorize everything up front.
How a group plays it together
The group-friendly piece is Online PvP. You arrange an opponent in your group chat, then both enter the PK module at the same time and the game matches you automatically. The current PK covers basic theory of Chinese medicine, and a round runs 25 questions: a correct answer scores 10 points, a wrong answer costs 10 points. Beyond that, the game carries a question bank with thousands of items that include explanations, plus question banks for the licensing physician exam and for Shang Han Lun, along with Shang Han Lun online competition and Shang Han Lun recitation tools. Some older questions in the bank have no explanation attached, though that share is small.
Before you start
The Early Access build contains five chapters: Chinese patent medicines, introduction to syndrome differentiation, internal medicine, the five movements and six qi, and Shang Han Lun. The first chapter puts you working in a pharmacy for the Time Administration Bureau, where your customers are famous figures from ancient China. The core loop is syndrome differentiation: run the four examinations to collect symptoms and signs, click a syndrome on the right to read its explanation in the annotation panel, compare it against what you have, then open the syndrome analysis panel for a mechanism analysis and check the symptoms against its conditions. You do not need to be certain on the first pass; the panels are there to be cross-checked. Expect incomplete hints in Early Access, since many symptoms are not yet in the dictionary, and the developer notes the game is fairly hardcore but that newcomers can pass levels using the built-in information alone. A learning module lets you look things up in-game instead of memorizing, and the five movements and six qi chapter carries added explanations to read as you go.