PhDing in the UK is a pixel-art life sim about a Chinese student doing a doctorate in Britain: chasing thesis deadlines, meeting your supervisor, missing home, plus a card-battle system. Every argument, every viva, every group meeting is a boss fight you never signed up for.

Tuition paid, bags packed, and somewhere between Heathrow and a rented room in Sheffield you became a PhD student. Nobody warned you that surviving it would come down to card games.

• Manage your days, not just your thesis : Every waking hour counts. Write, read, cook, exercise, or just stare into space. The clock, and the deadline, will not stop for you

• There is a lot of day left after the writing : Fish an afternoon away by the park lake, roll a couple of dice at the casino, work a shift to afford a chair that will not wreck your back. None of it advances your thesis, and all of it decides what shape you walk into the next fight in

• Build a deck out of your own arguments : Learn different schools of skill cards from different supervisors, curate them within a strict capacity, and turn every academic crisis into a turn-based showdown

• Form real bonds, and maybe more than bonds : Labmates and friends with their own personalities and their own deep-talk arcs. Someone might "happen" to walk past your building with an umbrella on a rainy day. Who you open up to gets written into your ending

• See the world on a student budget : Travel between terms and to conferences, from Tokyo backstreets to Roman ruins

• Fully localized, ten languages : Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. Every line has its own version

• Multiple endings : Who you become by graduation depends on every small choice along the way

Equal parts cozy and chaotic, sincere and self-deprecating. This is what nobody tells you about doing a PhD abroad.