>>1726I'm not sure I get it, is there any gameplay? Or is it just a simulation?
Then there are several things here that are highly complex and do not have an ready-made answer, "social interactions", story"? Do you want to procedurally generate that? Good fucking luck.
In any case when it comes to tools there's basically two ways : more programming or less programming.
If you want to learn/practice programming you have a million choices, the most common/industry standard is C++, there's also C#, Lua… I'm not an expert myself. Then for each of these you have libraries/engines that already include a ton of pre-made things to ease up the process, Ogre for C++, Monogame for C#, Love2D for Lua, but also a ton more. Generally an "engine" has more features than a library, in that it uses libraries itself, but the line is kinda blurry.
If you want a little less programming, you can use game engines : the 3 big ones are Unity, Unreal, and Godot. They're all free to a certain extent, until you make X amount of money, but you're probably good for a long while. The last version of Unreal is extremely lenient with that, you keep all your money (if you get to that point) under 1 MIRRION DOLLARS. As for Godot it's completely free and open-source. There's also Game Maker, not free but affordable, but it's been stagnating recently.
All that said you will always have some manual programming to do. And really it's always a better choice to stick to that.
Keep in mind for all the examples I mentioned there are a million others.
In the end what you have to do is kind of cluelessly look for info on all of these possibilities, search for comparisons, ask around if they're fit for your idea, finally decide on something, and then google a million tutorials for it and follow them. There is no single answer.
There's also Tiled, which may be useful, but it's a tilemap creator, not a game engine. It also has its issues, which I personally have found annoying a number of times, but huh, it exists. And for 2D drawing you have Krita, free and open-source too, tiny bugs but it's really good (avoid Photoshop and Adobe products at all cost).
Also a sad thing to note is that there seems to be no engine that is really great for 2D. They're all focused on 3D to be cool and shiny. Even Unity, who is fairly highly praised and has been around for years, still have issues here and there in 2D that haven't been fixed.
Second final note : it doesn't really matter what you choose in the end. Apart from AAAAAA GRAFIXS, you can realistically pretty much do anything you want with any tool you want. Especially if you're ready and skilled enough to tackle programming the more complex stuff by yourself.
The only limits are time and motivation. Good luck!