How do one day simulator courses work? There are companies such as this that offer one day full simulator experiences where you take several attempts at landing a 747 or something similar. Some people report success after a couple of attempts.

In this question, asked recently here on ASE, it was generally agreed upon that no-one could land such an aircraft without many hundreds of hours of training.

So how do these day-courses/experiences work? Do they somehow 'dumb down' the simulator, automating most or all of the process'?

Side-note: I am asking, because I am interested in learning the basics of flying, but could only afford simulator training, the actual school in my real country offers block bookings for a reasonable price.
I’ve done one of these before (not with that company). It literally used the Microsoft FSX game engine but with an A320 cockpit. You have an instructor guiding you and I got to fly around my local airport, land at Kai Tak at night (nailed my first attempt), and because I was in real-world training at the time I shot an ILS approach in zero visibility (definitely did not nail that one). 

These simulators are usually aimed at people with little to no piloting experience who want some fun (and they are, I enjoyed mine and my dad has done it 3 or 4 times). If you’ve used FSX you know that you can adjust the realism settings to make it easier to fly so, with help from the instructor a novice can probably land it. At the very least you will learn about basic procedures, flaps etc, and what the cockpit looks like.

It will definitely not make you ready to land the real thing though. These things are designed for fun, not realism.