For over 20 years, the Sims franchise has been the king of the life-sim hill. But Paralives, out now in early access, seems like a game ready to shakeup the leaderboards. Paralives started as a project from solo dev Alex Massé, who’s known for his work on PewDiePie’s Tuber Simulator. Massé launched a Patreon to fund the new game, grew his team to create Paralives Studios, and has plugged away at development until launching in early access on May 25th.
Paralives has two prominent game modes, Live and Build. In Live mode you pilot Paras—characters you’ve chosen or created yourself—through the ups and downs of life. Each day, you can choose basic tasks to fulfill like watch TV or exercise. What kind of tasks you receive are dictated by your moods, which are in turn governed by a Para’s physical needs like food and sleep. If you’re happy, you might choose to work on a hobby, or if you’re feeling flirty, you might wanna start a relationship with another Para. There are also bigger, longer-term goals and requests to work on throughout town and fulfilling any task, large or small, earns your Para precious experience points.
Build mode is just that. Game events stop, time pauses, and you’re presented with a partially filled-in canvas of a home to decorate to your liking. I suspect Build mode is what will appeal most to players. There’s an incredible degree of customization freedom that allows you to build structures to your exact specifications.You can turn a twin-sized bed into a California king simply by selecting the item and dragging it to the size you want. Same with windows, walls, doors, and most other household objects. Walls can be curved and there’s a grid setting that helps with sizing and proportions. When you place an item on a wall, guidelines will pop in to help you center it. The pipette tool makes cloning items or surfaces trivial, and nearly every color on every item can be customized. Build mode almost felt like a completely different game. Somehow technically advanced drafting software got mixed up with the cozy life-sim, and I was surprised at how much I preferred the former to the latter.
The Live mode portion of Paralives took more effort to play than I’d like. Since the game is in early access, the developers warn you to expect bugs and that quality-of-life adjustments will be made throughout the early access period. But even with those caveats, the game felt clunky. Getting Paras to complete a task was an ordeal that required precisely choreographed clicks, to the limited extent my commands were obeyed at all. I tried for three straight in-game days to get my Paras, Ash and Travis, to share a meal together. To do that, I had to first get the Paras in the same room, requiring me to click through the three separate floors of my house to select the Para I wanted, then click through the floors again to select where I wanted them to go. The moment I dropped Ash in place, her AI would take over, sending her off to fulfill a need like using the bathroom. By the time I got Travis in the room, I had to go back through my house again to search for Ash. Repeat that dance across all the different tasks I tried to complete and playing Paralives felt like herding digital cats.
Just getting my Paras to work out together like this would have taken me at least 10 minutes.
It’s also strangely difficult to do simple things like sit on the couch and watch TV. Sitting on the couch is one activity, watching TV is another, and for some reason you can’t do both at the same time. It’s really weird and immersion-breaking to observe my Para watch TV while standing stock-still behind the couch I so lovingly placed for them. I hope future updates smooth out these rough edges. It shouldn’t take so many clicks to complete a task with a group of Paras. I also wish the game was easier to navigate. Clicking on a Para’s portrait in the game’s UI should snap the camera to their location. Instead there’s a separate camera icon already on the portrait that you have to click to get there.
I’ve never been a Sims player because the game’s long history, combined with all the bars, icons, and menus, intimidated the hell outta me. Paralives was initially appealing because it offered me the chance to get in with a life-sim on the ground floor. Now that I’m here, I’m eager to see where the developers take this game. There are a lot of eyes following Paralives. The Sims 4 players have been on the lookout for alternatives as public sentiment regarding the game has been on the decline for several years. Sims players have long complained of the base game’s performance issues, which have been exacerbated by its prolific number of DLC content packs—all of which come at a price. Since The Sims 4 is free-to-play, some members of the community have also complained that EA, the game’s publisher, seems to prioritize monetization over addressing performance concerns. The famously queer and inclusive Sims community is also not happy that EA is currently in the process of being bought out by the anti-LGBTQ Saudi Arabian government, though EA has stated it will maintain “creative control.”
Paralives has the potential to give disaffected Sims players the off-ramp they’ve been looking for without sacrificing familiarity or the breadth of features the Sims franchise has offered over the years. It has a UI that seems similar to that of The Sims, there are future plans to incorporate user-generated content, and Paralives’ developers have stated that all future DLC will be free. Paralives isn’t the only life-sim game out there, but if its developers can address the issues with action and navigation, it’ll make a worthy challenger for Big Daddy Sims.
