If you’re a fan of life simulators, you’ve no doubt heard critics, developers, influencers, and all manner of social media-savvy people wax lyrical about the complexity of creating a compelling social simulation. As I said in my own inZoi review last year, curating a world that’s both representative of the murky mess that is being human and enjoyable to play is a seemingly impossible undertaking that few have managed. And yet, after spending 35 hours in Paralives crafting families, building homes, and sowing discord among residents, I have a renewed hope. This ambitious challenger to The Sims’ throne has captured not only the practical elements of humanity but, importantly, the weird ones we sweep under the rug, too. While its Early Access start has a lot of room to grow before it slays the reigning king of the genre, it’s certainly on its way.
Your time in Paralives begins on a train, with a quick tutorial for how to handpick the actions of the Parafolk (the name Paralives gives to its digital citizens) as God of this world. You’ll initially do so with predesigned families, including the father-son duo of the Marquez household, who hide secrets beneath their chirpy veneer, and the party-loving trio from the Wolf household, who need to get it together if they want to pay the bills. These families all feel thoughtfully written and have their own issues to connect with, which is a boon for people who prefer a rich backstory to bounce off. But if you’d rather get straight into the nitty-gritty of people pottery like me, you can also create your own household via the Paramaker mode right away.
Comparable in layout to The Sims 4’s Create-a-Sim, the Paramaker mode splits avatar creation into three main sections: Appearance, Clothing, and Personality. From here, you can curate the look of your digital person through a selection of pre-fab facial and body features, dress them in stylish garb, and finally choose what kind of digi-person they will be with various traits. There is also the option to fine-tune your creation by using your mouse to tug and drag at anchor points to twist up their features like putty. It’s a reactive and rewarding process, particularly if you’re working from a reference photo.
There aren’t a great deal of options for customisation just yet, though it’s clear there’s been a particular effort made to replicate the diversity of the real world with what’s available. Hair presets span a variety of textures, including straight, wavy, curly, and coily, plus there’s an option to select hearing aids and prosthetic legs. What’s more, you can layer items like piercings, jewellery, and tattoos to really amp up your character’s personality. This blend of options safeguards your households from the cursed same-face syndrome, and ensures that every person you meet out in the world doesn't look like they're all related either. Clothing, too, has a decent variety and caters to a range of styles from goth to coquette, even including a full-body morph suit – to each their own.
No matter what you pick, Paralives' standout art style evokes the nostalgia of classic Telltale games like The Wolf Among Us. This dynamic comic book approach is not only easy on the eyes, it also helps details like wrinkles, facial hair, and eyelashes really pop. That’s particularly true as your Parafolk emote and perform actions like cooking or scrolling on their phone while ignoring their chores – they’re just like me, for real! By leaning away from the hyperreal and toward the more cartoonish aspects of humanity, Parafolks feel slightly goofier and a lot more likeable than the people of their competitors, conjuring favourable comparisons to The Sims 2. In this way, I found myself connected to their plights more so than the undeniably trendy but slightly soulless inhabitants of Krafton’s InZOI.
Unfortunately, the wheels start to fall off in the Personality section of character creation, which feels quite limited at the moment. You’ll give every Parafolk a Vibe, a Social Perk, and a Talent area, each of which is intended to influence how they move through the world. For example, if you choose the “Good at taking care of other people” Social Perk, that character can make chicken soup for sick friends. Alternatively, if you pick the Gloomy option for their Vibe, they will be happiest when in a bad mood. As you play out their life, you’ll unlock more slots to fill, though these choices don't translate clearly into practical gameplay. And, frustratingly, even with drastically different personalities, most of my households reacted more or less the same to major incidents.
Rounding out the start of each new family, you’ll also need to choose a specific Storyteller, which is a unique mechanic that will dictate the difficulty of your day-to-day life. Storytellers dole out cards every dawn that cause random events to happen in the lives of your Parafolk. One day, you might get a free computer from work. Another day, one of your household members may be encouraged to cheat on their spouse. This system adds much-needed entropy to your household's otherwise routine shenanigans. While many of the prompts seemed repetitive in concept, I found them to be effective in practice — they do well to keep things fresh in the long term, which is one of the biggest bugbears of the genre.
Once you have your household, the next step is to find a home, which once again gives you the choice between a pre-designed estate or an empty block with a budget to spend on all the essential amenities, like beds, baths, and beyond. Similar to the Paramaker, Paralives' build mode currently has a fairly limited pool of items and options, but there's at least enough customisability here to keep you busy building for hours on end.
In construction mode, you erect walls, add windows and doors, and then decorate the space with a selection of modern interior options. It’s an approachable process, thanks in part to a togglable snap tool that ensures your architecture is balanced and beautiful. Still, cowboy builders need not worry as there’s plenty of room to get weird with it, too, and Paralives isn’t keen to hold you to any building code. When renovating your space, you can place items almost anywhere you’d like. As a huge fan of cosy, cluttered spaces, I squeaked with joy when I realised I could stack ramen cups on top of kitchen fridges and select random throw pillows to jazz up plain couches. Yuckier touches like mould, damp, and body hair can also be dotted around for the sickos out there, with Paralives allowing you to make a truly bespoke, if totally gross, living space.
This customisation is a double-edged sword, though – while beautiful, much of the world isn’t actually interactable. Those ramen noodles might create a cool vibe, but they can never be eaten, and the cosy throw pillows will never crumple under the weight of a sleepy character, which feels like a missed opportunity. Such aesthetically pleasing but useless items also crop up in the open world and inevitably lead to deflating moments as you realise you can walk through a moving train completely unscathed. There has been an effort to provide the background city with a sense of liveliness through a daily newspaper and rotation of activities like run clubs and BBQs. Even so, these events can feel rather flat, with locals milling around as if on a timer. As such, Paralives' setting doesn’t feel like an entirely cohesive society just yet.
Moment-to-moment survival comes down to meeting a few basic needs: Hygiene, Hunger, Sleep, and the Toilet. Achieving these needs is a constant uphill battle, though failing them so badly that you die isn’t so easy either. As with real life, Parafolks' days are split between working a job that pays the bills, toying around with home appliances, and chatting with the locals to try and make friends. The way you progress is fairly rudimentary; you’ll often be stuck reading a book to level up skills or waiting out the in-game clock for a work shift to end. Thankfully, there is some reprieve in the socialising portion, with Paralives opting for a refreshingly alternate approach.
Instead of selecting another character and choosing a conversation topic, you’ll need the Parafolk to interact long enough to fill a conversation meter. From there, you’ll have a small pool of subjects to choose from, which includes asking other Parafolk if they’re single in a flirtatious way, telling jokes, and chatting about general life events. At first, I didn’t love this radical style, but it grew on me over my play sessions, and I eventually realised how handy this hands-off approach was. Instead of sitting with one of my household members, clicking topics on repeat, I could move on to another task or person while they were schmoozing, and periodically jump in to keep the conversation flowing. Like spinning personality plates, I could lock in as one started to wobble, before jumping over to another conversation to keep that one in play, too.
Alas, not even expert helicopter parents like me can keep everything in check, and across my time with Paralives, I fell prey to the inevitable chaos of an Early Access life simulator. One day, during some routine cupcake-baking, my house burned down because the firefighters kept spawning just outside my front door without being able to step through it, as if they were mocking me. Soon after, another of my households got stuck in some kind of viral loop, circulating a sickness through the entire family, like a never-ending, festering plague. During this time, they all had to take turns running back and forth between their beds and the home’s single toilet – no prizes for guessing how that shook out.
Such unfortunate occurrences might seem like frustrating, gameplay-halting events that make you want to ragequit. But its spirited art direction and goofy charms manage to make these scenarios feel funny and endearing to experience, as if they were intentional. Where the day-to-day activities lacked the depth to keep me entertained, these scrappy edges showcased more of the rich, chaotic personality that bleeds through all aspects of Paralives, and makes it stand out as a worthwhile contender amongst its more substantial and established peers in the genre.
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