When you think of life sim games, most people picture The Sims series. It’s undeniably been the top dog in the genre for years. While other cute games sometimes capture our attention briefly, nothing has been more constant or 𝔍has ever delivered the same wealth of content as The Sims, whic🍒h remains one of the only series to fully focus in-depth on all the aspects of living a virtual life.
A new contender has appeared on the horizon in the form of Life by You, which I managed to get a sneak peek of at Gamescom last week. Immediately, you can see the influence of The Sims in the UI and mechanics within the game, leaving𒅌 much of it feeling familiar for fans of arguably the first true-life sim. Rod Humble, the director for Life by🌞 You, is the former executive vice president of EA Play and worked on The Sims, so seeing some crossover is hardly surprising.
While everything looked familiar, I couldn’t help but feel that the characters lacked charm. Maybe I’m just so used to the visuals of The Sims 4, but Life by You d✤idn’t have a unique standout style, and it felt a little lacking in personality. However, while the characters didn’t stand out, the world did. Everything is hyper-detailed and feels more realistic. Characters can dump their clothes on the bedroom floor, and bookcase shelves can become cluttered, just like in any truly lived-in house.
As the team shows us the world of Life by You, we see how traits and personalities you ass🎃ign can help your characters in their career. The team introduces us to the character Ronnie, who works at the Lotus Gym and is a known troublemaker who loves electro꧙nics, exercising, and using social media.
You can do various activities while working, from yoga classe♌s to reviewing member applications or creating workout plans. There are also set tasks you can complete as part of a system called Progression Quests. Achieving these leads to extra rewards, promotions, or maybe even an email 𒁃from your boss telling you that you’re doing a great job.
Like in The Sims, every character has needs you’ll want to keep on top of, including sleep, hunger, toilet use, happiness, thirst, social, and cleanliness. If you don’t have the time to deal with your character nagging to use the bathroom, 💎you can simply use a cheat to deal with these, another familiar inclusion.
If you want to focus on your character's story and forgo some of the more game-play intense aspects, you can use cheats to skip over things like fulfilling needs, and you can also speed up time by days, weeks, months, or even years. Alternatively, you can switch off the cheats and play through thoroughly, staying on top of every little niggle and whim of your character.
The team is keen to give players creative freedom in what they are doing, allowing them to use shortcuts to focus on what they want the most. “Our settings are really extensive because the core ethos of the game is to let players do what they want to do,” Paradox Tectonic COO Amanda Heaton says. “Rod has mentioned many times that he didn't want it to be his vision. He didn't want to tell his story. He wanted to build something that everyone could [use to] tell their own stories. Player empowerment is at the centre of everything we discussed.”
The team is also giving players access to options they wouldn’t usually have, including editing tools, with Heaton explaining, “The thing that really sets us apart is all of these things that we use, all these editors, to add crafting systems, to add recipes to the game, these editing tools are included right in the game so that modders can create mods, edit conversations, and they can tell their own stories. We've actually put a lot of work into taking all of that stuff that we use as developers and giving it to the broader community.”
As someone who knows nothing about mods, the idea of getting to grips with this is daunting, but the team assures me that all of the editing tools are within the game. There are a few assets or images you can download, but 💦for the most part, text, behaviours, and changing things in the world will be right at your fingertips.
We also got to see some of the skills in the game, such as harvesting, cooking, and flower arranging. As you level up in a specific ski♏ll, more options unlock for you, but one of the notable aspects of this—like the rest of the game—was the level of detail applied. Every animation is unique to what you’re doing, so making a steak will look completely different from making a salad, while creating a stir fry means you’ll see your character salting the pan. For flower arranging, there are suggested ‘recipes’, but you can also choose to swap out flowers. So, if you don’t have the suggested white rose for an arrangement, you can substitute it with a red rose instead.
Build Mode looked particularly fun. You can easily place different items, dragging, pulling, and resizing them, as well as customising them on multiple levels; recolouring different🎉 layers, and being able to choose the colour, right down to the saturation and brightness levels. You’re not just restricted to your house, either. Other venues are available to tweak and build upon as you see fit, and you c🐷an customise other different aspects of the world.
The team walks us through some things that make Life by You stand out from the crowd or, more importantly,ও from The Sims. The game offers a totally open-world environment, with each venue you see being completely playable. There are no rabbit holes, meaning you won’t see your character disappear into a building🃏 and live their best life without you knowing what they’re getting up to.
One of the biggest things that stood out to me was the use of real language. You can choose what your character says and express their personality better. They can be friendly, flirt, or even antagonise others, but sometimes the results are unexpected. The team d♚ecided to make Ronnie insult her co-worker by asking him, ‘What the hell are you wearing?’—despite him wearing the same work uniform—but the colleague responded with ‘I can take it off’, raising the romance meter a little.
The team calls this emergent storytelling, explaining that every action you make and conversation you🥃 have is contextual. Things like having a conversation at work, what relationship you have with the other person, or whether you previously♏ had a romantic dalliance with them can affect the outcome of your conversation choices, so although you might think you’re about to annoy them, you could be feeding into some weird kink they have. At launch, Life by You will be localised in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese, but with the accessibility of modding, I imagine even more languages will be available in the future.
I&rs✃quo;m not sure yet whether Life by You will manage☂ to topple The Sims, but there’s certainly a lot of potential there. The amount of detail and accessibility of modding and editing given to the players is sure to go down well with life sim fans.
Life by You launches in Early Access on March 5, 2024, for those who preorder. It will be available ꦆfor and the .
