It's Time to Get Parasocial, or ... Paralives?

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The Sims has been a franchise that’s been with me since the mid to late 90s. A thing that started, for me, with one of the very first SimCity games, on a school PC in a computer lab. This was before The Sims was even a glimmer in anyone’s eyes, and if you would have said, “I wish I had a life sim to play,” people would have had no idea what you were talking about. It didn’t exist. Other memories I have involve watching a friend play SimCopter with a joystick on his much better PC that I was really jealous about, and then, finally, one day while I was living in a for real, actual haunted house: The Sims came to my hand-me-down PC.

I still remember the first time I played the game. I didn’t make my own sims. I joined the Goth household and renovated everything so that the entire thing was a death trap, and then I’d just spend hours building more houses around the neighborhood.

Later, I, of course, played The Sims Online, which I spent a lot of time in just … chatting with people. As if it was a pre-Second Life, Second Life. And, once I was tired of it, I specifically remember canceling my subscription so that I could try out Anarchy Online, but this was back in the old days when subscription services didn’t have a “cancel subscription” button on their websites. No. You had to call them and tell them why you wanted to cancel.

Oof.

Regardless, I’ve been playing Sims games since the 90s, and they’re a staple in my life, no matter how hard Maxis continues trying to appeal their content to children and teenagers. The Sims 4 supported me through a lot of emotional and mental turmoil, and I really believe it stopped me from losing my mind, too much. Which is why it is a great pain to see the studio and the game in the hands of Saudi Arabians, and other violent, morally corrupt people and groups.

Yes, I’ve tried InZoi, and I think it’s pretty cool, albeit kind of … vanilla, and a bit lacking so far. But I’m not writing this to talk about that game, because I already have quite a bit of experience with it … as I wait for the studio to actually add real features.

So, we’re talking about Paralives. A game that had probably what I would call the most annoying pre-alpha/beta release hype and cycle I’ve ever seen. I’m talking years of people constantly spamming the algorithmic social media with, “This is the game that will kill The Sims!” But I have a special hatred of the Sims-Complainers who would see Maxis die completely, so that a game that was in-development for a decade could give us … a slower, and jankier experience, with no history attached to it whatsoever. Or, at least that’s what I expected it to be. Going into Paralives with this idea that it’s probably overhyped and not good could have been a good or bad thing for me, I don’t know.

But, here we are anyway.

Paralives.

It has a pretty neat start-up process where you’re on a train, and you have to either choose a family, or make a new one. And in this process there is a lot of content borrowed from The Sims. This is a continuing thing throughout my experience with the game, though. The source material is all over the place.

Then once you’re done messing with your appearance, clothing, and traits, you can choose to either start with a completely empty town, or a pre-built one. You might also be familiar with the next step: Buy your first house, while generously starting with 30,000 simoleans or whatever the currency is called, rather than 20,000.

I picked a loft with a second floor that’s blocked off by trash.

Why’s it blocked by trash? I don’t know.

The game has you pick a storyteller, which … I assume is what facilitates story progression, and through that your Para gains levels, and wants, and goals that work as what appear to be quests. So that’s a little different, at least. And you can bend walls around, reshape furniture and decorations, and so on and so forth.

Build mode is pretty versatile, I’ll give it that.

The thing I can’t really shake, is that, they borrowed all this stuff from The Sims, except for the camera controls, which are taking me forever to get used to. And, on top of that, despite it being in early access, it is a bit janky. The camera movement isn’t completely smooth and animations seem to jitter a little bit here and there. I don’t think this is an issue with my HDD, because I’ve tried it both on my Macbook and my Linux PC.

Outside of that, it’s the usual life sim sandbox, except there’s no vampires, no fairies, no werewolves, no aliens … it’s very much, like starting up a brand new Sims title.

There’s no features.

But, it kind of mirrors how I’ve started all the other Sims games. I load into Sims 2, Sims 3, Sims 4, notice that there’s not much content, and then I come back in a year and play as a vampire.

Will there be vampires?

I can’t fully endorse a life sim unless it has supernatural elments. I’m definitely not one of those people who needs a life sim to perfectly encapsulate and represent real life.

If I want real life, I can turn away from my computer screen, and look outside.

That said, with as little content as it currently has, and my unease of its jank aside, you could probably get a lot of time out of this if you just played and built up a family and careers for your Paras. There’s always fun in that.

Or you can meander around town and make faces at the random NPC Para people who are, really hard to flirt with, while you try and figure out what these gems and jewels are that the game’s asking you to collect (I still haven’t figured it out). Kind of brings me back to The Sims 3, where I moved into a small home, and just kind of walked around collecting all the stuff on the ground. Except, here, there doesn’t really seem to be much on the ground, so I don’t know what the hell I’m looking for!

Anyway …

I’ll give this life sim a tentative, “could be really cool, but we’ll wait and see”, just like I’ve given InZoi.

They have a lot of catching up to do if they’re going to match the mother of all life sims. And, you might not think it’s fair of me to expect it to do so, but if Paralives, or InZoi want you to stop playing The Sims and pick up their game … they gotta catch up.

I gotta be a vampire.