Some games are built to be reviewed. In April I played through God of War, a meaty and yet self-contained adventure with a beginning, middle and end, the sort of thing you could put down clean and say: “I have played this game, now I will review it.” Not surprisingly, Game of the Year lists contain a lot of games like this. But they are fewer and farther between these days: how do you review Fortnite, a game that launched as a co-op survival sim and then took over the world as a Battle Royale game that still manages to continuously change week after week? How do you review early access games, which charge money long before they claim to be released? And how on Earth do you review The Sims 4: Seasons?
The Sims 4: Seasons is, I would argue, the biggest update to the storied life simulator since its fourth iteration first released, its significance in no ways dampened by the fact that we’ve seen it in two other Sims games before. It takes the endless summer of your Sims lives and gives it yearly rhythms through Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, complete with imagined holidays, sweaters and swimsuits, rainstorms and blizzards, not to mention the usual suite of build mode and create-a-sim items, with glass roofs rounding the whole package out.
When I loaded the thing up, I was excited to make a family to dive right into live mode and guide them through their new yearly rhythms. But then, I remembered “Greenhouse,” a hip new bar with ample outdoor space built into a modified greenhouse. And then I remembered it didn’t exist, so I spent a few hours building it. Here it is:
Since then I’ve also had the notion for a more Christmas/Winter-themed cafe, but I’ve also dipped my toe into the live mode to feel what it’s like to live in this suddenly more variable world of the Sims, but a toe dip doesn’t quite do it. The whole feeling of this expansion is designed to be experienced over dozens of hours as you move from Winterfest to Winterfest, packing up the decorations in plastic tubs and putting them down in the basement. To review it so early seems insane, but to review it a hundred hours in seems equally insane: by then I’ll be living in it. Objectivity falls by the wayside by the time you commit to something the way The Sims has a way of making you do.
Other expansion packs seem more manageable: Cats and Dogs added cats and dogs. Did the cats and dogs do enough stuff, you could wonder. Were they a fun addition, did they work with the new neighborhood, Brindleton Bay? But the entire point of Seasons is to let this major overhaul inform you and your Sims’ every decision over the course of their strange little lifetimes. How do you review Seasons when you’re trying to get your kids ready for their big adventure to Granite Falls? Or when you just did Santa? It’s designed to lull you into these endless hours of tiny storytelling.
Other games present a similar problem from a developer perspective: you’re having trouble evaluating a game because it’s not really finished yet, or because it’s designed to grow and change over the years. But what’s always fascinating about the Sims is that all this stuff is there, in the game, now. You aren’t waiting on the developer so much as you are waiting for yourself to supply enough stories and settings to see if the game is a worthy match for them. And with Seasons it feels like that could take months.
I’ll say this: I’m really liking Seasons. It gives my Sims life and story in a way that they didn’t really have before, and I want to see what they, and I, do with that. But a review doesn’t seem like quite the right way to approach this. Look for some more builds in the future.
