Paralives is finally right around the corner—it's launching into early access on May 25 following last year's delay. As that day quickly approaches, Paralives Studio is well and truly dangling the carrot in front of us with a nine-minute video showcasing some of the bits we can expect.
I suspect this is intentional, but so much of what is shown off is the kind of stuff I've wished to see in The Sims for years. Tiny quality-of-life tweaks here, or mind-bogglingly absent features in The Sims that are happily present in Paralives' early access launch.
The video kicks off by showing a little bit of the character creation screen with—gasp—adjustable height sliders! It's such a small feature that's missing from The Sims, but one that I think can add so much variety to Paras. Everyone needs at least one short friend and one ridiculously tall friend in their lives, with Paralives' slider going up to a whopping two meters tall—that's 6'5" for our British and American pals.
We then get a little look at some build/buy goodies—we've seen plenty of it in previous trailers, but getting another glance has made me giddy all over again. Being able to scale objects up and down and even place them on top of each other without having to enter a single cheat code is a life sim builder's dream, and I love how the trailer showcases shrinking down a bush to pop on top of a planter, creating an entirely original object.
There's even snap-free clutter decorating, y'all. As someone who has constantly wrestled with The Sims' desire to have about six snappable spots on its surfaces—we all know the whole "move the counter, place object in the air, move counter back to check if it all looks okay" hack—I cannot wait to freely place all the junk without a care in the world.
When it comes to the actual day-to-day gameplay of Paralives, we get small snippets into some of the activities to participate in. Something I really loved was that it looks like a lot of jobs give several different options for both times and days to work, which should come massively in handy when trying to manage larger households.
There's some other neat stuff too, like:
- Being able to drag and select a group of people to partake in one activity together
- Steam Workshop for custom community-created content
- Different "vibes" for Paras like their cleanliness, tendency to rise early/late, and how sociable they are
- A vegetarian toggle! I hate having to use an entire trait slot for it in The Sims!
I am curious to see how Paralives' gameplay will actually shake out, away from a heavily spliced sizzle reel of interactions. If my time with Inzoi was anything to go by, making a smooth and engaging gameplay experience outside of character creation and house building is bloody hard work. Paralives at least has the safety net of being an early access game—one which has been doing a lot of tempering of expectations as release draws nearer—but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for something that at least borders on… y'know, playable.
