You know how the old saying goes: you wait 25 years for a The Sims competitor and then three come along at once. Lo-fi delight Tiny Life is already out in early access, and cosy contender Paralives arrives later this year. But first, there’s South Korean development giant Krafton’s InZoi – an ultra-slick, mega-budget spin on the classic life sim formula that mostly seems to be selling itself on its seamless worlds and glossy, photorealistic looks – but is that enough to usurp the genre king? Based on a half dozen hours or so with the game, I’m not so sure.
On paper, mind, InZoi ticks all the right boxes. There’s little new here, admittedly, and even less in the way of fresh ideas – apart from perhaps a poorly explained city wide karma system I’m still struggling to understand – but it’s a generous, slickly produced package that feels far more like a successor to Maxis’ ambitious, much-loved The Sims 3 than the official sequel series fans eventually got. It’s there in inZoi’s seamlessly traversable worlds, even if the scale of its spaces versus its scant few meaningful points of interest – a shop, a library, a café, perhaps – means the novelty quickly wears off. And it’s there in InZoi’s extensive customisation options: virtually every item can be reimagined with player-defined colours, patterns, and materials; public areas can be furnished and remodelled just as effortlessly as homes, and even city streets can be given a more personal touch, switching out flora, billboard displays, night-time celebrations, and seasonal decor. If anything feels like an ace up InZoi’s sleeve it’s these impressively granular customisation options, and the thrill they’re likely to bring to more creatively minded players.
And yes, InZoi is undoubtedly a looker, albeit in a blandly nondescript sort of way. As the sun gleams off the towering ultra-modern skyscrapers and trim, tree-lined streets of downtown Dowon, or slowly bathes the beaches of Bliss Bay with golden hues as the day draws to a close, it’s hard not to be a little bit dazzled by its Unreal Engine 5 powered stab at photorealism. It creates a far more grounded mood that immediately sets InZoi apart from its peers. And while it’s an aesthetic that’s unlikely to withstand the technological advances of a decade in the same way The Sims 4‘s more stylised approach has, there’s an air of Rockstar-like verisimilitude to InZoi’s lavishly constructed worlds that helps create a convincing backdrop of life – especially when you’re directly controlling your Zois at ground level.
As to what happens against that backdrop, there are – perhaps inevitably – few surprises here. InZoi, like its contemporaries, conjures its illusion of life through a broad range of simple interactions and superficial systems. You click an item, select from a list of contextual options – perhaps you’ll admire a picture to enhance your Zoi’s artistic prowess or fart discretely, just for the hell of it – and somewhere behind the scenes a number goes up. In this manner, Zois work, they play, they flirt, and learn – their constant mood shifts further influencing their interactions with the world, all as their more fundamental needs of sleeping, eating, washing, and pooping are met. And while we’re on the subject, yes, it is weird that Zois shower in their towels and poop with their pants up. InZoi doesn’t so much reimagine the genre as repackage it, but its slick grasp for realism does at least present the familiar in unfamiliar ways. And crucially, while there’s certainly room for expansion, its base offering is substantial enough that it doesn’t immediately feel like a cynical exercise in future wallet mining.
The trouble is, it’s all so soulless – its flashiness failing to mask a lack of personality. Where The Sims feels tuned for maximum chaos and carnage (sometimes exhaustingly so), InZoi barely mustered a single memorable event in the six hours I played. I milled about its empty streets, trudged around its handful of notable landmarks, sang a song in a park, and unsuccessfully tried to strike up a friendship with strangers before returning home. By the time I’d tired of redecorating and had clicked on everything in my apartment at least twice, I was genuinely wondering how I was going to fill the rest of my virtual day as InZoi’s clock – glacially slow even on its fastest setting – ticked on by. If this had been The Sims, I’d probably have been juggling several accidental deaths, a peeing incident, at least one break-up or desperately unwise flirtation, an alien probe, and a couple of housefires in the same time frame. And while it’s definitely liberating to play a life sim that’s not constantly teetering on the edge of farce, InZoi leans so far in the other direction, it barely has a heartbeat, let alone a sense of life.
It doesn’t help either that Krafton’s opted to frame its game in the most unappealing way imaginable, casting you as fresh-faced corporate lackey forced to play InZoi in a pristine office building that looks like the sort of thing you might get if you asked Patrick Bateman to design the afterlife. It’s an odd, anti-immersive layer that’s constantly impinging on proceedings, and, honestly, it’s hard to love a game that begins with a message from HR threatening you with disciplinary measures if your performance dips too low.
But it’s not just the weird sterility of its presentation that’s a turn off; there’s something lacking on a more fundamental level too. Zois, crucially, are deeply boring creations, their individuality primarily manifesting as a stat in a submenu rather than in their behaviour onscreen. This mostly feels like a consequence of InZoi’s more realistic, understated approach – The Sims’ wild but immediately readable gesticulations are here replaced by disinterested shrugs and fleeting emojis that convey little about Zois’ inner lives, or the impact your choices make on them. In Maxis’ game, you can follow the line of emotional cause and effect simply by watching a conversation play out, even from a distance – Sims will swoon, stamp their feed in a rage, sob into their hands – but Zois, in comparison, feel like emotionally impenetrable marionettes. And without The Sims’ upfront expressiveness, its unpredictability, and its melodramatic soap opera charm, InZoi ends up feeling like a poor story telling device.
InZoi, then, has been a bit of a disappointment so far. Its good bits – the slick presentation, the expansive customisation, and the simple pleasures of tootling around in such richly detailed worlds – are continually undermined by the void where a bit of virtual humanity should be. But even so, I can’t deny there’s something here; a solid systemic foundation that feels ready to be tuned and finessed into a far more interesting game – and that, of course, is precisely what early access is for. There are other questions still to be answered that could make the difference between a long-lasting legacy and a short shelf life – how Krafton plans to introduce monetisation after early access, for instance, or whether InZoi can generate enough enthusiasm to support the kind of dazzlingly rich modding scene that’s helped sustain The Sims for so long. It’s a start, though, and I’m curious to see where Krafton goes from here.
