InZoi🔥 The new competition that threatens The Sims!

You know how the old saying goes: you wait 25 years for a Sims competitor, and suddenly three appear at the same time. The charming Tiny Life is available in Early Access now, and cozy contender Paralives arrives later this year. But before that, there's InZoi, from South Korean giant Krafton – an ultra-polished, mega-budget take on the classic life-sim game that sells itself primarily on its slick worlds and photorealistic look. But is that enough to dethrone the king of the genre? After about six hours with the game, I'm not so sure. 🤔

En papel, InZoi cumple con todas las expectativas. Hay que admitir que no hay nada realmente nuevo aquí, y aún menos en cuanto a ideas frescas – salvo quizás por un sistema de karma en toda la ciudad que sigo intentando entender – pero es un paquete generoso, bien producido que se siente mucho más como un sucesor del ambicioso y querido The Sims 3 que de la serie de secuelas oficiales que los fans finalmente recibieron. Está presente en los mundos completamente transitables de InZoi, aunque la escala de sus espacios en comparación con los escasos puntos de interés significativos – una tienda, una biblioteca, un café, tal vez – significa que la novedad se desvanece rápido.

And it's in InZoi's extensive customization options: virtually every object can be reimagined with player-defined colors, patterns, and materials; the areas public can can be furnished and remodeled as easily as homes, and even city streets can be given a more personal touch, changing the flora, banners, nightly celebrations, and seasonal decor. If there's one thing that feels like an ace up InZoi's sleeve, it's these customization options impressively detailed, and the excitement they are likely to bring to the most creative players. 🎨✨

And yes, InZoi is undoubtedly a thing of beauty, albeit in a somewhat bland way. When the sun shines down on the tall, hypermodern skyscrapers and tree-lined streets of Down Town, or slowly bathes the beaches of Bliss Bay in golden hues at dusk, it's hard not to feel a little dazzled by its Unreal Engine 5-powered attempt at photorealism.

It creates a much more realistic atmosphere that immediately sets InZoi apart from its competition. And while it's an aesthetic that probably won't stand up to the technological advances Much like The Sims 4's more stylized approach, there's a Rockstar-esque air of verisimilitude to InZoi's richly constructed worlds, which helps create a convincing backdrop of life – especially when you're controlling your Zois at ground level. 🌆🌅

As for what happens against that backdrop, there are – perhaps inevitably – few surprises. InZoi, like its contemporaries, conjures its illusion of life through a wide range of simple interactions and systems superficial. You click on an object, select from a list of contextual options – maybe you admire a painting to improve your Zoi’s artistic talent or fart just for fun – and, somewhere behind the scenes, a number comes up.

In this way, the Zois work, play, flirt and learn; their constant mood swings further influence their interactions with the world, all while fulfilling their primal needs of sleeping, eating, washing, and relieving themselves. And while we're on the subject, yes, it's weird that the Zois shower in towels and do their business with their pants on. InZoi doesn't so much reinvent the genre as repackage it, but its stylish approach to realism at least presents the familiar in unconventional ways. And crucially, while there's plenty of room to expand, its core offering is substantial enough not to immediately feel like a cynical exercise in future exploitation. 💡

The problem is that everything is so soulless – its spectacle fails to hide its lack of personality. While The Sims seems designed for maximum chaos and carnage (sometimes to an exhausting degree), InZoi barely managed to muster a memorable event in the six hours I played. I wandered its empty streets, toured its few notable landmarks, sang a song in a park, and tried without success in making friends with strangers before returning home.

By the time I’d had enough 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—slow even on its fastest setting—continued to tick. If this had been The Sims, I’d probably have been dealing with several accidental deaths, a urination incident, at least one breakup or desperately reckless flirtation, an alien probe, and a couple of house fires in the same span.

And while it's definitely liberating to play a life sim that isn't constantly teetering on the edge of farce, InZoi leans so far toward the other extreme that it barely has a pulse, let alone a sense of life. 😩

Tampoco ayuda que Krafton haya optado por encuadrar su juego de la manera más poco atractiva posible, presentándote como un novato empleado corporativo obligado a jugar InZoi en un edificio de oficinas impoluto que parece lo que obtendrías si le pidieras a Patrick Bateman que diseñara el más allá. Es una capa extraña y antiinmersiva que constantemente interfiere en los acontecimientos, y, sinceramente, es difícil querer un juego que comienza con un mensaje de RRHH amenazándote con medidas disciplinarias si tu low performance too much. 🙄

But it's not just the curious sterility of their presentation that's off-putting; there's something missing at a more fundamental level. The Zois are, crucially, deeply boring creations, their individuality manifesting primarily as a statistic in a submenu rather than in their on-screen behavior. This mostly seems a consequence of InZoi's more realistic and subtle approach—the wild but immediately legible gestures of The Sims are here replaced by disinterested shrugs and fleeting emojis that convey nothing about the Zois' inner lives, or the impact of your choices on them.

In the Maxis game, you can follow the line of cause and effect. emotional effect simply by watching how it develops a conversation, even from a distance—Sims sigh, pound the floor in anger, cry into their hands—but Zois, by comparison, feel like emotionally impervious puppets. And without The Sims' direct expressiveness, unpredictability, and soap opera-like melodramatic charm, InZoi ends up feeling like a poor narrative device. 📉

InZoi, then, has been a minor disappointment so far. Its positive aspects – the polished presentation, extensive customization, and the simple pleasures of wandering around such richly detailed worlds – are continually undermined by the void where there should be a bit of virtual humanity. But, still, I can't deny that there are something Here; a solid systemic foundation that looks ready to be tweaked and refined into a much more interesting game – and that, of course, is precisely what Early Access is for.

There are still other questions to be answered that could mean the difference between a lasting legacy and a short lifespan—like how Krafton plans to introduce monetization after Early Access, or whether InZoi can generate enough buzz to support the kind of dazzlingly rich modding scene that has helped sustain The Sims for so long. It's a start, though, and I'm curious to see where Krafton goes from here. 🌟