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. 🤔

On paper, InZoi lives up to all the hype. Admittedly, there's nothing truly new here, and even less in the way of fresh ideas—save perhaps a city-wide karma system I'm still trying to wrap my head around—but it's a generous, well-produced package that feels much more like a successor to the ambitious and beloved The Sims 3 than the official sequel series fans eventually received. It's present in InZoi's fully traversable worlds, though the scale of their spaces compared to the few significant points of interest—a shop, a library, a cafe, perhaps—means the novelty wears off quickly.

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. 😩

It also doesn't help that Krafton has chosen to frame its game in the most unappealing way possible, casting you as a novice corporate employee forced to play InZoi in a pristine office building that looks like what you'd get if you asked Patrick Bateman to design the afterlife. It's a strange, anti-immersive layer that constantly interferes with the proceedings, and honestly, it's hard to love a game that opens with a message from HR threatening you with disciplinary action if you 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. 🌟