I was a huge Sims girly, like many of my 1990s-born companions. For hundreds of hours as a teenager and young adult I have been eagerly following people I know, the characters from the show I was obsessed with, or the original characters I wanted to try, and their paths and ambitions of life. I played it as a traditional life sim, and it also became a strange and crude lore. I played all the cheats and glitches and I, of course, put my Sims in the pool and took out the ladders so they could own.
As I can, I was unable to capture any of these feelings in Inzoi, Krafton’s Early Access Life Simulator. This was not normally immediately comparable to other games if not charged by lifting up all the parts of the design of the 25-year-old series that defined the genre. At first, I led the perfect Zoi for my shiny, light realistic model around the world, to shiny, light athletes, models, and I was simply 30 years old and feared that the whims of my mind would wither over time. But in the end I have to insist that it’s not me who’s wrong. Inzoy has a terrible atmosphere.
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Start where you have to start: Create a character. Zois, the game’s controllable character, is quickly rendered with slightly creepy valley details. Absolutely everyone is beautiful, perfect skin and hair, God wants you to make a fat person. You need to choose between “male” and “female” bodies. Zoi’s gender can be set as male, female, or non-binary, but they are trapped in many baggage that those body types imply. For example, you cannot create a beard on a woman’s body.
In short, in the case of a life simulator, you can only simulate life like something like plastic. The Sims also have restrictions, but their cartoonish style is more generous. Inzoi’s photorealism means a world close to ourselves, and therefore the portrayal between the feelings of possibility and impossible being more recharged. This is more than just creating characters. Once you’re ready to create Zois and join the game, there’s a lot to do. Build careers, skills and hobbies. Explore the world and visit places. Navigate your relationship with other Zois. But each of these is just as shallow.
Career, skills and hobbies can easily advance. Your Zoi will have a series of overlapping ambitions and drives your Zoi to push you into choosing something from the optional dissonance. For example, Eddie Jenkins, who wants a life of excitement, is a fun and cheerful adventurer and achievement of value. I let him work because these probably impact the auto-selected ambitions to become a fitness star.
First, he purchases some home gym equipment and wants to use it three times. This is easy enough. He then reads 10 fitness books and wants to level his fitness score to six. This requires steady reading over several days, and reading also increases your skill score, so there aren’t many others. He then spends three days and finishes his entire ambition by hitting 10 fitness levels. All of this took a week in the game, probably an hour of real time.
Of course, I could have spread this in other activities, but everything else feels the same as vapid. Eddie works as an amusement park employee three days a week – which is considered a full-time job – during which he interacts roughly with vending machines and vehicles and roams.
His housemate Helen, a journalist, occasionally stands up to ask how to proceed to tackle an article. Two consecutive times in a row in a few days of separation, she discovers that the editor was doing something shady and got a bonus to call them out, but the amusement park doesn’t seem to have comparable speed bumps. Eddie walks around. He makes vague gestures in the bottle. Sometimes, like all Zoa, he gets the fleeting desire to do something different, like boxing or tell someone about his accomplishments. This will change his mood and in theory make certain tasks easier, but in reality he doesn’t do anything because all tasks are frictionless.
Eddie’s intangibility at work extends to all the interactions outside of Zoi’s home. Inzoi boasts an open world. You can walk around as Zoi and… look at things, I think. But I don’t know why you want to. Inzoi doesn’t seem to think that’s worth it either. If you actually choose to go somewhere specifically, Zoi will jump on a bus or taxi, and the world will be replaced by a loading screen. These areas should open up a self-driven narrative for creative players if Inzoi had the foothold to support it. it’s not. You can interact with the objects in these places in 1000 different ways, but they all feel just as intangible as doing a 72 hour pull-up without reward.
One aspect that potentially includes some of the creative sparks I’ve been hoping for is how the building works. I wasn’t good at this. My Sims lived in an ugly boxy house covered in the same cheap paintings as the discrepant wallpaper. But I remember the ability to have a bowling alley alley carpet and strange fun sculpture, and Inzoi think you can put a gif of a terrible loop of ice cream trucks in your garden with fireworks on your walls. (Of course, any pre-built home that moves Zoa to Will is a somewhat barren interior designer but perfectly decorated like cutting edge, so if you have skills I don’t want to do so, there’s no doubt that players can also make these kinds of homes.)
Finally, I started to get to know other Zois. From mint chocolate to mental health, there is an optional waterfall where you can talk to other characters. Some of them are really strange, like “Your soul chose you” or “Your life is just one layer of dreams.” a Many Of them, this game feels like it’s written by the worst people on LinkedIn. All Zoi are obsessed with AI, Crypto and the stock market. They all want to be influencers and are constantly thinking about social media metrics. (The game is not properly localized yet. There are many remaining Koreans, with some broken strings hanging HTML tags.)
They insult people by wearing hats for whatever you’ve been working on, so it’s almost impossible to leave Zois alone and build the social life you’re aiming for. And it’s not just shaming. At one point, after I exchanged from my wife and then swapped from my wife to a married couple, I instructed them to spend a few minutes talking about what she wanted to get divorced.
We can explain in detail all the ways Inzoi’s vibe is simply not good, but here’s the last big one. The whole game is wrapped in a meta-layer like this assassin’s belief that it really controls (??) a game developer working in a building full of cats (???)
The only thing this does in the game is to add a veneer of something that doesn’t have a corporate soul throughout. The only thing I simulate is 9-5 in the life of Corporate Girl Boss’s life, the terrifying, flawless face and body, the obsession with influencers, and the senseless achievements as an alternative to the opportunity to find authentic stories to tell. And honestly, I’m the humiliation to all the strange teenage girls who have had weekends in the Sims burned a lot of family to the ground so they could seduce Grimm Grim Reaper.
This review is based on early access review code provided by the developer.