Paralives describes itself on Steam as
Paralives is an upcoming doll house life simulation indie game for PC and Mac. Build your dream house, create some characters and manage their lives the way you want inside their homes and all around an open world town!
Several articles have been written about it but this PCGamesN article does a pretty good job explaining some of the features the game is planning to have.
Paralives also has a website and Patreon for those interested.
While it’s not The Sims and it’s only going to be reaching early access in early 2025 I wanted to say I’m fine with people post about Paralives and other Sims adjacent stuff here. I like the idea of promoting smaller projects whether it’s games, mods, or open source engine recreations.
To be clear though by life sim I mean general life simulations not job simulations like firefighter or trucker simulators. That’s a bit too general and probably better suited for general gaming communities on Lemmy.
My only hope is that people realise these are often fan made creations with teams significantly smaller than EA’s and that they set their expectations accordingly. They might need time to breath and develop.
This is still a really small Lemmy community but if you have any thoughts feel free to let me know in the comments.
I have thought about maybe making an overview post of all the upcoming (and existing) “characters living in a household” life sims. Maybe we could call those “simslikes” and “simslites”? The same way that gamers call specific types of games roguelikes/roguelites.
Maybe. I feel like life sim does a pretty good job describing them as a genre.
I don’t think they always need to be lumped together with the Sims series. People do that with the Pokemon series and monster collecting games for example and I feel like it paints them as unoriginal cash grabs.
What other games can you think of other than Paralives?
Upcoming games in the genre:
The term “life sim” can apply to something like Animal Crossing, where you play as one character living their life. I sometimes use terms like “life sim/household management game” or “dollhouse sim” to describe the specific type of game, but the first one is clunky and some sims players use “dollhouse” as a negative term. So it’s easier to just say “life sim” and specify if needed.