It’s hard to imagine anything even attempting to step up to The Sims, but here we are. As a more “realistic” alternative, inZOI is a beefy competitor, with high-fidelity visuals running on Unreal Engine 5, and a massive focus on self-expression rather than wacky hijinks. It’s an impressive game to look at for sure, making a heck of a first impression with its shiny graphics, extremely detailed character creator, and goofy cat characters strutting around for flavor. After that though, inZOI is the definition of “Early Access,” offering more of a polished up proof of concept than the kind of game it aspires to be. There’s also a weird generative AI piece of the puzzle that not only contradicts the idea of creativity in a virtual space, but contributes very little of value to the experience anyway.
The character creator inZOI starts with is definitely impressive. It immediately shows off the visuals, and offers tons of options for minute details. I’m not the kind of person to move cheek bones around for half an hour, so I opted to tweak some preset options for a few minutes. I basically made a digital version of myself, because that’s the level of creativity I come to sim games armed with. Opting to live alone in a fancy apartment in Not California, I chose not to make any family members, choose some conflicting personality traits, and set off on a journey to… well, make it up as I went along.
Going with the flow
From the jump, I was interested in two things: seeing what happened when my character was left to his own devices, and how easy it would be to interrupt and try to direct the experience. The first thing my virtual self opted to do was start cleaning, whipping out a vacuum cleaner and going to town on the carpets in this luxury apartment I spent more than half my money on. Cleaning is boring though, so I told him to stop being weird and go do something more exciting, like sit down in front of the computer. I found several options there, but writing stood out to me for obvious reasons. I thought it might be fun to see if my little avatar here could become a successful writer, an ambition far too lofty for real life.
After noting that working on writing would improve my critical thinking skills (hell yeah), I got to choose what kind of novel to write. There was a list of genres gated by skill level, and when I chose one I could freely fill in details about what I was creating. I kept the default text of course, which read like machine-translated placeholder text. It was my first virtual novel after all; more effort seemed wasteful. I sat and watched my digital alter ego sit and write, and soon started questioning my motivations. The novel was eventually finished, and I was able to sell it from my inventory for about 15 bucks. It then cost me about that much to walk over to the fridge and reheat some takeout noodles. Uh-oh.
After tidying up it was time to tackle the second book, and see if my slightly-improved critical thinking skills would translate to better pay. Halfway through, my character was overcome with the desire to go out and make a friend. I humored him, and told him to go hop in the elevator to explore outside. The moment he stepped out, he promptly turned back around, rode the elevator back up, then sat back down to work on the book. This realism stuff really hits close to home! The second book turned out better, and sold for 30-something sim smackers. I realized the folly and devastating parallels of this writing endeavor, so I opened up the map and sent our hero to the beach to socialize. One bus ride and loading screen later, I arrived at a mostly empty beach with a lone food truck.
Making friends, and a surprise visit
People started to show up and walk by, so it was time to start chatting. The dialogue options were bizarre to say the least, awkwardly written with no personality or flavor. There was one that was clearly meant to be "talk about stocks," but was an overlong, mangled sentence about "growth" that didn't fit in the word bubble. I let my character do his thing at this point, approaching people and cycling through randomly-chosen options. I set my character’s personality to be laid-back and tranquil, but he kept trying to start arguments with every other person. We managed to make one friend though, and left the beach after the sun went down. The friend sent an awkward, machine-written text message and we responded in kind. Growing pains or AI penmanship? Who can say?
Not sure if anything that happened on day one was a success or not, I sent my avatar to bed. inZOI seemed happy to let me sit there and watch him sleep, but that’s weird, so I manually sped up the clock. My guy hopped out of bed at four in the morning, perfectly charged and ready to roll. Presumably the amount of sleep needed was cut down for gameplay reasons. So much for realism! After breakfast and starting to work on book number three, a literal child rang my doorbell and wanted to hang out. I had not met this child previously, and there were no signs of any parents nearby. He sat at my table and watched me eat, and since the whole situation was kind of uncomfortable, I chose to ignore the kid and went back to work. I’m not sure if the child left or not.
My first day with inZOI was emblematic of the whole experience so far. It’s very easy on the eyes, but otherwise incredibly awkward. All the text in the game reads like it was written by aliens inspired by human medical documentation, and there’s no sauce in watching characters interact with each other. Traits or personality don’t seem to impact anything observable; they just kind of stand there while you watch action timers play out in the UI. The gameplay experience feels like a more sterile, robotic version of The Sims, with way less complexity or interesting things to do. Perhaps inZOI will evolve as its early access period rolls on, but right now people who like to set things up and build will get more out of it than anyone more interested in the simulation part.
inZOI is available now in early access for PC. We acquired our own copy of the game for this article.
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replyLucas White posted a new article, inZOI impressions: Augmented reality and magical cats
