Paralives is home to the kind of architectural creative freedom I haven’t felt from a life sim since The Sims 2

Once upon a time I was a creator of Sims. A moulder of virtual people. Pushing and pulling at sliders to contort pixels like putty, perfectly preening them with makeup and hairstyles and outfits that would compliment the personalities I had invented for them. As I grew older, something shifted. An internalised domestication that suddenly had me gravitating towards building and decorating houses.

First came boxes the size of mansions littered with grand pianos and just about anything willing to clog up some of the sparse, undecorated tiles.Then experimentation—smaller builds, cosier, more cluttered. Something I myself would yearn to live in. While my real-life skillset will never allow me a career as an architect or an interior designer, I’ve long fulfilled that fantasy in the confines of the humble life sim.

And hoo boy, no other life sim has been letting me live out those dreams quite like Paralives. For an early access game crafted by a relatively small team, I have been in awe of what has been achieved despite the numerous bugs and game-breaking glitches. It’s a life sim builder’s dream—I can absolutely tell that Alex Massé and the wider Paralives Studio are simmers-turned-developers, because Paralives’ build mode is packed with stuff that only someone on my absolute sickest of sicko levels could conjure up.

Ow, she’s a brick… house

It’s a mish-mash of all the stuff I’ve sincerely loved across two decades as a Sims player, plus everything that I’ve forever found myself wishing “man, if only this little feature was present”. Paralives is packed with stuff I’ve scoured the internet to mod in for quality-of-life, or to help fulfill whatever vision I was doing my best to lay down a floorplan for.

Always hated how making a house just one wall tile longer was too much, but forgoing it was not enough? Paralives lets you build walls as long or short as you want, unbound by the whims of the grid. Want to create the most diabolically messed up “your did it” star as a liveable abode? You can literally do that. Someone did! You can still adhere to the grid life if you want (which admittedly, I have) but just having that option for freedom is something so many of us have dearly wished for.

Just like the characters I spent so much of my childhood contorting like playdough, Paralives extends that feeling of something so malleable to almost every single decorative and functional item of furniture currently present. I can stretch windows to take up more of my walls, yoink curtains down when their drop is a smidge too short, and turn my two-seater couch into a three or even four-seater if I’m going for a real big family.

It’s one of those things I never knew I needed until I found myself deleting items and cycling through furnishings, telling myself “Ahh, this doesn’t quite fit the space” until the realisation hit me that I could simply make it fit. This seemingly small power allows me so much depth in the way I choose to build, and it’s a shocking realisation just how limiting not having this freedom has been prior to now.

Brick by brick

And I am so happy to see glimpses of The Sims 3—arguably EA’s most creatively freeing entry in the series—with its colour wheel and texture options for infinite swatch possibilities. I popped a full-length wavy wall mirror into a Parafolk’s bedroom only to realise I wasn’t that keen on the vibrant swatches offered by default.

Popping in to create my own and I was able to transform the mirror from a bright acrylic frame to a more sophisticated brass metal one. While Paralives may be nowhere near fellow life sims Inzoi and The Sims in terms of raw number of items available to build and decorate with, it’s felt like I’ve been able to do so much with so little just because of how diverse a single object can become.

It’s given me that same sense of excitement and awe I felt all the way back in The Sims 2 for the first time—that sense of wonder at the perceived vastness of creativity that awaits. Even just being able to scale a little piece of clutter up or down to better fit a small counter, or having unfettered access to just about every surface for cluttering up has given me a sense of giddiness I haven’t felt from the genre in a helluva long time.

It’s one of those feelings that’s only going to grow as Paralives continues to build and evolve—both from Paralives Studio itself and from the wealth of community members who are beginning to trickle in their wonderful custom content creations for us to devour.