Paralives gameplay trailer proves it's a real Sims 4 competitor

If it wasn't clear that Paralives is gunning for The Sims 4's crown, it is now that the Paralives team published a lengthy gameplay trailer showing eight minutes of daily life. Many of the details should be familiar to anyone who's played The Sims in some capacity, like increasing skills through certain activities, using those skills to get a new job, managing clashing personalities in a household — all the basics. But the differences often include features Sims players have requested for years, and not just the color wheel and option to modify furniture using in-game tools.

Take character creation (or "Para" creation, to use the game's term) for example. It has you spread personality points across four different categories — charisma, creativity, physique, and mind — and then pick a vibe, social perk, and talent. Your character's personality levels over time, and you can augment these things, like changing the "good at nothing" trait so it makes nearby people sad when you're trying to learn a skill. How all this plays out over a character's lifetime is still unclear, but at the very least, it gives the impression that personalities are a bit more multifaceted, like the archetypes you pick at the start have more storytelling potential.

There's also an option to pick difficulty modes by choosing a storyteller at the start in what looks like a "we saw your vibes from across the bar" scenario. It's meant to "change gameplay parameters," though what that means is rather less clear. When the devs picked the middle difficulty option, the menu that appeared showed a dozen or so toggles for adjusting character pregnancy. The options closely resembled what you get from some of the more popular Sims 4 pregnancy mods. It's nice to have those choices built it, but I'm not sure what that has to do with difficulty (or what a hard-mode pregnancy might entail).

Then the trailer spits you out in town, which looks like the biggest and most potentially interesting change from The Sims. You'll buy a lot and house, like normal with this kind of game, but the lots are all part of the town. There's no distinct neighborhood district or downtown dwellings like in The Sims 3's open world and no instanced areas like Sims 4's worlds. Everything's just here, together, in one community, and there's a greater emphasis on community life. Shops have special sales or days where they give away free items to bolster business, and festivals just happen without being national holidays like they often are in The Sims.

Leveling up skills and talking with other characters looks a lot like what Maxis has done for years in The Sims, but there is a neat little detail in the Paralives trailer. Randomness governs certain interactions, including romantic ones apparently, and other factors influence the chance of success, like your skill level, relationship status, and environmental conditions. Successful interactions in The Sims are sort of random, though as your skill level increases, it's usually a safe bet that you'll get what you want. Here, having a high skill only slightly contributed to chances for success. There's a not-insignificant number of Sims 4 mods designed to make conversation more dynamic and less like it follows a pattern you control, and I'm hopeful relationships feel more natural — or at least less predictable — with the way Paralives handles them.

Jobs still seem like rabbit holes (where you don't control your character or influence their performance directly), and even with the potential improvements, it all seems a bit like "what if The Sims, but in a cozy color palette?" If nothing else, though, it seems like an ambitious starting point for the Paralives team to build on as they work toward the game's full release. Paralives launches in early access on Steam on May 25.