Paralives

I wanted to like Paralives. I really did. I’ve followed this game for years, watched the trailers and development updates, and hoped it would finally bring some fresh competition to the life sim genre. After actually playing it, I genuinely cannot understand how the current build costs **€39.99**. And before somebody types “EARLY ACCESS” at me: yes. I know. Early Access does not mean “you’re not allowed to criticise the game that currently exists.” It does not mean the core game can be empty, buggy and barely functional and everyone has to give it a thumbs-up because maybe it’ll be good in 2028. There are MANY Early Access games that launch with a strong, fun core and then expand from there. Paralives feels like someone released the skeleton of a life sim and said, “don’t worry, we’ll add the organs later.” The biggest problem is Live Mode. There is basically nothing to do. Wake up. Eat. Go to a rabbit-hole job. Come home. Fill needs. Grind a skill. Click through shallow social interactions. Sleep. Repeat. Technically Paras have traits. Technically they have wants, emotions and relationships. But where is the actual personality? Two Paras with different traits still feel overwhelmingly like the same empty doll with slightly different menu options. They don’t surprise me, make me laugh, annoy me, develop little habits, or make me think “of COURSE you would do that.” They don’t generate stories. They wait for me to click on them. That is a catastrophic problem for a LIFE SIMULATION GAME. And this is especially disappointing because years of promotional material made the Paras look expressive, quirky and alive. Some promotional footage around Early Access also showed interactions and behaviour that the released build simply doesn’t reproduce. Maybe the developers consider that representative/cinematic footage rather than literal gameplay, but if you use footage to market a playable Early Access release, people are naturally going to expect the game they’re buying to resemble it. The current Live Mode feels less like the result of years of development and more like the team is still figuring out what the actual gameplay loop is supposed to be. Recent updates have added basic things like assigning Paras to beds, storing food in refrigerators, hugging friends/family and inviting Paras to lots. I’m glad those things are being added, but those aren’t exciting expansion features. They’re “wait, how was this not already part of the basic life simulation?” features. It feels like the game entered Early Access several development stages too early. And it is BUGGY. I have a high-end PC. Paralives has absolutely no business stuttering and freezing as much as it does. Interactions fail, Paras get confused, pathfinding breaks, actions simply decide not to happen. People with extremely powerful current hardware are reporting the same kind of performance issues. Which makes the visuals even harder to excuse. I know this is subjective, but I think the game is ugly. Stylised graphics are not the problem. I love stylised games. The problem is that Paralives often looks unfinished rather than intentionally stylised. The lighting can be dreadful. Interiors sometimes look like raw models opened in Blender before the lighting pass was finished: flat and harsh at the same time, with characters not properly grounded in the environment. And I really dislike how the Paras themselves look. Their anatomy and proportions frequently look awkward to me, especially faces, shoulders, torsos and limbs. Not charmingly exaggerated — just off. Then there are the contour lines over the bodies and that permanent reddish “sickly blush” effect. Why does everyone look faintly feverish? I understand what the artists are going for. I simply don’t think it works. This would matter far less if Live Mode were fantastic. But Live Mode is the weakest part of the game. So what am I left with? A flexible building tool attached to an extremely shallow life simulator, running poorly, with visuals I dislike, sold for **€39.99 in Early Access**. FORTY. EUROS. “Yes, but there will never be paid DLC!” Great. I genuinely respect that policy and hope they keep it. It does not magically make the product currently on my screen worth €40. I’m reviewing the game I can play NOW, not an imaginary future version where the roadmap is complete, Live Mode has depth, Paras have personalities, performance is fixed and every promised system works beautifully. Maybe that game will exist. I hope it does. I’m not paying €40 based on fanfiction about 2028. And then there’s the community. The toxic positivity around Paralives is exhausting. A section of the fanbase has invested so much into the idea of Paralives as “the wholesome indie alternative to The Sims” that criticism of the actual product gets treated like a moral offence. You dislike something? “Unrealistic expectations.” Live Mode is empty? “It’s Early Access.” Performance is bad? “Small indie team.” You criticise the developers? Apparently you secretly want the game to fail. No. Sometimes a game just isn’t very good yet. I’ve seen positive Steam reviews that basically say: “It’s incredibly buggy, Live Mode is empty, half the features aren’t here and performance is bad, but I believe in the developers ❤️👍” That’s not reviewing the game. That’s voting for its potential. Steam asks whether you recommend the product, not whether you emotionally support the developers. I’ve also seen reasonable criticism dogpiled, and there have even been public claims from critics saying they received threats over negative opinions. Whether every individual claim can be verified or not, the atmosphere is already obnoxious enough. Paralives is software. Paralives Studio is a company selling software. They are charging money for it. People are allowed to criticise it. And please stop using “small indie team” like a magic spell that makes normal standards disappear. Small teams have made phenomenal games. Indie developers are game developers, not helpless woodland creatures who will perish if somebody leaves a negative Steam review. If anything, Early Access is exactly when honest criticism matters most. There ARE things I respect here: the build tools are ambitious, customisation is flexible, the no-paid-DLC policy is admirable, and there are clever ideas buried in the game. But right now Paralives feels like a promising prototype for a game I might want to play several years from now, not a €40 life simulator I would recommend today. Early Access explains why a game is unfinished. It does not automatically justify **how unfinished it is**. For €39.99, I expected a solid core game with missing features. What I got feels like a beta test with a very expensive admission fee. **Not recommended.**

I can't recommend this as an early access title - this is still firmly in demo, playtest territory. The price point is not justified for where the game is. It's just not anywhere near what I'm hoping for 3 months after first purchasing. I understand it's a smaller team but after so many years of crowd funding and development, this feels too much like an early demo than 7.5 years of production that has had pretty decent amount of funding. My reasoning: - More doll house than sim, you have to make the fun - Is very chuggy in performance, gets frustrating to play after about an hour - Controls are slow and cumbersome - Confusing updates and no clear goals with the development team. I'm confused about street names and amoung us collabs, being prioritised over optimising or a basic day night cycle.

Paralives has a great potential and I do like the game and its ideas. Though, in its current state, I sadly cannot recommend it. Why? Please find under the listed reasons that personally prevent me to fully enjoy Paralives. These are my own opinions and experiences: - I am a Mac and Windows user, and tested/played it on both machines. Both largely meet minimum requirements and even more. The Mac (M4 chip, recent model, only some months old) that can run The Sims 4 with 100+ additional content and DLCs on Medium, even High graphics, some enhanced options and visual effects ON, can't run Paralives well at all. Lag, freeze lag, stuttering, overheating of the machine, delay in actions, unresponsiveness, UI issues and UI scaling issues while staying in the recommended scaling ranges (tested multiple options), the mouse clicks were not followed. All those issues also happened on the Windows desktop, but were worse on Mac despite it having higher specs that the desktop. Even on the very lowest settings, while Paralives should run on the highest ones but the machines can't run it at all on those, the game is almost unplayable, and even sometimes IS unplayable. - The masculine frames/men/masculine clothing options are like in The Sims 4 and previous Sims, cruelly lacking. When equipped with masculine clothing and set with a male/masculine frame, my Parafolks still looked like they had breast tissue, and it was very disturbing. While I highly appreciate the Artistic direction and have enormous respect for the artists behind it, as an artist myself, the shadows and lighting are extremely badly rendered. If you try to create the average "anime handsome, manly man/ikemen", they will still look like too feminine in comparison to other games with expanded character creations options (simulations, RPG, etc). There seems to be way too much of an emphasis on feminine clothing, frames, options, make-up, accessories, etc. - Colour wise, the character personalisation is not accurate and deceiving. When I pick a certain colour on the colour wheel, I do expect this colour to roughly show up accurately. Of course, there is texture, material, lighting, other surrounding colours like carnation impacting how one colour is being perceived by one's eyes, but the difference is way too much in Paralives, adding to the customisation of a Parafolk being frustrating and too lengthy. - Building. I tried for HOURS to build in the little spot next to the Chemist, the cheap plot inbetween the two high buildings. It was an absolute nightmare. What should have been a fun, exciting experience, a cute building, made me rage so much I quit the game at two occasions. There is nothing worse than having a good tool, even an amazing and innovating one, and realise the execution is a complete mess. Why was the building grid straight, then when I try to build, this exact same straight grid, turns in a diagonal way, and suddenly stops being a half-grid? I tried multiple building options on this plot, researched online if i did something wrong, followed in game instructions, learnt about how it should work, and it SHOULD work... in theory. Not in practice. - It is still too long to cook and eat. Still better than the Sims though. I can personally cook toasts or an omelet and eat them in less than 30-45mn. Why does it have to take 2 in game hours +? Does it include partial digestion time? - It is surely complaining too much there, but instruments sounds, especially the Plazza piano one, does not seem to be implemented...? I am sorry to be so critical, but after 5+ years of development, after such a successful fundraising, after the expansion of the studio and employees, even if you take into account the fact simulation games are EXTREMELY hard to develop, this Beta release is not satisfactory at all. It should be an Alpha. I don't care if the Studio does a "7 Days to die" with a seemingly eternal development phase, at least 7 Days to die was playable and deeply enjoyable, even if f-ugly at first and for years it stayed like this. Why do I mention 7 Days to die there? Because Paralives massively failed at something. It is great to have a pretty game, with pretty characters, graphics, decor, etc. It is way better and more optimal to have a mid looking game that WORKS. By focusing all the visual aspect of Paralives too much, the development took more time than it should have, and many players like me are not disappointed by the Artistic direction, but by the performance of it. Why did inZOI fail? Same reason. All pretty, almost nothing under. It's like buying a pretty book but the content is riddled with mistakes, inaccuracies, etc. Having a pretty website designed by a Web Designer, but the Integrator and Web Dev could not have a real say in it, so nothing runs as it should. So I can't recommend Paralives for now. It is good, but infuriating to play. It's in Early access, okay. But way too many studios now release their games in Early access while being way too incomplete, and then wonder why their reputation gets affected. Yes, a studio needs funds. But when managed badly, it will bring down the credibility and reputation of their beloved game, and will ultimately lose prospecting funds in the long run because of that. I do not want to only stay on a bad note, and many points are great about Paralives. So let's speak about them to be fair: - The artstyle is so pretty. You can feel the humans behind it. The world is nicely designed, great colours, lighting, you can feel the hours passing by. - Amazing choice of furniture and decors. Some names chosen for them are hilarious. Makes me think about an IKEA catalogue, but "harsher" lol. Some items were... unexpected. But gladly welcomed! - Heterochromia. Asymmetrical accessories. THE things Maxis never implemented in The Sims franchise while being piss easy to do so compared to other things. - I complained about the Colour Wheel, but at least there IS a colour wheel. You know the thing Maxis never gave us back in the Sims 4? Yes, that. Having to install mods just to have more eye and hair colours is ridiculous. Thank you Paralives for giving us this customisation option. - There is a freaking bookshop and shroomies. - Community Bundle thingy in a Stardew Valley style. - LGBTQIA+ options. Body frames, clothing, clothing preferences, facial and body traits, pronouns, nicknames, orientation, etc. - Inclusivity options. Skin colours, facial traits, eye/mouth/nose shapes, scarring like top surgery scars, stretch marks, moles, freckles, etc. Hair types, variety of clothing and fashion. - Disability representation through character customisation, decor items that in the future, as told by the team, will be functional for some. - BASIC CLUTTER ITEMS THAT ARE NOT BEHIND A PAYWALL. *wink wink the sims* All of these positive points makes buying the game very tempting, and Paralives is full of pleasant surprises and still is a great addition to one's Steam library. But... if you deeply need to relax like me in your daily life, if you tend to ragequit and be impatient like me, skip the game for now. It will make you want to write a negative review like I did, and too many of them are not good for the studio. They are transparent and work very hard despite all the complaints I listed. Thank you to whoever took the time to read that pseudo-novel, have a good day UwU