Paralives Early Access Review – IGN

Rounding out the start of each new family, you’ll also need to choose a specific Storyteller, which is a unique mechanic that will dictate the difficulty of your day-to-day life. Storytellers dole out cards every dawn that cause random events to happen in the lives of your Parafolk. One day, you might get a free computer from work. Another day, one of your household members may be encouraged to cheat on their spouse. This system adds much-needed entropy to your household’s otherwise routine shenanigans. While many of the prompts seemed repetitive in concept, I found them to be effective in practice — they do well to keep things fresh in the long term, which is one of the biggest bugbears of the genre.

Once you have your household, the next step is to find a home, which once again gives you the choice between a pre-designed estate or an empty block with a budget to spend on all the essential amenities, like beds, baths, and beyond. Similar to the Paramaker, Paralives’ build mode currently has a fairly limited pool of items and options, but there’s at least enough customisability here to keep you busy building for hours on end.

In construction mode, you erect walls, add windows and doors, and then decorate the space with a selection of modern interior options. It’s an approachable process, thanks in part to a togglable snap tool that ensures your architecture is balanced and beautiful. Still, cowboy builders need not worry as there’s plenty of room to get weird with it, too, and Paralives isn’t keen to hold you to any building code. When renovating your space, you can place items almost anywhere you’d like. As a huge fan of cosy, cluttered spaces, I squeaked with joy when I realised I could stack ramen cups on top of kitchen fridges and select random throw pillows to jazz up plain couches. Yuckier touches like mould, damp, and body hair can also be dotted around for the sickos out there, with Paralives allowing you to make a truly bespoke, if totally gross, living space.

This customisation is a double-edged sword, though – while beautiful, much of the world isn’t actually interactable. Those ramen noodles might create a cool vibe, but they can never be eaten, and the cosy throw pillows will never crumple under the weight of a sleepy character, which feels like a missed opportunity. Such aesthetically pleasing but useless items also crop up in the open world and inevitably lead to deflating moments as you realise you can walk through a moving train completely unscathed. There has been an effort to provide the background city with a sense of liveliness through a daily newspaper and rotation of activities like run clubs and BBQs. Even so, these events can feel rather flat, with locals milling around as if on a timer. As such, Paralives’ setting doesn’t feel like an entirely cohesive society just yet.

Moment-to-moment survival comes down to meeting a few basic needs: Hygiene, Hunger, Sleep, and the Toilet. Achieving these needs is a constant uphill battle, though failing them so badly that you die isn’t so easy either. As with real life, Parafolks’ days are split between working a job that pays the bills, toying around with home appliances, and chatting with the locals to try and make friends. The way you progress is fairly rudimentary; you’ll often be stuck reading a book to level up skills or waiting out the in-game clock for a work shift to end. Thankfully, there is some reprieve in the socialising portion, with Paralives opting for a refreshingly alternate approach.

Instead of selecting another character and choosing a conversation topic, you’ll need the Parafolk to interact long enough to fill a conversation meter. From there, you’ll have a small pool of subjects to choose from, which includes asking other Parafolk if they’re single in a flirtatious way, telling jokes, and chatting about general life events. At first, I didn’t love this radical style, but it grew on me over my play sessions, and I eventually realised how handy this hands-off approach was. Instead of sitting with one of my household members, clicking topics on repeat, I could move on to another task or person while they were schmoozing, and periodically jump in to keep the conversation flowing. Like spinning personality plates, I could lock in as one started to wobble, before jumping over to another conversation to keep that one in play, too.

Alas, not even expert helicopter parents like me can keep everything in check, and across my time with Paralives, I fell prey to the inevitable chaos of an Early Access life simulator. One day, during some routine cupcake-baking, my house burned down because the firefighters kept spawning just outside my front door without being able to step through it, as if they were mocking me. Soon after, another of my households got stuck in some kind of viral loop, circulating a sickness through the entire family, like a never-ending, festering plague. During this time, they all had to take turns running back and forth between their beds and the home’s single toilet – no prizes for guessing how that shook out.

Such unfortunate occurrences might seem like frustrating, gameplay-halting events that make you want to ragequit. But its spirited art direction and goofy charms manage to make these scenarios feel funny and endearing to experience, as if they were intentional. Where the day-to-day activities lacked the depth to keep me entertained, these scrappy edges showcased more of the rich, chaotic personality that bleeds through all aspects of Paralives, and makes it stand out as a worthwhile contender amongst its more substantial and established peers in the genre.