Life By You might be a game that’s technically within the life simulator genre, but it could just as easily be a god game. Yes, it’s challenging The Sims’ crown, and many people will surely play it as a drop-in replacement, but this game’s design is so inherently customisable and mod-able that you barely have to play within the “rules” if you don’t want to. At every stage, you can inject your whims and desires into Life By You for the ultimate in role-playing fantasy.
At its core as a life sim, Life By You looks pleasantly broad and expansive, right from the off. Our hands-off demo followed Ronnie Maisonet as they got their day started and went to work at the gym.
Looking to continue their crawl up that particular career path from a basic trainer to higher positions at the company. To do so, you’ll have various performance goals to meet, whether it’s making sure that the gym is clean and tidy for customers, reviewing gym applications, creating new workouts, or simply practising yoga routines to run classes with.
Bumping into a colleague in the morning, the conversation that follows is a mixture of personality traits and a deep real-language dialogue tree that aims to cater for whatever situation your human can face. Perhaps feeling a little put out after missing out on a promotion, an antagonistic set of dialogue options let Ronnie just outright say “You didn’t deserve that promotion”, but one of the most immediate ways you can personalise the role-playing in the game is to replace the written dialogue on the fly. The underlying chat tree doesn’t change from that, but you can inject a little more personality into how you stink up the workplace relationships.
However, just as in real life, a job can be just a job. Ronnie also has a budding interest outside of work in gardening and flower arranging. Tending to her front garden is a simple case of watering the plants to start off with, but with more experience and levelling up, she’ll learn about fertilising and more. She can also take cuttings and use them to spend time flower arranging indoors, creating a bespoke decoration for a housewarming party in the evening. Get good enough at it, though, and she could pack in her job at the gym and instead start a career as a florist.
But here’s the thing: none of this can apply to you if you don’t want it to. If your human’s tummy is rumbling or they’re busting for a pee, but you don’t want it to interrupt the task that they’re currently engaged in? Well, by default Life By You lets you mouse over the pee meter and drag it out of the pants-wetting danger zone. It’s a change that’s up there with Fire Emblem making permadeath optional – you can still choose to abide by the character needs meters, or you can deactivate this cheat within the game’s options.
Hannah Culver, Senior Game Designer explained, “We’re doing some things for players who want a more directed experience, which you saw a little bit in the demo with the quest bar. There are a lot of little directed quests throughout the game, and you can choose to ignore them if you want, but I think they give players that direction and something specifically to do instead of just ‘live life! There’s options for whether you want that more directed experience, or if you want the more open-ended game.”
From the relatively short hands-off demo, we’ve only been able to scratch the surface of what’s possible in Life By You, but something that really stood out (and which Paradox Tectonic were keen to showcase) were the mix of small touches and wider freedoms.
When cooking, your human will have different animations for making a salad – chopping and mixing – to making a steak – frying. When they take a shower, they’ll leave a pile of clothes on the floor that needs to be tidied up later. The flower arrangements will be visually different depending on which flowers were used. And when making adjustments to the home, items can quickly and easily be modified and scaled on multiple axis, and with a full spectrum of colours for individual parts – in this instance, placing a window in the bedroom to fit above and not drop behind the bed’s headboard.
And then on the broader scale, there’s a full town to explore that’s without loading screens. All of the homes and businesses are fully realised in this setting, there’s other people going about their day-to-day routines, and you can then just dive in and start fiddling with it as you see fit, taking control of other people, modifying other buildings and lots, and more. Add to that just a wealth of other ideas and content and it’s difficult to grasp what the limits of life By You are at this time.
“I’ve only been working on it for about a year and a half, but in that time, it continually snowballs and never seems to get smaller,” Hannah said. “We’ll think of new things that we like doing in our everyday lives and think ‘We should add that!'”
For most games that would be a significant problem, as feature creep draws development out for longer and longer, but Paradox Tectonic have half a solution to this in releasing the game first as an Early Access title. Hannah said, “I think that’s another part of why we’re doing Early Access, we really want players to be able to have a voice in what they want a life sim to look like. Potentially it could be anything and everything.”
Then there’s the deeply ingrained support of modding that Life By You will have, thanks to Creator Tools that will allow for conversation and object editing to start with, but with the potential for much more.
Hannah said, “We’re trying to be the most modable life sim ever, so we’re hoping also that players, when we give them the tools that we have, they can make their own modes, whether that’s wilder and bigger than what we [have made], or something super narrow and quest driven.”
Personally, I’m hoping for a Star Trek total conversion mod…
Life By You is the kind of game that life sim fans dream of, aiming to cater to pretty much every type of player of the genre. On the one hand, you can stay within the “rules”, babysitting your humans all the way through life, work, love and beyond, but on the other, you can embrace the sandbox of possibilities to twist the characters, world and game as a whole to do pretty much whatever you want.
Life By You is heading into Early Access on Steam and Epic on 5th March 2024.
