Paralives is an indie life simulator game where players build homes and lives to create their own story. Read our review of its early-access build to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Everything We Know About Paralives
Paralives Plot
In Paralives, the player’s life is their story. Players can use the everyday happenings in the city, the people around them, and their personal decisions to shape the lives of their characters. Along the way, players will have to make important decisions that will dictate whether their characters will live happily ever after.
Paralives Gameplay
Paralives aims to make a complete simulation of everyday life in a community. Players can create and personalize their homes, manage their characters, and oversee their day-to-day lives there. The game has innovative features that are both simple to use for novices to the genre and robust enough for more experienced players to tinker with. Players are afforded a sprawling city full of activities, people, and places, allowing them to shape their characters’ lives.
Paralives Release Date
Released on May 25, 2026, Paralives is now available to be purchased in Early Access on Steam for $39.99.
| Digital Storefronts | ||
|---|---|---|
 Steam |
||
| $39.99 | ||
Paralives Review [Early Access]: Paradise Under Construction
A New Contender In Life Simulation
I absolutely love simulation games of any kind, and in particular, I was a huge fan of The Sims growing up. I went through all of the mainline iterations from the OG The Sims all the way to The Sims 4, and even delved into some of their spin-offs like MySims and The Sims Freeplay.
So when the likes of inZOI and Paralives were announced, I was stoked. The Sims has long dominated the scene of this certain brand of life simulation, and while it’s nice to always have something to fall back on, it definitely needed some type of competition on that front.
Paralives was announced long ago, around 2019. I fondly remember it being teased back then, and being the Sims-head I was, I eagerly anticipated its arrival. Now, seven years later in 2026, it’s finally made its Early Access debut. Did it cater to my expectations? It sure did—not perfectly, and it’s definitely not going to topple any of its contemporaries anytime soon, but it’s got a solid foundation and ambition for what it wants to be, and it shows.
A Town To Conquer
Paralives is set in a sandbox, open-world town where you’re free to live as you please. If you’ve played any of the mainline The Sims games or inZOI, then its mechanics and gameplay are all familiar to you. You command your Parafolks (or Para for the singular term) as they go about their daily lives, molding them into a narrative that suits your fancy.
In this modest seaside town, you can build a career, find love, start a family, or become adept in many different skills—almost anything goes. Players are free to control up to eight Parafolk in a single household with the same ages or a variety from baby to elderly, each with their own set of interactions as well as their own personality traits, which tweaks the Parafolk into having better bonuses when doing certain interactions or improving skills.
For example, an Overjoyed Para will become happier more, and those with the Good at Taking Care of Others Social Perk can help out other Paras when they’re feeling down. A Para with a talent in Art can sell their paintings for higher and…a Para that’s Good at Nothing will get sick easily, learn skills slower, and fail tasks more often, if you want to play life on the hard road.
Once your household is created (or chosen from the in-game list), the game really starts at your new home in town. Each Parafolk has a set of four basic needs, namely Hunger, Sleep, Bathroom (Bladder), and Hygiene. Less needs to be looked out for in comparison to The Sims’ six needs, which makes for a bit less stress too in keeping your characters happy. They are also ruled by their moods, which range from Happy, Sad, Uncomfortable, Stressed, and the like.
From that point on, almost anything is fair game. Keep them happy and thriving, or make their lives absolutely miserable if you’re that type of life sim gamer. At this point in Early Access, there are quite a few things that are not available to be interacted with until a later patch, such as video game consoles and some of the kitchen appliances like the coffee machine.
Nevertheless, there are a decent amount of things to do and Paras to interact with, although after a few hours of the same things over and over again, plus the lack of proper autonomy (which I will get to later), it might feel stale eventually. For example, you can have multiple jobs in the game provided that their schedules don’t clash, which is pretty cool in itself, but they just disappear into rabbit holes for the rest of the day, so if you have a Para juggling jobs one after the other…you might as well don’t see them at all. However, there are systems in place that feel rather fleshed out—not completely, but enough to keep you on your toes for much longer.
Fully Customizable Character Creator and Build Mode
One of the most enjoyable things about Paralives is the extensive customization, specifically in the Paramaker and in Build Mode. Of course, the first one you encounter when playing any life simulation game is the character creation screen, and Paralives has a decently extensive customization screen to create your Paralives self just the way you imagine yourself to be.
Its customization screen is similar to the more advanced character creation screens of the present, such as the one in The Sims, inZOI, and other games like Monster Hunter Wilds and Where Winds Meet. You are free to tweak your Parafolk down to the most minute of details in their features—the curve of their eye, their exact height, their body mass, their makeup. You’re also free to layer makeup for a unique look, wear different socks, have heterochromia, and more.
It’s easily an hour or two (or more) of your playthrough already, especially if you’re looking for perfection in your virtual self. For my playthrough, I created Shina and Alec, the latter of whom I tried my utmost best (within an hour) to embody a certain fictional character I’ve been fixated on—and that’s the fun in life simulation games, where you can create characters to your heart's content. What’s even better is that it doesn’t end there—the Build Mode is just as extensive and engaging as the Paramaker.
While it doesn’t mean you can plaster your walls with pictures of your favorite celebrity or anime character just yet, it has a decent selection of furniture, wallpaper, decor, and knickknacks to create your home just the way you like it.
The house is quite literally your gridless canvas—no need for a special code to make interior design borderless and no-holds-barred (Sims players would know what I’m talking about). Paralives allows for freedom in placing things where you want them and how you want them. They even have a miscellaneous clutter item tab in Build Mode, which feeds into the organized chaos dreams. A toaster, a coffee machine, and a rice cooker all in one nook? Count me in.
What elevates the experience even more is the free resize and recolor options too. Anything and everything can be made bigger or smaller to fit your aesthetic, or recolored and redesigned to the exact hex code or pattern you want. Large, towering plants and wide, king-sized beds; curved walls and roofs; and shelves full of miniature figures and statues like a collection—you’re free to mix and match to your heart’s content.
Visually Stunning—If It’s Not Glitching
With all this customization up in arms, of course it has to look pretty good, right? For the most part, it does. While not wholly realistic, the graphics have this lovely, cartoon-y charm to them. The overworld is easy on the eyes, pretty to look at, and definitely is somewhere I’d like to spend the rest of my days in.
However, I would appreciate it more if the camera work weren't as janky. It’s hard to appreciate aesthetic visuals when your camera controls make it a headache to work with. The most minute of camera movements would make it go wonky and straight down into your downstairs basement or cut through the walls of your neighbor’s house. Trees would constantly cover the view out of the blue, and zooming into your Parafolk will inevitably screw up the camera work in some way or another or make the game freeze for a good five seconds.
Some assets just completely disappear too—my Parafolk would be painting on an invisible canvas for hours, and then when it loads outside of an interaction, you see this amalgamation of glitching canvases on top of each other. Funny anecdote, but it does make selecting the easel much harder for some reason, so it gets frustrating when it affects gameplay.
Autonomy Could Use Some Work
Making a game of this size is already ambitious in itself, so I won’t fault the developers for cutting a few corners here and there. But if you’re one of the many people who grew up on The Sims and its particular brand of life simulation, it’s inevitable that comparisons will be made between the two games and that you’ll find yourself looking for some of the missing things that were present in EA’s social life simulation title.
For instance, the autonomy. One of the most interesting parts of The Sims, for me, is how much freedom your Sims have. You control them and guide them a little, sure, but most of the fun is seeing how they get themselves into the strangest of situations and drama.
Paralives also has autonomy mode enabled by default, but perhaps because of certain limitations in the engine or whatnot, it doesn’t feel as autonomous and, therefore, a bit bland or boring. Without player intervention, most Parafolk default to just sitting around lounging on chairs or standing around on their phones when not commanded to do something—sometimes, even when a need is in the red zone, they still won’t fulfill that need (most evident with the bladder need in my game—they'd rather be uncomfortable all day than go to the toilet themselves).
There was one day I forgot about my male Para and he was just on their outdoor lounge chair for about ten in-game hours straight. Ten hours he could have used to make friends or to explore the world a little bit, all because I forgot to hover over to him—and that’s with autonomy enabled even for unselected characters. Boo. Unfortunately, this blandness isn’t just for your current household, though, as even the Paras you share the town with also feel a bit lifeless. Their autonomy is reduced to just their daily routines, walking to and fro, sometimes doing something else and interacting with others.
The Tendency To Bug Out
It’s in Early Access, and it’s to be expected, but it’s still something to look out for. The overall optimization is rather janky, as it appears to render the entire map during your entire playthrough—after all, it’s open-world-esque. Some lots only load when you enter them, for example, the flower shops or restaurants, which somehow helps with the overall asset load, but it’s still evidently janky in many areas.
Next on the list is that there will be plenty of times when the in-game code just seems to break, causing Parafolks to just freeze and not do their actions even when commanded repeatedly to do so. One particular hilarious (and panic-inducing at the same time) example I have is when my Parafolks’ kitchen caught on fire. The fire spread throughout the counters, the stove, the fridge, the floor—and even onto Alec, my male Parafolk. While extinguishing the property damage, he was also extinguishing himself. What was my female Parafolk, Shina, doing?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even when I queued her up to call the firefighters a dozen times. I was losing it—I didn’t want to lose the rather handsome-looking Alec to a house fire—but Shina just wasn’t budging. Alec himself had to call the fire department, all while still burning and yelling for help. He was saved, but hell, it could all have been prevented if my female character didn’t bug out.
It even happened a second time, and the two of them stood outside of their burning house panicking…just panicking. Alec got to call the fire department, but even they stood around not doing anything for an in-game hour (a minute in real time) and I had to intervene by selecting them all and making them extinguish the fire. Like come on—that’s your job, my dear firefighters.
In hindsight, that’s a rather extreme example, but the "glitch in the matrix," "God-cancelled-my-action" type of bugs, do happen ever so often—Parafolks refusing to go to work, them being blocked by an invisible barrier, and those kinds of things. There’s the Unstuck button, but most of the time it doesn’t help with my frozen Parafolk predicament. It’s frustrating because you’d need to exit to the main menu and then reload your save, which isn’t annoying in itself—but if it forces you to do so multiple times over the course of three or so hours…then that’s just tedious.
Another game-breaking bug I can’t seem to remedy is the glitch with the triangle instrument and its corresponding skill. In Paralives, the Music skill is improved through three instruments—the guitar, the piano…and the triangle. Unique take, but I digress. My Parafolk, Alec, is currently hired as a Multi-Instrumentalist at a Music Production Studio, and one of the skills he needs to upgrade for a performance bonus is the Triangle skill.
However, no matter how many times I reload my save file or change up the Triangle instrument’s orientation for easy access, he can never play the darn thing. He just stares at it, doesn’t even hold it, and then the Triangle skill bar comes up for three seconds before disappearing.
So far, it hasn’t greatly affected Alec’s standing in his job (he’s earning quite a bit, I should say), but putting a skill that can’t be interacted with properly on the list of performance requirements is quite frustrating, especially knowing no matter what I do, that giant red thumbs down will always ruin my perfect streak—on something that’s totally out of my hands. I totally understand that not all interactions will be available on launch, but as minor as this Triangle skill is, it’s part of something bigger and shouldn’t be glitched out like this.
Still Needs To Cook For A While
Paralives has got its foundations down pat, but its overall gameplay experience is marred by its bareness, performance issues, and bug-ridden systems—which is inevitable in an Early Access experience, after all. However, it has loads of potential, and with the post-launch roadmap promising all these improvements and fixes, it’s hard to not look forward to that.
At its current vanilla state (as it already possesses a rather large library of player mods created with the in-game modding tool), it’s still barebones and is most fun when you’re creative and into customization in the form of creating Parafolks or building houses from scratch, as those features feel the most polished out of all its mechanics.
Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to what Paralives has in store for its players moving forward, and the level of ambition it has for a small team looking to carve its space into the niche is admirable. For now, I’ll be staying in town for a few more hours than I initially anticipated while waiting for more of the game to be fleshed out.
Game8 Reviews
You may also like...
Paralives Product Information
 |
|
| Title | Paralives |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 25, 2026 (Early Access) |
| Developer | Alex Massé and team |
| Publisher | Paralives Studio |
| Supported Platforms | Steam |
| Genre | Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Paralives Official Website |
