In the conference room at this year’s Gamescom, Hyungjun Kim, producer and director InZoitook the stage to share his vision for the future of life simulations. One of the slides, in a section on humility about the challenges encountered during development, showed a screenshot of a hyper-realistic baby floating above a crib and scrolling the smartphone with Slenderman’s fingers. Caption? “Sweet, innocent baby does something unexpected.”
Due to the unfortunate cancellation of Paradox Interactive’s game Life through you and with no date in sight for EA’s Project Rene, there’s a clear gap in the market for a up-to-date life simulator. Krafton hopes to fill that gap InZoian alternative to the Sims game on the Unreal Engine 5, where everything is available, and which is definitely more stylish than its stylized counterpart.
In the cabin where the cat’s upper body loomed over my head like a hairy sword of DamoclesI started tinkering with it InZoia wonderful character studio that creates Black Desert Online look like Myst Online: Uru Live. I quickly managed to create a yassified approximation of myself by pulling on the philtrums, tugging on the cheeks, and accentuating the partitions of mouse hair. For dedicated creators, the innovative potential here is staggering, right down to the individual levers for the cleft chin and the softness of the hair edges, and the blending of colors between the outer and inner iris.
InZoi also takes an adaptive approach to clothing, with variable necklines and sleeve configurations available across a range of impressive, fashionable haute couture and streetwear wardrobes. I dressed my Zoi in Balenciaga football shirt-adjacentand dad shoes and baggy cargo pants. I noticed an captivating wrinkle while modifying the color palette. You can upload your own textures and apply them to selected clothing items in InZoia shrewd feature that will motivate and benefit aspiring designers.
You can also operate InZoibuilt-in generative AI tools to conjure textures for you, a decision I’m not too keen on. I tried it, of course, by calling up the “1997 Windows screensaver” pattern and applying it to a button-down shirt. The results were… okay, I think, if tinged with anxiety, as with most AI art. But I’d rather enjoy the process of learning how to create a texture in Photoshop for my Zoi, or, failing that, just downloading another designer’s recreation. Creating a snapback covered in suspicious-looking hallucinogenic potatoes is probably fun for someone. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that including generative AI simply reduces the appeal InZoia game that feels the pulse of culture in a different way.
Photo: Krafton
Naturally, the game has a Zoi preset browser where you can upload and download your creations InZoiinnovative player base. Some have already conjured meticulous recreations of stars like Taylor Swift. Others asked forbidden, decidedly macabre, one might say Pandoran questions, such as “What would Wallace do with Wallace and Gromit look like if he was a real man?” (Warning – unless you want to have the bare feet of a Wensleydale eccentric etched in your memory, I advise against that last link.) Of course, this cascade of tools also culminates in a fancy photo mode, where you can throw props into a special studio and tweak the lighting. InZoiHonestly, the character creation set is big enough to be a standalone game, but it’s the world outside of it that matters in the long run.
Narrative Justification InZoi is that you, the player, are an intern working for a company that manufactures and maintains Zoi. They exist in little digital worlds on your desk that look a bit like O’Neill cylinders. From this perspective, you choose a plot of land for your own Zoi family to live on, but you can also just zoom in and choose any inhabitant of the world you want to have. I think it’s good to preface this to understand the scale InZoi. It’s not just about creating a character and living their life – it’s a sandbox where you can really shake the snowball. Players can drop crocodiles in the local park, massively affect the frequency of negative emotions, drive around in real time, or build an apartment building in the middle of the street. InZoiThe game’s closest neighbor is of course The Sims, but we will also find a lot of SimCity elements and even a bit of Cities: Skylines DNA.
Each Zoi has an editable daily schedule, long-term ambitions, short-term desires, defining values and characteristics that control his predisposition to certain activities. When my Zoi first arrived in his penthouse apartment, I used my interior design skills to renovate his bedroom Inzoia massive construction set and IKEA furniture options. Then I had them rummage through drawers for clothes to donate, which was a unique activity that aligned with my Zoi’s coexistence value. You can select preferences in categories like fitness or food from the menu, and your love of spicy food or yoga can eventually come up in conversation. When it comes to emotions, Zois have basic needs, but there are also a range of states they can get into based on cumulative actions or reactions. The bus to the beach calmed my Zoi, but I was also angry (I think I skipped breakfast), so I started raging at the surfer as soon as I stepped onto the sand. Helpfully, this introduced me to the conversation system in InZoiwhich features separate dialogue option trees depending on whether you want to get into business or bed with your conversation partner. Understandably, my first conversation was tinged with the white-hot rage my Zoi was experiencing—it went about as well as could be expected.
Photo: Krafton
It soon became clear that InZoi is a game of abundant dynamic crossovers, enhanced by being specific about who your avatar is and wants to be. The problem is that changing your mind, positioning InZoi in the unsettling zone between game and simulation. Player agency and freedom come first, but does it all come at the cost of focus and, ultimately, your attention? With the press of a button, I could refresh my conversation options with seemingly endless current replacements. The source of indecision inevitably complicated the promise of being able to do anything at any time. In practice, what lay before me was a deeply chaotic world full of procedural people acting impulsively. Zoya’s names, emotions, actions, and dialogue choices often seemed random and out of context. As such, I had no sense of a functioning virtual society in the game, unless it had descended into anarchy. I suppose one could argue that InZoiThe unpredictability of the simulator is analogous to that of real life, but is that what makes it good?
Unfortunately, I didn’t make any memorable friends during my show that I could tell stories about at the water cooler. I befriended the aforementioned surfer by forcing him to come over for dinner, cooking him a meal (a wonderfully detailed process), and then quickly going through the friendship conversation tree. But as he sat on my couch, still in his swim trunks, I wasn’t sure I knew him any better than I had during our argument at sunrise. Later, I couldn’t get anyone to meet me at the furniture store, so I played with a grapple machine outside for two hours, ate three tacos, and then built a bed on the street because I noticed my Zoi was tired. When I woke up, I told a woman in the park that “the best teacher of life is death.” There are a dizzying array of dialogue options for interacting with people you’ve never met, and the distance between alienation and intimacy is only a few minutes of effort. So why not surprise them with an existential crisis?
InZoi is a technological marvel, a stunning, genre-bending life simulator that I’d love to dive into. But the moment-to-moment gameplay is still a bit rough around the edges. I was surprised by how much I missed the quirky boundaries and quirky authorial narrative that are built into The Sims. Oddball thrives as the Goth family legend and the Grim Reaper are so much of the series’ soul. Maybe we’ll just have to wait for InZoi to provide its answers to these problems, but given the outpouring of wish lists, I’m not sure this is the top of the list. A life simulation is by definition a pursuit of goals, and even if it has no plans to introduce any of its own story and personality, I hope InZoi is capable of landing successfully and delivering an immersive gameplay experience that complements its impressive customization systems.
