I was, like so many of my 1990s-born peers, a huge Sims girlie. I spent hundreds of hours as a teen and young adult making people I knew, characters from shows I was obsessing over, or original characters I wanted to experiment with, and diligently following their life paths and ambitions. I played it as a traditional life sim and I also got into all the weird, scrappy lore. I played with all the cheats and glitches and I, of course, put my sims in the pool and took the ladder out so that they were forced to drown.
Try as I might, I could not capture any of these feelings in InZOI, Krafton’s early access life simulator that I would not typically immediately compare to another game if it did not beg for it by lifting every part of its design from the 25-year-old series that defined the genre. At first, navigating my shiny, photorealistic, model-perfect Zoi’s around the shiny, photorealistic, model-perfect world, I feared that I am simply thirty years old and that the whimsy in my heart has withered with time. But in the end, I must insist that it’s not me who is wrong. InZOI simply has awful vibes.
Starting where you have to start: in character creation. Zois, the game’s controllable characters, are rendered in minute, slightly uncanny valley detail. Absolutely everybody is beautiful, with flawless skin and hair, and god forbid you want to make a fat person. You’ll have to choose between a “male” and a “female” body, and even though you can then set your Zoi’s gender as male, female, or nonbinary, you’ll still be locked into a lot of the baggage those body types imply. You can’t have a beard on a female body, for example.
In short, for a life simulator, you can really only simulate a plastic-y, pared down sort of life. The Sims also has its limitations, but its cartoonish style gives it more leeway. InZOI’s photorealism implies a world close to our own, and so its delineations between the possible and the impossible feel more charged. This is not only true of character creation. When you’re done making Zois and ready to get into the game, there’s plenty to do: build a career, skills, and hobbies; explore the world and visit locations; and navigate relationships with other Zois. But each of these is just as shallow.
Careers, skills, and hobbies are progressed straightforwardly. Your Zoi will have an overlapping set of ambitions and drives to push you towards choosing something among the cacophony of options. Take, for example, Eddie Jenkins, who desires a life of excitement, is a joyful and cheerful adventurer, and values accomplishment. These presumably influence the autoselected ambition to become a fitness star, so I put him to work.
First, he wants to buy some home gym equipment, and then use it three times. This is easy enough. He then wants to read 10 fitness books and level up his fitness score to six. This takes a few days of steady reading, and since reading also increases the skill score, there’s not much else to it. He then spends three days doing pull ups to finish the entire ambition by hitting a fitness level of ten. This whole thing took maybe a week in-game and maybe an hour of real time.
I could have spread this out with other activities, of course, but everything else feels just as vapid. Eddie works as an amusement park employee three days a week – this is considered a full time job – during which time he goes and walks around the boardwalk, loosely interacting with vending machines and rides.
His housemate Helen, who is a journalist, sometimes pops up to ask how she should proceed in working on an article. Twice in a row with a couple of days of separation she discovered that her editors were up to something shady and got a bonus for calling them out, but the amusement park doesn’t seem to have any equivalent speedbumps. Eddie walks around. He gestures vaguely at the bins. Sometimes, he, like all Zois, gets a fleeting desire to do something different, like go boxing or talk to someone about his accomplishments. This changes his mood, which theoretically makes it easier to do certain tasks, except that all tasks are frictionless, so in practice it does nothing.
Eddie’s intangibility at work extends to any interaction outside of the Zoi’s home. InZOI boasts of its open world; you can walk around as a Zoi and…look at things, I suppose. But I don’t know why you would want to. InZOI doesn’t seem to think it’s worthwhile either: if you actually choose to go somewhere specific, your Zoi will hop on a bus or into a taxi and the world will be replaced by a loading screen. These areas are where a self-driven narrative ought to open up for the creative player, if InZOI had the scaffolding to support it. It does not. You can interact with objects in these locations a thousand different ways, but all of them feel as intangible as doing 72 hours of pullups for no reward.
One aspect which does potentially contain some of the creative spark I was hoping for is the building mechanics. I was never good at this; my Sims lived in ugly, boxy homes covered in mismatched wallpaper and the same cheap paintings. But I do remember the ability to have bowling alley carpets and bizarre, fun sculptures, and InZOI will let you put a badly looping gif of a firework on your walls and an ice cream truck in your garden, which I think is important. (Any of the pre-built homes you move your Zois into will, of course, be immaculately furnished as if by cutting-edge though somewhat sterile interior designers, so I have no doubt players can also create these kinds of homes if they want to and have skills that I do not.)
Finally, there’s getting to know other Zois. There’s a waterfall of options you can speak to other characters about, from mint chocolate to mental health. Some of them are truly bizarre, like “say your soul chose you,” or “say life is but one layer of a dream.” A lot of them feel like this game is written by the worst people on LinkedIn: every Zoi is obsessed with AI, crypto, and the stock market. They all want to become influencers and are constantly thinking about social media metrics. (The game is also not properly localised yet, with a lot of leftover Korean and some broken strings showing hanging HTML tags.)
It’s near impossible to leave Zois unattended and also build the social life you’re aiming for, because they will insult people at the drop of a hat and derail whatever you’ve been working on. And not just insult, either. At one point after I swapped away from the wife in a married couple who I had just instructed to spend several minutes talking about how much she wanted a divorce, and she immediately texted her husband saying she thought things were going great these days.
I really could go on with detailing all the ways that InZOI’s vibes are simply not good, but here’s a final big one: the whole game is wrapped in this Assassin’s Creed-like meta layer where you’re actually controlling (?) a game developer (??) who works at a building full of cats (???) and is then controlling (????) the Zois in turn.
The only thing this does for the game is add a veneer of corporate soullessness to the whole thing. Alongside the terrifyingly flawless faces and bodies of every Zoi, their obsession with being influencers, and the meaningless achievement grinding as a replacement for opportunities to find real stories to tell, it seems that the only thing I’m simulating is an endless “9-5 in the life of a corporate girlboss” TikTok trend. And, honestly, I find that an insult to every weird teenage girl who’s ever spent the weekend in the Sims burning their family lot to the ground so that they can seduce the grim reaper.
This review was based on Early Access review code provided by the developer.