Gamers and romance go together like peanut butter and jelly–there’s little in the world we like more than a good interactive love story. This is no doubt a significant reason for the decades-long popularity of The Sims, and why interest in InZoi is so high. These games are, ideally, romantic sandboxes full of endless possibilities for love and drama.
But InZoi, of course, is a brand-new game released in Early Access, and so its romance systems are relatively unsophisticated right now in comparison with those of The Sims 4, which just added a ton of new romantic features in last year’s Lovestruck expansion pack. Use our InZoi romance guide to learn how to flirt, go on dates, get married, and, perform a special kind of no-pants dance. You know the one.
Preparing for love
As with most aspects of InZoi at this early stage, the romance system is fairly basic but it gets the job done–you can have a crush on somebody, go on dates with them, get married, have kids, get divorced, all that fun stuff that everybody does in the real world. We’ve gotta have some way to spend that money we’ve been working so hard for, and we’re certainly not spending hours every day cleaning our homes for nothing.
Before we dive into the particulars, we should point out two things. First: You set your Zoi’s gender identity and dating preferences when you create them, and you cannot modify it later, so don’t miss it.
Second: At any time, you can change how easy or difficult it is to develop romantic or friendly relationships. You’ve just got to head to the Edit City menu (button is on the bottom right corner of your screen, to the left of Build Mode), and then select Manage City. There, you’ll find sliders that alter the mood of the whole town–you could make everyone more receptive to romantic advances, or you can harden everyone’s hearts. It’s up to you.
Before you actually try wooing somebody, you may want to work on your charm skill a little bit. You can increase your charm by going to the AR Library and reading self-help books. If you’re in a confident mood, your charm skill will increase quicker.
How to flirt and go on dates
Once you’ve decided you’re ready to take your shot, and have a romantic target in your sights, the approach is rather simple: start hitting them with romantic conversation–that is, conversation options in the Romantic folder of the dialogue box–click on the Zoi, then click More, then Romantic, and there you’ll find the list of options you want. If the other Zoi doesn’t like you, or if their romantic orientation is incompatible, they’ll let you know immediately. Otherwise, if your Zoi is gaining affection with these interactions, you should just keep doing them. Keep it to conversation at first–like most people, Zois don’t seem to be into kissing or other physical affection until they’ve gotten the relationship meter up a little bit, but having a high charm skill helps accelerate that process.
Once you’ve made a little headway, you can ask them on a date, which is more or less just a generic social hangout, but with new romantic interaction options. You can go anywhere you want, like somebody’s house, or karaoke, or anything else–the activity doesn’t really matter. What matters is continuing to choose romantic actions that make the relationship meter go up. If the two Zois have compatible personalities, it will go up quickly. Otherwise, the date will be a real struggle, and the Zois may even fight.
How to get married and have sex in InZoi
As your relationship meter with the other Zoi increases, it’ll occasionally stop at certain thresholds where you’ll need to pick a conversation prompt to take the relationship to a new level. Once you’ve reached Sweetheart level, you gain two really important options: “Set the mood in front of bed” (that’s for sex), and “Propose marriage” (that’s for proposing marriage).
Choosing the marriage option will immediately make you schedule and pick a location for the ceremony. The ceremony itself is easy–you just have to show up, click the prompts in the upper left corner of the screen if you feel like it, and at the end of it, you’ll be married no matter what you actually did.
Do Zois get jealous?
Here’s where InZoi really shows its Early Access-ness–I’ve tried a number of bad behaviors, but I’ve only managed to trigger jealousy under one single condition: when my Zoi’s spouse saw me kissing somebody else. They didn’t care about flirting, and even when the spouse walked in on my Zoi actually in bed with someone else, they became uncomfortable only because walking in on somebody doing the nasty is coded to generate awkwardness, and not because they were jealous. The tooltip was weirdly specific about this.
And, for the record, it was only the spouse that cared, and you can only have one of those at a time. But my Zoi also was allowed to have several different not-legally-bound True Loves, and none of them ever became jealous about anything. So it seems like there’s still plenty of work to be done on this particular aspect of InZoi’s romance systems.
With so many potential lovers, be sure you know how to use the money cheat and make money in InZoi.