In a briefing room at this year’s Gamescom, Hyungjun Kim, producer and director of InZoitook to the stage to share his vision for the future of life simulators. One slide, during a humbling section about the challenges faced during development, showed a screenshot of a hyper-realistic baby floating above its crib and scrolling on a smartphone with Slenderman fingers. The caption? “A cute, innocent baby does the unexpected.”
With the unfortunate cancellation of Paradox Interactive’s Living through you and with no date in sight for EA’s Project Rene, there is a clear gap in the market for a contemporary life simulator. Krafton hopes to fill this gap with InZoian all-in-one Unreal Engine 5 Sims alternative, which is clearly more stylish than its stylized counterpart.
In a cubicle where the the upper body of a cat hovered above my head like a hairy sword of DamoclesI started tinkering with InZoi‘s amazing character studio, which Black Desert Online resemble Myst Online: Uru Live. I was able to quickly create a yassified approach to myself, pulling philtrums, tugging cheekbones, and highlighting sections of mouse-colored hair. For dedicated makers, the creative potential here is astounding, down to individual levers for chin cleft and hairline softness, as well as color blending between the outer and inner iris.
InZoi also has an adaptive approach to clothing, with variable necklines and sleeve configurations available across parts of his impressive fashion wardrobe of couture and streetwear. I’ve decked my Zoi out in a Balenciaga football shirtand also some dad shoes and baggy cargo pants. While tweaking the color palette, I noticed an interesting wrinkle. You can upload your own textures and apply them to selected garments in InZoia smart feature that will motivate and benefit budding designers.
You can also use InZoi‘s built-in generative AI tools to generate textures for you, a decision I’m not a fan of. I tried it of course, using a pattern from a “1997 Windows screensaver” and applying it to a button-up. The results were… fine, I guess, if a little creepy like most AI art. But I’d rather just enjoy the process of learning how to make a texture in Photoshop for my Zoi or, failing that, just download another designer’s re-creation. Making a snapback covered in dubious hallucinogenic potatoes is probably fun for someone. Still, I can’t help but feel that the addition of generative AI would greatly increase the appeal of InZoia game that, by the way, keeps its finger on the cultural pulse.
Of course, there is an in-game browser for Zoi presets where you can upload your creations and see the efforts of InZoi‘s creative player base. Some have already accurate recreations of celebrities like Taylor SwiftOthers have asked forbidden, absolutely macabre, and perhaps Pandoran questions, such as, “What would Wallace make of Wallace and Gromit resemble if he was a real man?” (Fair warning: unless you want the bare feet of the Wensleydale oddball etched into your memory, I wouldn’t recommend using that last link.) This cavalcade of tools also culminates, of course, in a remarkable photo mode, where you can drop props into a special studio and fine-tune the lighting. InZoiThe character creation suite is large enough to be its own game, but in the long run it’s the world around it that matters.
The narrative justification of InZoi is that you, the player, are an intern working for a company that creates and maintains Zois. They exist in little digital worlds on your desk that look a bit like O’Neill cylinders. From this perspective, you choose a plot for your own Zoi family to inhabit, but you can also just zoom in and choose one of the world’s inhabitants to own. I think it’s good to preface this to get the scope of InZoi. It’s not just about creating a character and living their life – this is a sandbox world where you can really shake the snow globe. Players can drop crocodiles in the local park, massively influence the frequency of negative emotions, drive around in real time, or build an apartment complex in the middle of the street. InZoiIts closest neighbor is of course The Sims, but there’s also plenty of SimCity and even some Cities: Skylines DNA in there.
Each Zoi has an editable daily schedule, long-term ambitions, short-term desires, defining values, and traits that determine their suitability for certain activities. When my Zoi first arrived at their penthouse, I used my interior design skills to renovate their bedroom with Inzoi‘s powerful construction kit and an Ikea full of furniture options. Then I tasked them with rummaging through drawers for clothes to donate, a unique action that resonated with my Zoi’s coexistence value. The menus let you pick preferences in categories like fitness or food, and your love of spicy food or yoga can come up in the conversation. In terms of emotions, Zois have basic needs, but there’s also a range of states they can enter based on cumulative actions or reactions. A bus to the beach calmed my Zoi down, but I was also furious (I think I skipped breakfast), so I started ranting at a surfer the moment I stepped onto the sand. Handily, this introduced me to the conversation system in InZoiwhich features separate trees of dialogue options depending on whether you want to do business or sleep with your conversation partner. Understandably, my first chat was colored by the white-hot rage my Zoi was experiencing — it went about as well as you’d expect.
It soon became clear that InZoi is a game of abundant dynamic intersections, made better by being specific about who your avatar is and wants to be. The problem is that there are few consequences for changing your mind, placing InZoi in the anxious 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? At the push of a button, I could refresh my conversation options with seemingly infinite topical substitutions. A well of indecisiveness inevitably complicated the promise of being able to do something at any time. In practice, what lay before me was a deeply chaotic world of procedural humans acting on impulse. Zoi names, emotions, actions, and dialogue choices often felt arbitrary and out of context. As such, I got no sense of a functioning virtual society unless it had descended into anarchy. I guess you could argue that InZoiThe unpredictability of is similar to real life, but is that what makes a life simulator good?
Unfortunately, I didn’t make any memorable friends to tell watercooler anecdotes about during my demo. I befriended the aforementioned surfer by forcing him to come over to my house for dinner, cooking him a meal (a wonderfully detailed process), and then quickly moving through the friendship conversation tree. But once he was sitting on my couch, still in his swim trunks, I wasn’t sure I knew him any better than I did during our sunrise shouting match. Later, I couldn’t find anyone willing to talk to me for a meet-cute at the furniture store, so I played the claw machine outside for two hours, ate three tacos, and then built a bed on the street because I could tell my Zoi was tired. When I woke up, I told a lady in the park that “the best teacher in life is death.” There are some bewildering dialogue options available 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 technical marvel, a mind-boggling, genre-eating life simulator that I’m eager to dive deeper into. But the moment-to-moment gameplay is still a little rough around the edges. I was surprised by how much it made me long for the quirky boundaries and idiosyncratic written stories baked into The Sims. Weird flourishes like Goth family lore and the Grim Reaper are such a big part of that series’ soul. Maybe we’ll just have to wait until InZoi to present his answers to these questions, but given the flood of wish lists, I’m not sure it’s at the top of the list. Life simulation is an ambitious design endeavor, and even if there are no plans to work in a story and personality of its own, I hope that InZoi can make a good landing and provide a deep gameplay experience, supporting the awesome customization systems.