The neighbourhood citizens of Life By You are positioning themselves as bright-eyed pretenders to The Sims. But in this ultimate game of keeping-up-with-the-Jones, the life sim from Paradox has slipped on a wet kitchen tile. The game has been delayed for a third time, and the developers are reluctant to set a new date for the planned release into early access. “[We] believe it is more prudent to hold off while we plan ahead,” said Mattias Lilja of Paradox Interactive, “rather than committing to a new date that we cannot be certain to meet.”
“After much consideration, we regret to announce that we have decided to retract Life by You’s Early Access release date, previously set for June 4th,” said the announcement from Paradox’s deputy CEO. “This was not an easy decision, especially since we understand the anticipation and excitement that many players have for the game. However, we believe that additional development time is needed.”
Announced in March last year, the game was originally set to launch in September 2023. But was then delayed into March 2024 and once again to June.
This might be understandable, given the scope of the game’s goals to create a town-sized simulation in which all NPCs can be possessed at a moments notice. Life By You is hoping to distinguish itself from The Sims with deeper customisation and pawns whose powerful command of actual human language (as opposed to Simlish babble) allows them to live out deep and fulfilling lives. Katharine saw a demo last year in which she witnessed “a conga line of complete strangers who followed our demo character home and stood around her in an ominous circle while she was trying to do some gardening”. Uh.
But she was also impressed by the scale and ambition of the sim. According to the developer, players will be able to edit and create quests, write their own character dialogue, come up with new traits, and directly control the characters in a third-person view, among many other mod-friendly tools. When you’ll be able to do this, of course, we no longer know.
The Sims 4 was one of our best management games but we don’t yet know when The Sims 5 will be coming out either, so I guess Paradox technically is keeping up. Life By You isn’t the only one treading on EA’s toes, however. There is also indie contender Paralives to consider, which is due out some time next year.