"A nocturnal farm sim where you're a vampire" is one of the better hooks I've heard lately in a subgenre that's long become overstuffed with too many same-y, saccharine rural community sims. Moonlight Peaks' slightly spooky theme is a welcome twist, but that's where its originality ends, because it struggles to ever turn that concept into a story with any bite.

You play as Dracula's spawn, storming out of Dad's castle to take up farming "cruelcumbers" and "blood tomatoes" at the overgrown family retreat in small town Moonlight Peaks, where families of vampires, witches, seers, and werewolves are mired in years of bickering. There's a whole lot of all-caps dialogue in this town.

Eternally familiar farming

It's got the requisite activities checklist for a post-Stardew, Animal Crossing-like farm sim: crops, animals, foraging, fishing, bug catching, a museum, cooking, friendship and dating, decorating, and a bit of crafting. All those basics are executed competently enough that I can shut my brain off and have a good time for a few hours. Digging tidy rows for my blueberry plants, using kegs to make wine, and running off to mine copper for an axe upgrade is all comfortingly familiar, but as soon as I try to look any closer the cracks show.

Unlike more open-ended cousins like Stardew Valley, progression in Moonlight Peaks is extremely main quest-driven. There's no leveling your farming skills or unlocking buffs here. It's all about making money to fund the string of crafting and collecting tasks that help revitalize the town and repair the relationships between its supernatural families. Despite that, I often go days at a time without an active quest to pursue, going to bed early after watering my crops and talking to a couple villagers as I wait for my next goal to trigger.

In between quests and farm planning there are several side activity minigames like flower arranging and pottery, which are genuinely neat, though there's not much incentive to engage with them after making a couple custom decorations for my farm. Some are used as date activities, which is a cute concept, but each character only goes on one date type, so players who choose to only woo one character will be stuck endlessly embroidering or marshmallow roasting their way to marriage, which gets old fast.

For those who do date around, being able to play the field before committing to marriage is nice, and common now in farm sims. With just a few families living in Moonlight Peaks, though, I've found myself simultaneously dating parents and their adult kids, or all four members of a witch coven, or two siblings, which feels a bit odd.

The relationships panel does track gifts that I've given to the locals to earn their friendship, but only the past eight items, duplicates included, which isn't nearly as useful as a discrete list would be.

Every interesting idea or variation on farm sim standards that I can find to praise in Moonlight Peaks comes with an asterisk, which is most true of its story and characters.

Totally de-fanged

Thanks to that driving main quest, there's a ton of story content in Moonlight Peaks. Each character has four cutscenes doled out as we become friends, with more available if I choose to date and marry them. Many of the main quests also involve a handful of the cast getting together to banter and bicker. It's a total feast of character interaction compared to so many other farm sims out there. But yet again, a caveat: The writing is offensively bland.

I don't expect literary innovation from a genre whose current trends prescribe a cast of character tropes. There must always be a friendly rancher, fastidious mayor, plucky carpenter, and a charming bartender (etc.), most of whom should be hot, single, and down to date. Moonlight Peaks has done more than just cleave to character archetypes, though. It's managed to not find a single original string of words in that bounty of character dialogue.

The coven's relentless flirt of a warlock Noel is all confident bluster, which of course begs a relationship arc to uncover his inner sincerity. In one of his early cutscenes he says "there's more to me than this front," in nearly those exact words. "When I'm around you… I don't have to pretend," Noel later says in the scene confessing his feelings to me after we've been dating. Every character interaction is full of these same trite lines I rolled my eyes at in network TV shows 20 years ago.

The tone is inconsistent. Interactions with alcoholic vampire dad Orlock are played for laughs at every opportunity, but his behavior is treated as a serious emotional burden for his adult kids in their own character scenes. Then it's right back to blacking out gags. Its characters all fail to find a compelling identity with inconsistencies like Elvira expressing excitement over seeing pumpkins in the autumn festival but being totally disinterested in receiving one as a gift.

I just haven't managed to care about the story when Moonlight Peaks can't decide if it wants to be silly or sincere, sweet or dark. It's possible to juggle those moods at different moments, but this cast consistently drops the ball.

Moonlight Peaks works as a second screen game for farm sim fans who just want a new aesthetic in which to decorate a home and lay out perfectly even rows of tomato plants. This subgenre is completely packed with options at competitive prices, though, so I can't eagerly recommend one that feels so thin.

One of the biggest end goals in a farm sim (other than a massive wine-making operation) is getting married to your favorite townie. Moonlight Peaks lets you really play the field by going on dates with pretty much everyone before you lock down one chosen beau.

I've been through the process a couple times already, so I've broken down everything you need to know about popping the question, prepping for a wedding, and how to get divorced if you want to head along to your second (or third) marriage. I won't judge you for getting married early and then realizing that you want to date Samael later.

Marriage in Moonlight Peaks

How to get married in Moonlight Peaks

1. Reach 8 friendship hearts with your partner
2. See your partner's 8 heart cutscene (check your map for sparkles indicating where to go)
3. Invite your partner on a date
4. At the end of the date, you can now propose marriage instead of a hug or kiss
5. Set a date for your wedding when prompted (check your calendar after to see it logged there)
6. (Optional) Starting the day after your proposal, buy white attire from Third Eye Threads to wear on your wedding day
7. Your wedding ceremony will take place first thing on your wedding day

What happens when you get married

• Spouse moves into your house
• Spouse unlocks two final (10 total) friendship hearts for you to earn
• Anyone else you were dating becomes "hurt" and goes back to only four hearts
• You can no longer invite other characters on a date and are locked at four hearts with other marriage candidates

When you propose and become engaged, your partner will temporarily have the "fiancée" relationship label and a total of 11 friendship hearts. Any other character who you had a "dating" or "partner" relationship with will be in their feelings about it and temporarily gain the "hurt" relationship label. They will be reduced to just four broken-looking friendship hearts, will have sad dialogue when you chat with them, and will not accept gifts from you. This status seems to only last a day though, so singles in Moonlight Peaks move on fast.

After you get married, your spouse will move into your house but will still go about their own business in town by exploring or going to work like they always have. They will go back to having eight friendship hearts and will have two new hearts to earn while married for a total of 10. You can continue to ask your spouse to go on dates together, which will help you earn those final hearts. You cannot have children in Moonlight Peaks, but you can get divorced.

Divorce in Moonlight Peaks

How to get divorced in Moonlight Peaks

1. A few days after your wedding, Llemi will come to your house to tell you about divorce
2. Visit Llemi's house in the Pink Grove (must progress the main story and unlock Luna Bay to reach it)
3. Tell Llemi you want to divorce your spouse
4. Sleep until the next night and your spouse will return to "friend" status

Getting divorced in Moonlight Peaks is arguably way too easy. When Llemi first comes to your house a few days after your wedding to just casually drop the possibility of divorce into your mind, he calls it "A clean slate. No bonds, no vows, no lingering what-ifs. A love undone as if it had never been."

Despite his protests about breaking your partner's heart when you actually come to take him up on the offer, "as if it had never been" seems to be how Moonlight Peaks treats divorce because your ex-spouse will be totally unfazed by your marriage ending. They'll return to being your "friend" the following day with only four hearts, no "hurt" relationship label, and will not acknowledge the divorce in dialogue at all. In fact, they'll act like they want to start dating you all over again.

Remember though, getting married in the first place locked all your other relationships at four friendship hearts. If you want to tie the knot a second time, you've got a lot of gifting and dates to do to make it back up to eight hearts with your next prospective spouse.

I don't blame you for loading up Moonlight Peaks and saying: "Wait, how are you supposed to date Samael?" The broody bartender is easily the most conventionally attractive guy in town. If you peeked at the datable candidates list for Moonlight Peaks, you'll have seen Samael featured alongside all the other eligible townies. When you start playing, though, you notice pretty quickly that Samael only has four friendship hearts in his relationship panel unlike the other bachelors, so what gives?

Unlocking Samael's romance involves some main quest story spoilers about characters who you won't meet for several seasons, so scroll down with caution. If you just need reassurance: Samael is datable. Just keep plugging away at the main story improving the town and you'll likely see his relationship progress in the first autumn or winter depending on how fast you're progressing.

How to date Samael

Once you've got Samael's expanded relationship hearts unlocked (scroll down for spoilers on that below), you can approach going on dates with him just like other locals:

• Reach four friendship hearts
• See Samael's four heart cutscene
• Talk to Samael and "invite" then "ask on date"

Here's what you need to know to woo Samael fast:

• Samael loves red wine, so make sure you're keeping your kegs stocked with grapes and talking to him each day
• You can prepare to romance Samael by going ahead and reaching four friendship hearts with him before his romance is available
• Samael will take you on a stargazing date where you'll identify constellations he points out, how romantic!

How to unlock Samael's romance (spoilers!)

• Complete the quest "Bride's attendant duty"
• Wait one week for Orlock to visit your house
• Complete "Unfinished business"
• Earn four hearts with Samael to ask him on a date

To unlock Samael's romance, you need to progress through the main story quest until you unlock Luna Bay and meet the Hosu family. The quests "A Curious Passage" and "The Mysterious Bay" are the precursor to Samael's story. You'll need to lift a fallen tree, repair a bridge with Ludo, and help Samael prepare for a really big day.

Don't panic when it becomes clear that the guy you've been pining after is carrying a torch for your new mermaid neighbor. Samael's freakishly fast marriage to Kim doesn't actually go through. After you help them prepare for the ceremony, Kim's brand new feet get cold at the altar and she runs away. Samael will still be un-datable for one week after being ditched. One week later, Orlock will display some uncharacteristically perceptive behaviour by arriving at your house and enlisting your help to shake his nephew out of his sad funk.

You'll help arrange a meeting for closure between Samael and Kim and then, finally, you'll be able to open your relationship panel and see that Samael now has extra hearts for you to unlock past the first four hearts of friendship just like other datable characters. If you've already reached four hearts with Samael, you can go ahead and invite him on a date immediately. No shame.

During the quest The Mysterious Bay you're going to need to lift a fallen tree in Moonlight Peaks to help your newly-discovered mermaid neighbors rejoin the town proper. After you get the rundown, you might wind up scratching your head over where that tree you're supposed to clear was. It certainly isn't nearby in the Howling Marshes where you'd assume.

How to lift a tree

If you've perused the spells at Webb of Wonders, you'll have already noticed there's a spell for lifting a tree that you can buy from Sabrina You'll need three mana to cast the Arborascend spell, so hold off watering your magic crops for the day (or cook yourself a mana food to supplement) so you can go lift the fallen log.

In case you've forgotten, you can refresh your memory on casting each spell in the first tab of your almanac in the game menu. The pattern for Arborascend looks like a tree after you finish casting it: down, up, right, left, up.

Fallen tree location

The fallen tree is in Moonlit Pines near Luna's seed cart. If you forgot exactly what Rei and Kim told you, you may mistakenly think there's a tree in the Howling Marshes that you need to lift since that's the area adjacent to their home in Luna Bay. But nope, you're actually looking for a fallen log over in the forest where the witches hang out.

You can spot the fallen log blocking a small waterfall just west of the set of stairs that leads to Luna's seed cart and cottage. Cast your Arborascend spell to trigger a cutscene that removes the tree. Kim will rush down to thank you, excited to be reunited with her "Sammy" again.

We're always keeping an eye out for new Stardew Valley mods. For instance, not long ago I played a mod where I could open my own grocery store and make Pierre buy my seeds for a change, dammit! It was satisfying.

But here's a mod (via Gaming Bible) created by modder kittycatcasey, aka spacechase0, that immediately looks different from all the other Stardew mods out there. That's cuz it's in 3D. Have a look at "The Third Dimension," a proof-of-concept video of a 3D version of Stardew Valley—and then come back here and help me decide if it looks completely rad or vaguely horrifying.

I'm delighted at first: the video shows the modder strolling around their house, interacting with the kids, and talking with their spouse, Penny. It really is neat seeing the game's bright and cheerful art in 3D, even though the sprites (except for structures like walls and floors) are all still 2D.

But as I watch more, it quickly begins to get unsettling. Since nearly every entity is still currently 2D, it only has one side to face the player, which means it all swivels to continue facing you no matter where you go. Everything: plants, decorations, furnaces, the mailbox, scarecrows, containers, all slowly turning as you walk by. As if alive. As if watching you. It's creeptastic.

This is temporary, of course: "Right now just about almost everything besides the terrain is billboarded sprites, but the plan is to over time give everything a unique 3D model," spacechase0 says.

I feel better again while watching spacechase0 harvest blueberries from the farm: it's delightful to look up instead of down at the plants, to be surrounded by them like you were really out there doing some gardening. But then I notice the house in the background. It, too, is swiveling to watch you, everywhere you go, like some sort of extremely nosy Baba Yaga's Hut. I'm glad the video doesn't show downtown Stardew. Just imagine those shops and houses all turning to watch as you walked around. Chilling!

This isn't shade on the modder, by the way: turning a 2D game into 3D is really impressive, and even this extremely early proof-of-concept looks great (except when it makes my skin crawl). The second half of the video is a demonstration of the 3D concept compatible with VR, which is amazing—though fighting off bats sure looks tricky.

The mod isn't available to try yet, which works for me: I think I'd be a little too creeped out with all those sprites slowly swiveling around to stare at me everywhere I went. If you want to play Stardew Valley in 3D or VR someday, though, this is one mod you should keep a close eye on.

When Elvira cooks up a little treasure hunt for you in Moonlight Peaks, you may find yourself stumped if you haven't explored too far out of town. A couple of her poetic little hints refer to locations you've got to really pay attention to. Down below I'll go into detail on the clues and where to find them, but here's a quick reference list of all five clue locations:

• Clue 1: The Broken Lamp bar
• Clue 2: Ambrosia graveyard
• Clue 3: Webb of Wonders
• Clue 4: Cave of Echoes
• Clue 5: Khazan temple

Elvira's first clue

Where spirits are poured and secrets are stored,
Find the book that's dusty and old.
Look between the shelves where bottles line,
The next hint awaits, where magic and wine intertwine.

For the first clue, head to Samael's bar over on the east side of town. You'll have been here plenty already so you should know the way. Elvira's clue is an envelope on the ground near the wine racks on the right side of the bar.

Elvira's second clue

Where the quiet ones rest beneath moonlight's gleam,
Find the spot where shadows dream.
Seek the place where memories are kept,
The next clue lies where the peaceful are slept.

Clue two refers to the Ambrosia family graveyard over in the Misty Shores region. The clue is a bit hidden, tucked behind a bat-shaped headstone in the top left corner of the graveyard.

Elvira's third clue

Where moonlight dances on ancient spells,
Find the place where magical items dwell.
Look for the spot where enchanted crafts appear,
The next clue waits for you, close and near.

For clue three, head to Webb of Wonders where Sabrina works in town. Elvira's clue is on the right side of the shop beside the pottery station.

Elvira's fourth clue

Where moonlight is scarce and sound slowly sours,
Find the shrine that tolls at the passing of hours.
Seek the stones that remember, and find two apart,
You'll find your next clue in the space at their heart.

Clue four is a lot tougher! The "sound slowly sours" is your hint to head to the Cave of Echoes, the mine in the Misty Shores where you'll have been farming for copper. It's referring to a big bell that actually marks the hour passing in Moonlight Peaks which is over on the eastern side of the mine. Luckily the envelope is very easy to spot so you won't miss it.

Elvira's fifth clue

Where the moon and her followers watch the futures of all,
Find the eastern cascade of the water's fall.
Look for leaves well-tended by the keepers of fates,
And find the last clue, where your treasure awaits.

Clue five is a location you may not have even been to before: the Khazan Temple east of town. Follow the path that heads directly east away from town hall (not up to the Howling Marshes) and look for the last note on the ground outside the temple on the right side of a waterfall.

Elvira's treasure hunt reward

Elvira's reward for finishing her treasure hunt is a painting that you can hang in your house. For me, it was a pink painting of a cat (or perhaps a vampster?) laying down. Cute!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that going on dates in Moonlight Peaks is more involved than your average farm sim. After you extend an invite, your beau will take you out for a little activity featuring some of Moonlight Peaks' minigames. You're free to date around, too, so don't be stingy with your time. Here's how to start stepping out with all the locals.

How to go on dates in Moonlight Peaks

• Reach 4 heart friendship level with a datable townie
• Choose "Invite" and "Ask on date" when talking to them
• Go to sleep at the end of the night and your date will begin the next night
• Listen to your date and play a mini activity to have a successful outing
• After finishing a date (even a bad one) your relationship will change to "dating"
• You can have a "dating" relationship with multiple people at once

Be careful asking multiple people on a date in the same night! Whoever you asked most recently will pick you up for an outing the following night. The dates seemed to stack in reverse order, so the person I asked first came to get me the second night, though I didn't see a way to track this anywhere. I have no idea what stacking too many dates might do, so perhaps best to avoid that.

How to start a date

Counterintuitively, you need to start a date by going to sleep. You'll ask a townie out by using the "invite" and "ask on date" dialogue interaction after you've reached four hearts with them, but your rendezvous will happen at the very beginning of the night after that. So head to bed and get ready to be picked up promptly at 6pm.

Date rewards

Your date will pick the activity to take you on, some of which will reward you more than others. Here's what you can expect:

• "Dating" relationship status in your friendship menu
• Friendship points awarded for a successful date
• Once you're dating, you can kiss your partner each day with the "give" dialogue interaction
• Some dates will send you home with a gift, like a custom bouquet when a date takes you to do flower arranging

A new farm sim has launched today and, as is tradition, cozy game enjoyers gather round to ask each other: Is Moonlight Peaks worth it? I'm about 40 days (nights, actually) into my playthrough, so it'll be just a bit longer before I can deliver our scored review, but I want to give some early impressions to help all my fellow farm simmers figure out if this month's flavor is one to take a bite out of.

In my early preview of Moonlight Peaks, I called it Real Housewives of Stardew, which remains true. It's got all the usual farm sim bits (crops, foraging, farm animals, friendship, crafting, mining, fishing, etc.) but the four families of supernaturals in town are feuding something fierce. There's quite a lot of all-caps dialogue around here.

In the first few weeks, all that goofy toxic behavior is entertaining, but as I've continued playing, Moonlight Peaks feels like it can't pick a tone. It plays Orlock the vampire patriarch as a comedic relief alcoholic, which feels a bit out of touch in 2026, but then in other moments attempts to treat that tense family situation as a genuine struggle for his daughter Mina.

Meanwhile the annoyingly persistent charmer Noel seems to be going for a "there's more to me beneath this front" character arc by… just saying that out loud and then immediately going back to being shallow. Even in a genre that intentionally leans on character archetypes, these townies have felt a little one-note so far.

Not for nothing, but making the requisite 'white-haired hot guy' laughably childish while leaving the broody bartender Samael un-datable (or so it first seems, based on his sole four friendship hearts) feels like a real misread on the farm simming audience. I'm happy to date one of the many ladies of the town, but the bachelor options probably aren't what most people are hoping for.

Moonlight Peaks is full of slightly odd decisions like that. I can store seemingly infinite resources in my house, but the storage menu requires so many button presses that it becomes more of a chore than organizing my chests in any other crafting game. It tracks gifts I've given to villagers, but just in a list of "recently given" that seems far less useful than a discrete list of things they like or love. It's very quest-driven, rather than being open-ended like Stardew Valley, but I'm often left without enough to do in a day because my next goal is too far off from being completed.

For all that, Moonlight Peaks is really easy to pick up and dive into. The Animal Crossing-like chibi character designs are cute, the supernatural town concept is charming, and quest directions are clear even if the pacing is a little slow. Its flower arranging and pottery minigames, and the pattern-based spellcasting are all fun touches too.

I'm glossing over the 'how it plays' bit of things, because for so many farm simming fans that never seems to be a dealbreaker. Most of us are in it for the cast of characters and their stories, while the gameplay specifics are either a little speed bump or boost on that journey as long as they include all the usual activities, which Moonlight Peaks does. I did finally find out how to go on dates in Moonlight Peaks, though, and the fact that they involve minigame activities is a little treat.

I'm not having a bad time in Moonlight Peaks, but it's hard not to look at its $35 price tag and rather average writing without thinking of Fields of Mistria's 1.0 launch coming up next month after two years of consistently excellent character writing in early access and no hike in sight for its $14 price. Farm sim fans have a lot of options these days and I'm not convinced yet that Moonlight Peaks earns its keep.

Sul sul! If you've ever spent extended time with The Sims, don't pretend like you don't know what I'm saying—we've all been there. It's never enough to open a game in the series for a quick session. You've got to spend hours micromanaging households, building new homes, and coordinating fancy 'fits.

But I get it, no judgement here. The Sims 4 is easy for me to pick up, but impossible to put down. And because of that, I may know a word or two of their bizarre, in-game language.

It's called simlish, and just like Klingon from Star Trek or Final Fantasy 10's Al Bhed, it's your sims' very own in-universe language. The Sims Studios has explained its linguistic process multiple times over the years, but in case you were wondering: no, it's not just you. Your sims really do have specific words and phrases to describe the same concepts. When you've played a ton of The Sims series, it's hard not to pick up and repeat a few of them.

In honor of the series' impressive linguistic feat, I've teamed up with PC Gamer's very own Sims series scholar, Lauren Morton, for a quick quiz on simlish. You've got a little over eight minutes to interpret these 10 sim phrases. Good luck, and let us know how you scored in the comments below.

The Sims 4 is a noisy game, especially once you've piled on a few expansion packs. You're constantly fielding stray notifications and unsolicited calls from acquaintances asking you for advice, and before you know it you've soiled your pants and bowling night is ruined. Thankfully, the headlining note in a recent Sims 4 patch is a stab at "clearing the noise."

As the update blog notes, there are loads of new menu options for in-game alerts. You can silence your phone entirely, for instance, and toggle festival notifications for each individual pack.

Some nonsensical cases of unwelcome calls have been accounted for explicitly: freelancer sims will no longer receive calls regarding careers they aren't in, the grim reaper will only bother recruiting sims if they’re already tagged as macabre (see our guide on that if you think claiming the souls of the dead actually sounds pretty rad), and sims on your front lawn won't call you to ask about your childhood anymore.

There are a lot more notes like that, so I'd check out the blog if you want to ensure the thing that bothers you in particular was accounted for. Beyond that, there are over 70 bug fixes to peruse as well—among them, sims created as romantic partners shouldn't errantly become siblings all of a sudden anymore, doors and windows should clip less, and the gallery UI should be less buggy.

As always, The Sims patch notes are simultaneously a bizarre read and a relief to regular players who are well-acquainted with the life simulation's innumerable quirks. As it turns out, simulating human life in a videogame comes with some challenges. If you'd rather introduce some new bugs, take a look at our list of the best Sims 4 mods, and if you're looking for a change, try our list of the best Sims-likes.

Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone recently gave us a small update on the progress of Haunted Chocolatier. He said that his next project is taking longer than expected due to the fact that it's a bigger game than Stardew Valley and because he's a perfectionist. He also explained why there are no screenshots alongside this update—or in-depth explanations of any systems—in terms that any cosy game player will understand.

"Please excuse me, but I don’t like to share too many screenshots, or even talk about the systems in too much detail, while the game is in development," Barone wrote in his blog post. "Partly, it feels like I’m serving a half-baked bread. I would rather serve a fully baked bread."

This is hardly a surprising decision given that as far as we know Haunted Chocolatier isn't close to being finished. There's also plenty that could change between now and its release, so explaining systems and supplying fans with too many screenshots runs the risk of getting people excited about things that just won't end up in the final game. "If I reveal them early, I risk disappointing players if the final product does not match their expectation," Barone said. Inaccurate screenshots truly are the goopy bread of indie game development.

There's an increasing trend of games drip-feeding players morsels before release, whether through demos or countless blog posts. And while demos and community engagement certainly have their place and have proven successful for games such as Cult of the Lamb or YapYap, it's certainly not the only way to release a game.

This is especially the case since Barone doesn't have to worry much about creating hype. "I'm in a position where I don't need to market the game," before its release, said Barone, humbly refraining from mentioning Stardew Valley's 35 million plus sales. He's sticking to his "preferred approach," which seems to be slowly but surely bringing Haunted Chocolatier up to temp.

It's been five years since Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone announced the idea of Haunted Chocolatier, since then we've got a few small updates on progress here and there, with the bulk of Barone's time being spent on making Stardew Valley one of, if not the best indie game available (which is currently 40% off in the Steam Summer sale).

It sounds like work on Haunted Chocolatier has been slow yet very deliberate, something that Barone yet again stresses in this latest update on progress. "I know it’s taking a long time," Barone says in a blog post. "A big part of that is that I am being very thoughtful about every aspect of the game. The things in the game which the player will be interacting with or using very often need to be 'perfect'. They need to be seamless, clear, intuitive, satisfying, aesthetic."

Barone has already confirmed that Haunted Chocolatier will be bigger than Stardew Valley, which is fantastic for us as it means we'll have more to chew on once we get our hands on it, but that does mean way more work for Barone. Whether there'll be a bigger map, more characters, or more systems (or all of the above), Haunted Chocolatier certainly sounds like a much bigger project than Stardew Valley was at launch.

One area which Barone has dedicated a lot of work to, and a lot of reworks, has been in the actual chocolate making: "I’ve been revisiting the recipe book for making chocolates. As with many things in the game, I’ve iterated on this many times, each time bringing it closer to its final form. To me, it’s not a simple task, as I torture myself over every last detail. This is a UI you will be using fairly often, so it has to be perfect. You need to be able to accomplish your goal with the minimal number of clicks.

"There needs to be just the right amount of data presented to the player: not so much as to be overwhelming, but not so little as to be trivial or mundane. And the way that this data is laid out on the page is crucial. If the data is all clustered together, it will be disgusting to look at. The data needs to be grouped into compelling, intuitive and easy to read/understand groupings. It needs to look appealing and intriguing. And this is just the bare minimum, that players will likely take for granted."

I've never really thought about just how well-crafted Stardew Valley's UI is, because it's just so bloody intuitive. I always end up explaining the systems to my game-averse mates by simply saying "you just know". Stardew Valley has the right amount of information dispersed in the right ways to make playing feel instinctive. It's a brilliant template for Haunted Chocolatier.

But even still, Barone doesn't seem content with just making the whole experience frictionless: "I want to delight the player" and that means a hell of a lot more work needs to go into iterating on systems "several times before I'm satisfied with it."

There is absolutely no part of me that wants Barone to rush Haunted Chocolatier. Sure, I can't regulate my excitement everytime I read an update on it because it just sounds sick as all hell. But I'd wait many more years to play this game if it's what's best for the game and the developer. "It’s a big game, so there are many things for me to fuss over," Barone explains. "But, this is what it will take to make a game I’m satisfied with."

This year's Steam Summer Sale has kicked off and if I could convince all my fellow cozy gamers to pick up one thing it would be Fields of Mistria. It's got a nice little 20% discount during the sale, going for just $11.19, which is a dang good price for an already excellent farm sim that's about to launch its completed version.

The magical girl anime-inspired farm sim has been in Early Access for a couple years, and as soon as its 1.0 launch lands in August it's going to officially take the top spot on my favorite games like Stardew Valley list. Mistria's cast of characters is so much more charming and lively than any other farm sim I've played in the past decade. It's been two years and I still can't decide which one to marry, which I'll finally be able to do after the 1.0 version lands.

Even on a normal day, Mistria is one of the cheapest farm sims around. While most of the post-Stardew crop go for around $30, Mistria has always been $14. NPC Studio confirmed to me during its 1.0 date announcement that the price isn't going to increase after the August 5 update, which rocks. Getting it for an extra couple bucks off is even better, especially knowing it'll be in a completed state in about a month.

The Sims 4 painted the town green with its outdoorsy, fairy-themed expansion, but if you don't want to work your way up the faefolk rankings to get to the good stuff, you can use Enchanted by Nature cheats for an easy shortcut. Some fairy features don't have their own code, but here you'll find cheats for most Sims 4 careers, skills, and traits that were added with the expansion.

If you need extra guidance, check out our main list of The Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on the basics. And if you're looking for other expansion commands, we've got lists for Businesses & Hobbies cheats and Life & Death cheats.

Enchanted by Nature career cheats

Enchanted by Nature added one new career to The Sims 4 with the Naturopath. It's a handy career for curing ailments, and you can even take things a step further with branching career paths as a Lifestyle Coach or Apothe-curist.

Enchanted by Nature skill cheats

The Sims 4 received two new skills with Enchanted by Nature: Apothecary and Natural Living. Sims skilled in Apothecary will learn how to make cures for ailments, while Natural Living sims learn how to thrive outdoors.

Use the testingcheats true command before setting a skill level via cheat code.

Enchanted by Nature trait cheats

Sims get three standard traits in this expansion: Disruptive, Mystical, and Plant Lover. There are Enchanted by Nature cheats for all three, but you can always add them via Create-a-Sim by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Edit in CAS"
• Find both in the "Social" traits section

You can also add or remove traits in the console with the codes below. Traits marked with the fairy emoji 🧚 are exclusive to the occult sim.

Personality traits

Reward traits

Enchanted by Nature death cheats

Enchanted by Nature adds two overdramatic deaths for fairy sims, Death by Emotional Starvation and Death by Emotional Overload, but there's only a cheat for one.

Fairy death cheats

How fairy sims die from Emotional Overload

Fairies can detect and absorb other sims' emotions, but consuming Overload Moodlets can lead to Death by Emotional Overload. Here's how to get the process started:

• Use Detect Emotion on other sims to find overload emotions (look for an exclamation❗)
• Use Absorb Emotion until it triggers Enraged, Hysterical, or Mortified
• Continue until triggering Death by Anger, Death by Laughter, or Death by Embarrassment

Sims have been able to die from extreme emotions for a while, but the fairy sim option is still a new way to experience all three possibilities. If you're trying to avoid death or bring someone back, refer to our main list of Sims 4 cheats.

Enchanted by Nature fairy cheats

As Enchanted by Nature's occult sims hone their magical abilities, they'll also improve their fairy ranking. There are five ranks to work (or cheat) your way through, each with their own perks and special manipulation magic.

There's no cheat to directly equip the fairy rank to your sim, but you can use an XP shortcut to accomplish the same thing.

I usually expect blank stares when I wax nostalgic about The Guild 2, a rough diamond that's part management game, part life sim, part RPG. It's the kind of game that does well in central Europe but not remotely as well elsewhere. Your classic eurojank romp: big on ambition, not so much on optimisation or clarity. This is the Stalker of life sims.

For the uninitiated, imagine Anno—or any other detailed economic sim—but instead of playing some omnipresent administrator, you're just some guy. Some guy, though, who can climb the ranks of medieval society, forging a lasting dynasty with the power to change history. Or you could just open a successful tavern or become nothing more than a moderately successful gravedigger.

So many life sims fall into the cosy game category, and while I like Animal Crossing and Pokopia, it's sometimes hard to shake the feeling that these games aren't for me—a middle-aged man who loves boring things like historical accounts of terrible monarchs or the rise of the industrial revolution. I was not yet a middle-aged man when The Guild 2 came out in 2006, but I was still a bore, and this game felt made for me.

I craved more, and the monkey paw curled. In 2017, The Guild 3 was released in early access. It largely seemed to be more of the same thing, but fancier. I was thrilled, right up until after I had to play it. Back then I ran Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Premature Evaluation column, exploring new early access games. Here's what I wrote at the time:

Disappointment has hounded me at every turn. Nothing I do feels like it matters, and the simulation that ostensibly drives the game is very, very slight. Relationships, jobs, the economy that’s meant to lie at the heart of the game—all of them are half-baked at best, and I’ve seen little evidence of any dynamism.

Things didn't improve much throughout early access. The release date kept getting pushed back, promised features never materialised, and the initial developer, GolemLabs, was given the boot, to be replaced by Purple Lamp. The Guild 3 eventually left early access in 2022. But it never actually got finished. Updates continued for a year, but not ones that could salvage it.

But now a new Guild is on the horizon! Except it's not really new. It's The Guild: Europa 1410, inspired by the first game in the series. Unfortunately, this was before it became a life sim/RPG. This is disappointing, but I still love economic sims, so I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

I shouldn't have bothered.

The Guild: Europa 1410 is, in its current incarnation, just a bunch of flavourless menus and repetitive notifications. It's a little bit less abstract than a lot of economic sims, in that you are technically playing a person, as well as the head of a dynasty, and they technically exist within the world. However, you exclusively control them through menus, and how they interact with the world is extremely limited. You also can't name them, any of their family members, or their business. The game does that for you. And while you do have RPG-like stats, there's no character creation.

So! I guess I'm Jan Hirschfeld, the owner of The Fat Goose, the only tavern in all of Kuttenberg—which, if you're not from the Czech Republic, you might remember from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. And for 17 days—where each day is also a season—I am tasked with diligently moving ingredients from one menu to another menu. Such is the life of an innkeep.

Occasionally I move some sliders, attempting to stop my employees from hating me by increasing their wages and treating them with more kindness. And when I start to get annoyed with how few items I can sell at once, I upgrade my bar and storage facilities. More exciting upgrades are available, like a stage for shows and a dark corner for spying on customers, but I don't have the relevant skills to construct them.

Every day is the same. My workers keep inexplicably injuring themselves, no matter how much training I provide—an event that is always accompanied by a voiceover letting me know how rubbish my employees are. And when they aren't just falling over, they make beer and gruel, which another employee sells. I can actually make more money selling beer at the market, though, so I usually send the cart out with any beer I've not already sold.

I guess folk really like a frothy beverage while they're doing their groceries.

During the 17-day demo, a few events occur that sort of break up the monotony of running an inn. At one point, I'm reminded that it would be handy to have an heir. I click on the first woman I find in the courtship menu. I flirt with her four times and a day later we are married. And a day after that we have our first child.

Now, I'm not really a fan of children. They're pretty useless. So when Satan shows up at my house and asks me to sacrifice my first-born child, with the promise that this will strengthen my bloodline, I go ahead and murder Jan Junior. Nobody seems to mind, and a day later I have another kid anyway. God, parenting is so easy.

Yes, making a deal with the Devil sounds pretty neat—but again, this is all happening in menus and text popups, and the result is just that I have slightly better kids, I guess? This is not Crusader Kings 3, where you've got playful text accompanied by striking art and characters with actual personalities. It's the bare minimum.

One afternoon, I agree to hold onto a sacred relic for a pilgrim. He says he's being hunted for it, and that I should deliver it to the church. I now have an artefact in my possession, and the game tells me I could sell it for 800 gold—I'm calling it gold just for convenience, but it's actually referred to as "local currency". I need the money, but there's a problem. Items from your personal inventory can be gifted, but not sold—which makes me wonder why it even has a price in the first place.

Since there's no objective listed, and no obvious way to deliver it to the church, I instead gift it to the local archbishop. He takes it, nothing happens. Thrilling quest!

The life of an innkeeper is clearly not for me, and I start dreaming of an exciting career in politics. Unfortunately, I'm not even considered a citizen yet. That will cost me 1,000 gold—which is actually not too much. Except I need to have 20,000 gold in my bank account first.

No politics for me, then. Instead, I just watch as increasingly bizarre laws are passed. Theft becomes legal. Then beating people up. And witchcraft. It sure sounds like someone powerful in Kuttenberg is a magical thief. Not that anything going on in the city really seems to affect me. Though it might be affecting how much I can sell my beer for. The price keeps fluctuating, and the economy is dynamic, but it's not clear how external factors affect my business.

17 days isn't much time to get to grips with the game. Even at the default speed, a day goes by in minutes. But even with this meagre offering, I duck out early. It's all just so gruelling—a joyless grind, one day to the next.

The Guild: Europa 1410 has the appearance of a deep, complex, systems-driven sim, but playing it is a shallow, repetitive experience that fails to capture any of the series' former magic. It's due to hit early access on July 16, but I'd give this one a miss, folks.

Spore is the greatest game that never was. Clear as day, I remember the wonder the pitch instilled in me as a young'un. It was to be a true simulation like The Sims, not just of daily life, but of the history of all life—life as everything from a unicellular amoeba to a spacefaring alien of my own design, all realized in exacting detail.

That was the idea, or the one overhyped fans ran with, anyway. The game we got is not that. It's more of a sci-fi minigame collection with an impressive, if cartoony, character creation engine tacked on. But as an interview-stuffed oral history from Design Room explains, that was always the idea.

"Will [Wright] said from the jump that this was going to be a lot of little minigames. Just nobody listened," gameplay designer Jenna Chalmers told Design Room. "Everybody knew him for these really rich, robust simulations, and wanted all the depth and the richness … people heard what they wanted to hear."

Admittedly, this perception of Spore as some sort of mythical super-game didn't materialize out of thin air. When The Sims designer and PC gaming mastermind Will Wright presented the game at GDC 2005, he did so in the now-infamous talk humbly titled "The Future of Content" which shows the game with a less cuddly art style and some features that never made it into the final game, like an aquatic stage between single cell gameplay and land-dwelling creaturedom.

In the talk, Wright throws around tantalizing terms like "procedural verbs" and notes that budding societies may come to favor emotional or logical styles of reasoning—while a good deal of what's shown has some sort of approximation in the final game, it's easy to fill in the blanks with depth that isn't there. As for the stuff that never made it into the final game, there's a whole fan wiki article about that.

You don't have to scroll down far to see that people are still bitter about it. "Remember what they took from us," reads a comment from Worldsawesomestguy posted just five years ago.

Talking to Design Room, Will Wright said that preview might have been a bit much. "[EA executive Don Mattrick] was really against [the talk]. He said we shouldn't show it to anybody yet. But I wanted to start getting early feedback," said Wright. "We were definitely overrepresenting what it eventually became there."

Art director Ocean Quigley recalled the talk's glowing reception: "One of the journalists who covered [the GDC talk] said, 'This is either the most amazing game design of all time, or an act of bold chicanery.' It was B. It was an act of bold chicanery." Alex Hutchinson, lead gameplay designer on Spore, said the preview "built a fantasy in people's minds that was unachievable."

You might assume that, as is so often the case in stories like these, publisher meddling led to a change in direction or cut necessary dev time short. But in the article, Wright and others recalled that EA gave Maxis both a long leash creatively and an exceptionally long development timeline of nine years (though Wright recalled he and EA exec Mattrick were at odds on certain design decisions).

"We never felt pressure," said developer Chris Hecker in the article. "EA's got lots of problems, but this was not one of them."

Quigley told Design Room that keeping that relationship strong took coming up with "compelling bits and pieces" to share frequently, "Scheherazade-style," but ultimately Wright had won a lot of good faith with his previous successes. Spore was afforded so much time, money, and confidence on the promise of what it could be.

"He had more credibility than anybody," Quigley explained. "And this is both good and bad. That gave him license to explore half-baked ideas and see if there was anything there. But it also gave him license to be self-indulgent. There wasn't any sense of crisis. And sometimes a sense of crisis can be useful for driving decisions and getting to clarity."

Despite the turmoil behind its creation, the game still found an audience and has its merits. It's still one of the most ambitious games on PC thanks to its sheer variety and impressive procedural animation, and even if the game itself is kind of "a slog" as Philippa Warr described it writing for PC Gamer, there's nothing else quite like it. That's probably why it's inspiring games like the roguelike Everything Is Crab to this day.

Life sim player tradition (or stubborness?) dictates I often attempt to build a real house—my childhood home or one I drove past last week—and yet in The Sims, I always wind up frustrated that the series' grid-based building has never been able to quite replicate actual floor plans. I've become totally enamored with building in Paralives because its gridless, real world measurements make so many designs possible, even going so far as just slapping a real life blueprint into the game and tracing it.

In the week after Paralives launched, lots of players were sharing the possibilities of importing custom images. One trick, which just requires a small mod, is uploading an image of a real blueprint and putting it onto a rug which you can use like a guide to draw all your walls in Build Mode. Incredibly it just… works?

How to use a custom rug floor plan in Paralives

1. Download Bunny's Customizable Rug in the Steam Workshop
2. Save an image on your PC of a floor plan you want to replicate (one that shows measurements, ideally)
3. Use the search function (magnifying glass) in the Build Mode menu to find Bunny's Custom Rug
4. Click the "change image" picture icon and scroll down to find the custom image "+" button
5. Import your blueprint image and resize the rug to the correct scale
6. Make sure to toggle the grid off when building walls and verify you're using the matching measurement type (metric or imperial) in your game settings
7. Trace your walls!

To get the scale of your image correct, check the measurements of a room in your blueprint and build two perpendicular walls in the lengths specified. Use the resizing arrows on the rug to line those walls up on your blueprint. With your measurements aligned, you're free to trace away.

In The Sims games, which I've always loved building in, you've got to treat the dimensions of real houses more as inspiration. Tiny rooms like hall closets or half baths are a bit too big even when you make them a single wall tile wide, and bedrooms always have to be a bit bigger than seems realistic just to fit a tiny twin bed.

It was so fun to see a blueprint just translate nearly perfectly into Paralives. The moment of truth was when I finished its small but realistic 8'x11' bedrooms and went to see if a standard size bed would fit and, miracle of miracles, it does. Even my linen closets in the hall just work.

The one bit of scale that I've struggled with in Paralives are the showers. Even those miniscule rounded corner showers measure 4sqft in game. I've been in one of those things in real life and can assure you they are not four feet wide. Since showers are one of the few structural bits in Paralives that can't be resized, because of the animations for showering I assume, it means a few of the realistically cramped bathrooms I've attempted haven't worked out. Alas, I haven't spotted a workshop mod with smaller showers yet.

Otherwise, building true to real life scale has been such a treat after spending 20+ years finagling uncanny replications of the homes in my neighborhood. I wish I could tell my ten-year-old self about this.

Today's Xbox Showcase just wrapped up, and amid all the blood, guts, and wackiness the standout trailer for me had to be the calming life sim, Vivarium.

It's not that I don't like my fair share of gore—State of Decay 3 and Metro 2039's new trailers both looked fantastic, and I can't wait to play them, but a Ghibli-styled cosy life sim? Hell yeah, that's what I get out of bed for.

This is the first time I'm seeing anything about Vivarium, but I like what I'm seeing. Set inside a "perfect" pocket world you play a protagonist in a life sim adventure progressing through a non-linear narrative which is apparently shaped by your own choices.

To do so you need to chat to the locals, who are peculiar yet charming anthropomorphic animals, plus a doll, who is also your best friend (no judgement here). You'll learn more about your neighbours and the secrets that this world holds.

It all sounds absolutely delightful. I'm something of a horror mega fan, but I always like to have a slower-paced cosy game in my back pocket for mental emergencies. It works just as well as watching cute animal videos in my experience.

But it's greatest strength, in my humble opinion has to be its hand-illustrated art style which has clearly been inspired by anime classics like those from Studio Ghibli. Watching the protagonist amble through forests and over babbling brooks feels good for my soul. My love for this style is almost certainly nostalgic, but it doesn't make it any less beautiful.

The only catch is that we don't have a release date for this lovely life sim yet. We do know it will release sometime in 2027, so let's just hope it's sooner rather than later.

Some of you may have had your fill of farming sims, but I swear it's impossible for me to grow tired of them. As you can imagine, shows like the Wholesome Direct are often a treat for me, and today did not disappoint with a new look at another life sim, Fourleaf Fields.

Well, it being a farming sim is what pulled me in, at least. The gossip mechanic is what really got my attention though—I love mess.

As part of the Summer Game Fest 2026 lineup, the Wholesome Direct put the spotlight on this tiny farming sim from Behemutt, an indie studio based in Brazil. In Fourleaf Fields, you're a polly pocket-sized farmer growing gargantuan crops, and their massive size impacts the way you care for them. You don't just pull giant carrots up; you slice them into a bunch of normal-sized veggies. And instead of using a watering can, you shoot big dew drops at your thirsty plants.

It's all pretty dang cute, but I can't get over how clever a town gossip system sounds. I love not minding my business in these games—I'm in everyone's house at all hours of the morning and night, so of course I know all of the town tea. We don't get a very long look at how exactly it all works in Fourleaf Fields, but Behemutt says you'll collect stories from around town to uncover your neighbors' secrets with its "tech tree fueled by hearsay."

Aside from peddling in the rumor mill, Fourleaf Fields has some of the other farm sim staples you've come to expect too, like maintaining your relationship with other villagers, upgrading structures around town, and caring for your livestock. Oh, and the livestock are all bugs, by the way. Your little Thumbelina farmer can't handle normal animals like chickens and cows, so they'll care for moths, butterflies, and bees.

It's also multiplayer, so between the adorable sprites and Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Kids aesthetic, I reckon I'll have no trouble cornering a few of my cozy gaming friends to play with me. As for when I can do that, it's still up in the air. Fourleaf Fields doesn't have a release date yet, but it's available to wishlist now on Steam.

Vampire life sim Moonlight Peaks is creeping near but if you can't wait for launch day to play, well, you don't have to: there's a new demo over on Steam right now. My fellow farmlife sim players have been looking forward to this dark but cute twist on the genre for a few years now and with the release date scheduled for July, now's a great time to take a quick look on a handy 'try before you buy' basis.

Moonlight Peaks has had a couple demos over the past few years since its reveal and, as announced at the Wholesome Games showcase today, it's swapped in yet another bigger, better version for you. Past demos haven't had much story content or the character creator and were focused on smaller bits of decorating or farming in short bursts.

A rep for the game told PC Gamer that this demo will be largely similar to the one I played 6 hours of last month, though you'll start with a partially upgraded farm instead of from scratch. It will "cover the same content" though, they say, so presumably that means you get to see the start of the story where the werewolves, witches, vampires, and seers in town are all at odds with each other slinging spells and insults equally liberally. You'll be able to meet most of the cast, begin farming, and learn how to cast spells and shapeshift.

Based on my experience playing, that should be the bulk of what farmlife simming fans need to decide whether you're into Moonlight Peaks enough to buy it at launch. I found all the basics plenty competent—snappy tool animations, easy menus, and cute character designs—so it's down to whether the comically toxic bantering and the directed main quest (rather than open-ended goals as in Stardew Valley) are to your taste.

Do be aware: Moonlight Peaks strongly advises that you use a gamepad to play, though I tried a bit of keyboard & mouse and didn't find it played poorly that way.

You can find the Moonlight Peaks demo on Steam, which is also where you'll be able to buy it when it launches on July 7.

Summer weddings are back in, babes. I am not waiting a day longer than necessary for my nuptials, so you'll find me at the altar on August 5 when Fields of Mistria launches its 1.0 update. The full launch will finally bring marriage and babies and a whole lot of other awaited changes to the magical girl farm sim. Who's going to be standing beside me saying "I do?" I don't know yet. I'm still deciding.

Mistria delivered its save the date in a new trailer at the Wholesome Direct showcase today, with a cheeky little peek at some of the parts that are going to have me kicking my feet giggling. There's a marriage ceremony with the blacksmith March (you're taking his breath away) and domestic life with Juniper (your baby's name is Rune). I still really enjoy the special details Mistria packs in for its characters like seasonal outfits, including wedding outfit portraits now, and an alternate sprite for Juniper holding your baby, which I assume other spouses will have too.

In its announcement post NPC Studio broke down lots of what's coming in this 1.0 update. Of course there's the 10 heart friendship events with villagers, marriage, and children, as mentioned. There are new Saturday Market vendors, one of which you can spot in the trailer named Stillwell. You'll also be able to raise your town renown level to 100 and complete the town repair quest line, which is likely related to the cutscene featuring Adeline and Eiland's mother Baroness Linnet there's a little teaser for at the end. Oh, and a giant, rideable chicken?

For a farm sim lover, my 50 hours in Mistria so far are actually pretty pitiful, but I took a break after the early access launch to wait for more character heart events and town quests. Knowing 1.0 was planned for sometime this year, I booted it back up this spring to start advancing through the friendship stories that have been added but got nowhere near finished. I've got a deadline now—time to hit eight hearts with everyone by August so I can drop into relationship endgame on the 5th.

My only question now is: with who? I lamented right at launch two years ago that I couldn't decide who to date because all of Mistria's residents are so charming and all the writing is so well done. I still haven't decided, so I've got my work cut out for me there too, oops.

Getting notice about the full release now is actually quite nice. The yearly Steam Summer Sale is coming up this month, so it's worth watching to see if Mistria goes on discount at all. Its current $14 price is extremely cheap compared to other farmlife sims, though, and NPC Studio confirmed to me this week that it will not be raising the price for the full launch.

The Fields of Mistria 1.0 update launches on August 5 and NPC Studio has said that "early access is just the beginning" so it's clearly preparing for more updates even after the main game story is complete.

The A Heroes Journey update brought Hercules and Phil to Disney Dreamlight Valley, but unlike Pocahontas, the process of unlocking both characters is slightly more complicated. You've got five new quests to make your way through before they move into your valley, alongside a shiny new realm to explore.

To begin the first quest you need to complete, you have to unlock the Hercules realm in the Dream Castle. This will cost 11,000 Dreamlight, which is a pretty big investment if you ask me, but it's worth it. As soon as you've unlocked the realm, before you've even set foot inside, you'll begin the Moonlighting as a Hero quest. Here's what you need to do from there.

How to complete the Moonlighting as a Hero quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

Once you're inside the Hercules realm, a cutscene will play showing Phil running through the woods. Follow him by going right and walking through the trees. Speak to him in front of the plinth surrounded by thorns, and he will explain that Hercules has gone missing and he needs your help. You'll offer to investigate the thorns and fog, so once the conversation has ended, walk up to the thorns and interact with them to receive a message from Artemis which doesn't make much sense.

Head back to Phil by the pillar at the start of the realm, and talk to him. He'll decipher the message you've just found and task you with finding a Moon Headband in the realm. Fortunately, it's just in the pool of water behind where you're talking to Phil, so grab your fishing rod and cast your line into the ripples. When you've reeled it in, take it to the pedestal next to Phil.

Talk to him again, and he'll suggest getting more gifts for Artemis. You'll need to gather the following items from around the realm next:

• 3 x Greek Clay
• 3 x Greek Flowers
• 3 x Sylvan Wood

Transfer these things to the pedestal, and the Moon Headband will start to glow. Phil will then tell you to pick it up, put it on, and head to the training arena with him. So, equip the headband and follow Phil to the left, clearing all the night thorns along the way. Speak to Phil once you've reached the arena, and he'll get you to run the obstacle course before helping you. So, go through the starting line behind Phil to begin your run.

You'll need to clear night thorns and light five Moonlight Beacons on your way around the course, so keep your Moon Headband equipped. It's worth increasing your stamina bar to gold so you can glide around too, as this makes the entire course that little bit faster. As long as you get through in two minutes or less, that's all that matters though.

Once you've spoken to Phil a final time, he'll send you back to the first pedestal you found in the realm. Light this to clear the first bit of fog, and then go through the woods lighting every pedestal you come across until a cutscene plays showing Hercules in front of three swirling water fountains. Talk to Hercules, and the Moonlighting as a Hero quest will end, and the Speedrun Crash Course quest will automatically begin.

How to complete the Speedrun Crash Course quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

Head back into the woods and speak to Hercules and Phil. After the initial excitement of them being reunited, they'll explain they need the help of Hermes, aka some Winged Boots, to get across to the temple. These need to be mined from the marble pile to the left of where you speak to Phil and Herc. You'll also need to gather five Pegasus Feathers while you find the boots, which can be found throughout the forest and are hard to miss given their golden glow.

Take all of these items back to Phil, and he'll lead you to the Hermes pedestal back at the arena. Place the items on the pedestal, and speak to Hercules. Much like what happened with the Moon Headband, you'll need to put in a bit more work to please Hermes, which means cooking up a "Legendary Meal". To create this, you'll need to find the following items scattered across the entire Hercules realm:

• 1x Aegean Delights
• 1x Legendary Goldfish
• 1x Greek Cheeses
• 1x Greek Fruits and Veggies
• 1x Giant Lettuce

When you've gathered all of these ingredients, use the cooking pot (the firepit) at the entrance of the arena to save yourself from going back to the valley. Shove all of these ingredients into the pot, and take the Legendary Meal to the Hermes pedestal. When you place it, the boots will start to glow like the Moon Headband did. Pick them up, put them on, and go to the starting line for the Hermes obstacle course directly to your left.

As you run around the obstacle course, you'll need to collect five feathers. Just like the first obstacle course you ran, it's easier to float or glide around and much faster too, so fill your stamina bar before you start to make your course more efficient. When you've finished in five minutes, you'll be sent back to the dark forest and you need to talk to Hercules again.

He'll say you're ready to cross the storm to get to the temple, so run back to the cliff edge and interact with the Hermes symbol on the floor to cross. This will end the Speedrun Crash Course quest and immediately start the Thunderstruck quest.

How to complete the Thunderstruck Quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

Hercules and Phil waste no time in telling you that the gate to the temple is locked, of course. But luckily, there's a rotating puzzle on the floor you can solve to help. Use the levers at the bottom of the puzzle until the cloud with lightning coming out of it is facing you. You'll know when you've positioned each correctly as a mechanism will pop up in the middle, and you'll be able to grab the Stone Bracers Mould. Take this to Hercules, and he'll ask you to gather the following items:

• 6 x Hephaestus Coals
• 10 x Orichalcum Ore
• 10 x Greek Marble Fragment

You can gather most of your Orichalcum Ore and Hephaestus Coals from the island you're on, but you need to head back into the dark forest to get marble fragments from piles of broken marble pillars, and more coals from the arena.

Take all of these items to the crafting bench left of the temple's entrance and craft the Golden Bracers. Place them on the Zeus pedestal in front of the temple entrance. Before you can enter the temple though, you'll need to decide on whether you want to make Zeus laugh, cry, or become angry.

I chose to make him laugh, which sent me back to the valley to speak to Scrooge McDuck, Merlin, and Goofy to learn some good jokes. I couldn't test if the other options gave different characters to speak to, but I imagine so. Go back to the valley and chat to your selected villagers, and return to Hercules in the realm with your findings. For me, I had to tell him my favourite joke, which triggered the Golden Bracers to glow on the pedestal.

Pick up and put on the Bracers, and you'll be able to break the rocks blocking the temple entrance, alongside the chains keeping the door shut. When you break these, Hercules and Phil will run in and walk up to the mosaic at the back of the room. Follow them, and speak to Phil who explains that someone is making a mockery of the Gods by switching parts of the mosaic around. You're then challenged to find the missing pieces around the temple. After this conversation, the Thunderstruck quest will end and automatically start the A Real Godly Mess quest.

How to complete A Real Godly Quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

You need to find six mosaic pieces around the temple, and luckily they have a very bright golden glow so you can see them from a mile off. Most of them are trapped behind big rocks, so keep your Golden Bracers on as you won't be able to break them otherwise. Once you've got all six pieces, take them to Phil and interact with the mosaic to solve the puzzle. This is just like the puzzles we solved during the Storybook Vale DLC, so you just need to drag and drop the pieces into the right places.

Once you've completed the puzzle, a cutscene showing peace being restored to the realm will play, and you'll ask Phil and Hercules to join you in the valley at the end. Hercules will immediately agree, but Phill will say he's got things to do.

Head back to the valley, place Hercules' house plans, and pay 10,000 Star Coins at the Scrooge McDuck sign. Once his house is built, the Welcome Hercules screen will play. This will unlock him in your valley, but it isn't quite the end of the A Real Godly Quest mission.

Instead, you need to cook a 5-star meal for Phil. Any will do, I ended up just using whatever ingredients I had on hand and baking Aurora's Cake. Take your meal back to the Hercules realm and give it to Phil at the temple, and he'll say that it's a tempting offer but he needs to find out who chaotically rearranged the mosaic. You'll offer to help, which means "checking the temple". Basically, just head straight to the mosaic and you'll find a spool of Dreamlight Thread on the floor which you need to pick up and take back to him.

You'll convince Phil that he'll find more clues about who messed up the mosaic if he comes to Dreamlight Valley, which is all the persuasion he needs. So, head back to the valley with him and the "Welcome Phil" cutscene will play. After a quick conversation, A Real Godly Quest will be completed, and you'll be able to start making your way through Hercules' and Phil's friendship quests.

The last time I was a regular Sims player was, well, in the era of The Sims. The first one. Since those ancient days, it's my understanding that the series—or at least The Sims 4—has turned into a platform for some of the most exotic and enthusiastic sexual experimentation mankind has yet produced, largely thanks to its mega-popular Wicked Whims mod.

So I should not be surprised, but maybe lightly scandalised, that the Paralives community has quickly made a whole medley of NSFW mods for the game, then promptly made those mods the most popular among players (spotted by TheGamer).

After releasing in early access just a week ago, Paralives' most-popular mods over on Nexus are already, well, just what you expect. The big swinging champ at the moment—the most popular mod of all—is called (I cannot advise strongly enough against clicking this in public or at work) "Parapenis", if you require some sign of where things are at.

Parapenis, which I have now viewed in my work browser, boldly declares that "Freeballing is for everyone" and gives your masculine Parapeople… exactly what you'd expect. Exactly what you'd expect comes in three sizes, ranging from large to small. For a wishful definition of small. Doesn't seem that small to… a friend of mine. Who I asked about it. Ahem.

That is only one of a suite of freethinking modifications. There's also multiple de-censor mods, genital and buttock sliders (that was the name of my band in university), adult toys, more pubic hair mods than you'd anticipate, and, of course, the Parapenis companion mod: Parapussy.

Some days I write about multi-billion dollar corporate acquisitions. Other days it's Parapussy.

Of the top 10 most popular Paralives mods at the time of writing, seven are fully NSFW, and two of the remaining three are underwear mods, which might be NSFW if your W is especially square.

The thing is, on a more serious note, the proliferation and accessibility of mods like these are probably downright essential if Paralives ever hopes to carve out space for itself in the Sims-dominated life sim world. It seems fairly obvious to me that letting your freak flag fly is a key part of the appeal for these games' audience. If the Parapenises are already there just a week after launch? That suggests to me Paralives is in a pretty healthy place, audience-wise.

Once upon a time I was a creator of Sims. A moulder of virtual people. Pushing and pulling at sliders to contort pixels like putty, perfectly preening them with makeup and hairstyles and outfits that would compliment the personalities I had invented for them. As I grew older, something shifted. An internalised domestication that suddenly had me gravitating towards building and decorating houses.

First came boxes the size of mansions littered with grand pianos and just about anything willing to clog up some of the sparse, undecorated tiles.Then experimentation—smaller builds, cosier, more cluttered. Something I myself would yearn to live in. While my real-life skillset will never allow me a career as an architect or an interior designer, I've long fulfilled that fantasy in the confines of the humble life sim.

And hoo boy, no other life sim has been letting me live out those dreams quite like Paralives. For an early access game crafted by a relatively small team, I have been in awe of what has been achieved despite the numerous bugs and game-breaking glitches. It's a life sim builder's dream—I can absolutely tell that Alex Massé and the wider Paralives Studio are simmers-turned-developers, because Paralives' build mode is packed with stuff that only someone on my absolute sickest of sicko levels could conjure up.

Ow, she's a brick... house

It's a mish-mash of all the stuff I've sincerely loved across two decades as a Sims player, plus everything that I've forever found myself wishing "man, if only this little feature was present". Paralives is packed with stuff I've scoured the internet to mod in for quality-of-life, or to help fulfill whatever vision I was doing my best to lay down a floorplan for.

Always hated how making a house just one wall tile longer was too much, but forgoing it was not enough? Paralives lets you build walls as long or short as you want, unbound by the whims of the grid. Want to create the most diabolically messed up "your did it" star as a liveable abode? You can literally do that. Someone did! You can still adhere to the grid life if you want (which admittedly, I have) but just having that option for freedom is something so many of us have dearly wished for.

Just like the characters I spent so much of my childhood contorting like playdough, Paralives extends that feeling of something so malleable to almost every single decorative and functional item of furniture currently present. I can stretch windows to take up more of my walls, yoink curtains down when their drop is a smidge too short, and turn my two-seater couch into a three or even four-seater if I'm going for a real big family.

It's one of those things I never knew I needed until I found myself deleting items and cycling through furnishings, telling myself "Ahh, this doesn't quite fit the space" until the realisation hit me that I could simply make it fit. This seemingly small power allows me so much depth in the way I choose to build, and it's a shocking realisation just how limiting not having this freedom has been prior to now.

Brick by brick

And I am so happy to see glimpses of The Sims 3—arguably EA's most creatively freeing entry in the series—with its colour wheel and texture options for infinite swatch possibilities. I popped a full-length wavy wall mirror into a Parafolk's bedroom only to realise I wasn't that keen on the vibrant swatches offered by default.

Popping in to create my own and I was able to transform the mirror from a bright acrylic frame to a more sophisticated brass metal one. While Paralives may be nowhere near fellow life sims Inzoi and The Sims in terms of raw number of items available to build and decorate with, it's felt like I've been able to do so much with so little just because of how diverse a single object can become.

It's given me that same sense of excitement and awe I felt all the way back in The Sims 2 for the first time—that sense of wonder at the perceived vastness of creativity that awaits. Even just being able to scale a little piece of clutter up or down to better fit a small counter, or having unfettered access to just about every surface for cluttering up has given me a sense of giddiness I haven't felt from the genre in a helluva long time.

It's one of those feelings that's only going to grow as Paralives continues to build and evolve—both from Paralives Studio itself and from the wealth of community members who are beginning to trickle in their wonderful custom content creations for us to devour.

For years we life sim players have stood 'round the summoning circle, chanting the ritual words: "The Sims really deserves some legitimate competition, you know?" Despite our efforts to manifest, likely competitors just kept getting delayed or outright canned. Now that Paralives has launched—and is, in fact, good—I think maybe the variety life simmers have been yearning for is finally here.

Late last year I lamented that the life sim revolution never came because what was supposed to be a boom year for the genre became a litany of insults upon injuries. The delays (Paralives) and cancellations (Life By You) were one thing, but then The Sims series just kept punching itself in the face between the EA buyout and consistent Project Rene leaks. The beginning of this year didn't get much better with the final confirmation that yeah, Project Rene is just a mobile game now. Oh, and Jake Solomon's life sim got cancelled too.

Inzoi launched last year, it's true, but unfortunately I just didn't click with it at all. A lot of life simmers did, but regardless of whether it scratched your itch or not, one legitimate competitor to The Sims does not a healthy genre make. Even just a month ago I'd started looking ahead to the early access launch for Paralives with mounting dread. Much as it had an art style that felt more my vibe, I was fully prepared to be let down again.

Well, Paralives has launched. And… I'm loving it? I think Paralives is totally worth it for life sim fans in general, but as a Build Mode girl I am ecstatic. Customizing furniture swatches and dynamically resizing everything from couches to curtains is everything I'd been hoping for. Even the Live Mode, bare as it is right now, has brought back the strategy roots in the genre that I'd been missing. Heck, I lost an entire night just messing with the animation sliders in photo mode.

Folks, I think life sims are flourishing.

Am I changing my tune because now there's something for me on the table? Yes, I absolutely am—but that's the point! There really is something for every flavor of life sim fan to get excited about now. The Sims 4 is an old reliable with a free base game that, despite the expensive DLC menu, has benefited from years of free updates. Inzoi's hyper-glossy realism has been perfect for the simmers who like cooking up drama for their digital dollies. And Paralives is a heaven for builders like me who yearn for the return of The Sims 3's Create-A-Style tool.

After being Stockholmed by The Sims for—well essentially forever—having two strong alternatives is incredible. Three's a structurally sound number. Enough to prop up a genre by? It may just be.

All three life sims have earned their defenders and detractors. My complaints about Inzoi don't make it any less loved by quite a lot of players. Anyone (correctly) saying that Paralives' Live Mode needs a lot of work can't stop me from having a whole lot of fun with it. If you're determined to dig on The Sims for its backlog of bugs, you too are correct, and yet so many people who've been with the series for decades are still clocking thousands of hours. If none of the above are working for you, please let me tell you about Tiny Life too.

At last, The Sims series has the competition that we deserve.

There's a reason that we're in 2026 and still see so few life sims on the market: they're incredibly freakin' hard to make. That's not just me spouting my opinion, it's something that the developers behind games like The Sims, Inzoi, and prematurely cancelled Life by You have said in the past. There are so many moving parts in the ways life sim characters interact with the world, their peers, and themselves. Making something functional, believable, and fun? It is not an easy task.

It's a sentiment that has now also been echoed by Alex Massé—creator of the newest life sim to hit our Steam libraries, Paralives. During a recent Q&A, the head of Paralives Studio delved a little bit into just how much goes on behind the scenes in an interaction as simple as instructing a Parafolk currently holding a baby to go to sleep.

"The game first needs to wait for the character to finish their current interaction, gracefully drop the baby they were holding, play an animation to turn around by 180 degrees, walk to the bed by avoiding obstacles on the way and not cutting corners too sharply and be sure to play the proper animation while climbing the stairs because taller Paras need a slightly different animation while doing so," Massé starts off.

He then goes on to list every other little nuance the game has to factor in, like:

• Ensuring Parafolks are in their sleep clothes
• Checking if one side of the bed is occupied or against a wall
• Randomly cycling through sleeping animations
• Replenishing the sleep meter, dependent on age and personality
• Automatically canceling the interaction when the sleep meter is full
• Having the Parafolk get out of bed, animations dependent on age and height
• Playing idle animations reflecting a Parafolk's current needs or personalities

Massé clarifies that "this is all just for the 'Sleep' interaction," and doesn't even factor in what the game is trying to do when you're instructing multiple Parafolks to do this at the same time, or when you attempt to cancel the interaction halfway through. It's almost 20 different things being considered in the background for one task!

That complexity behind crafting a fully fleshed-out live mode has reared its ugly head in terms of a boatload of bugs in Paralives. When asked how many reports the team had received since the game's launch at the beginning of this week, Massé says the team has "received over 100,000 bug reports so far." I do not envy whoever is having to sift through those in the slightest.

It's certainly worth remembering that Paralives Studio is made up of a team of just 15 developers, which feels ridiculously small considering it's managed to carve out a space in a genre known for having about a gazillion different moving parts at any one moment. It's the reason I'm still so surprised by how put-together Paralives is even with having to wade through its buggy early access state.

While Massé says it's "very possible we recruit a few more people to help soon," he says that ultimately "we like working as a small team so we don't plan to grow the team too much." Despite a small team and a mountain of bugs to squash, Massé says the team will continue to chip away at improving live mode over the coming months. For now, at least I can hang out in the game's genuinely fantastic build mode.

As someone who is slowly burning out on The Sims 4 and bounced off the uncanny sameness of Inzoi's world, Paralives was my last hope for a new direction in life sims. No pressure to the small indie team at Paralives Studio, but I was feeling very "this hits, or I'm over the genre for a while," so thank goodness Paralives feels like it's got the makings of a winner.

It's got the early access jank, sure, but even those day-one bones outline something I'm finally excited for—a life sim that isn't a bland attempt at recreating the success of The Sims. Instead, it's real admiration for the original Maxis formula, which includes a few features outlined in the Paralives roadmap that have me hopeful the team will go back to expand on more features its cousin abandoned years ago.

My mom would tell me not to count my chickens before they've hatched, but the Paralives roadmap reads like my life sim dreams come true. The only problem is that it's a little hard to follow between a sparse infographic and a detailed Notion outline, but that's easy enough for me to solve and present here.

When is the first major Paralives update?

The Paralives roadmap notes its first major update is planned for Q4 2026, so that's a tentative October to December window. We don't know what the update entails just yet, but we do know it's my favorite price: Free.

Until then, the rest of the roadmap outlines a period of hotfixes, bug smashing, and existing feature improvements from June to September 2026. Then there's a broader "within ~2 years of early access" note for more major updates, including a system for weather and seasons, pools, pets, and more.

The Paralives roadmap

What's coming to Paralives while it's in early access

The Paralives team estimates they've got about two years of early access development ahead of them before it's 1.0 ready, but some of the updates include features that The Sims 4 would package as a new expansion. There are also things the Maxis series abandoned in its older games, like cars, working garages, and houseboats.

I've highlighted and consolidated the most interesting details found in the Paralives Notion roadmap, but as the team explains in their Patreon blog, it's by no means exhaustive, and plans may change as development continues.

Paralives early access features

What can you do in Paralives early access now?

No matter how much fun I'm having with Paralives, I'm not going to stand here and act like it isn't buggy as all getout in Live Mode. There are glitched menus, failing interactions, and wacky texture glitches, which are all the sorts of things life sim players pretty much knew to expect from an early access game. What we didn't know was that we'd be hounded by some naked lad sneaking into our save files. Their name is Charlie, and like some ghost of life sims future they've now visited my save game too.

I first saw Charlie in a Reddit post on Paralives' launch day, which I promptly sent to my fellow PCG life simmer Mollie Taylor to have a little chuckle over. Today, naively believing I couldn't also become a Charlie target, I was messing around with Paralives cheats working on our guide to trying for a baby in Paralives. After adopting a baby, I quit to the main menu without saving so as not to keep the messy testing I was doing in my save file.

Welcome to the family...... Charlie from r/Paralives

When I loaded back in… Charlie was there. They were in my family instead of that unwanted infant. Charlie is bald, butt naked, and staring directly into your soul. I found them loitering out on the industrial side of town browsing their cellphone, which it seems like they shouldn't have—obvious jokes about where they must keep it aside.

I needed to know more. I used the "editcharacter" cheat to open Charlie up in the paramaker to find that their legal name is Charlie Default, they are nonbinary, and they have no personality stats. Not suspicious at all.

I went looking for other players visited by Charlie where I found others also referencing misplaced kids. One describes accidentally abandoning a child after asking her single father to move in with his partner, having her claimed by child services, and finding Charlie ominously in her place after rolling back the save file. Another says their game crashed after adopting a baby who was also bodysnatched by digital faeries and replaced with Charlie. You can try to reload your save but Charlie will be there waiting.

Charlie's true purpose is probably just as a debug character that misplaced paras will fall back to in the event of simulation errors, if the other Charlie sightings are anything to go by.

In the meantime, I feel like maybe Charlie deserves to stay in the family. Perhaps I'll make some outfits for them and bestow some character traits on them as well.

There's two things I know life simmers love: having affairs and having babies—sometimes all at once, you sloppy drama hounds. Having a baby in Paralives isn't quite as straightforward as you'll be used to coming from The Sims. You've got to spot the right "together cards" in your conversation and then use Paralives' special method for doing actions together to actually try for that baby. Here's the quick guide to having a baby in Paralives followed by a walkthrough on each necessary step.

How to have a baby in Paralives

• Earn the "lovers" relationship label with another para
• Flirt together and discuss the state of your relationship by asking to have children together
• Select both paras in a group together and interact with a bed to "try for baby"
• Alternatively, adopt a baby at the hospital

Earn the lovers relationship label

This part isn't hard for any seasoned life simmer. Use every opportunity you get while talking with your paramour to choose flirty together cards until your storyteller offers you a card to gain a point in the "lover" relationship label. After becoming lovers, you'll be able to choose wants and together cards related to having children together.

This part may not actually be strictly necessary, but it'll be a lot harder to draw the "try for baby" flirt card or succeed in convincing someone to have a baby together in a premeditated fashion without being lovers first, according to the success percent breakdowns for that card.

Ask to have children together

After getting flirty with your lover, you've got a couple options to open up the procreation conversation:

• Use the "ask if they want to try for a baby NOW" flirty together card
• Toggle through the "discuss state of relationship options" and choose the flirty "ask if they want to have children together in the future" card

"Try for a baby NOW" will send your paras immediately off to do the horizontal tango in bed together. This is a spur of the moment thing though, and doesn't let you just try for a baby again whenever you like. For a little more consistency, instead of a wild fling, talk about your relationship first.

When you get the "discuss state of relationship" stack of together cards, which is a neutral white card on top, cycle through the options with the arrow button to find the pink flirty card that says "ask if they want to have children together in the future" (a classically flirty topic, I know). After selecting it, you'll be notified that your two paras can now try for a baby "at any time, when they're ready!" Except, wait, how?

❗ You can also use Paralives cheats "getpregnant" and "pregnantstatus" to make a para conceive and check the time until birth.

How to try for a baby

After discussing the emotional and financial demands of parenthood like a responsible paradult, how do you actually try for that baby? It relies on Paralives' system for doing actions together. You'll need to select both paras by clicking and dragging a box around them (if not in the same household) or holding Shift and clicking both portraits (if they are in a household together). With both paras selected, click on a bed and select "try for baby".

After trying for a baby, you can send your conceiving para to any toilet with the interaction "take pregnancy test" which will let you know whether to expect a baby.

❗ To try for a baby successfully, you'll need to have a Para who can get others pregnant paired with one who can get pregnant. You can use Paralives cheats to "editcharacter" and check the detailed gender info for your paras if you aren't sure. Same sex paras can actually "try for baby" in a bed together but presumably won't ever succeed. Look below for details on adoption.

❗Open your settings menu and look at your "storyteller" to double check the likelihood of becoming pregnant and the duration of trimesters and labor to find out how long your para will be pregnant based on the options you've set.

How to adopt

Instead of getting pregnant, or for paras who cannot get pregnant together, you'll still want to have the conversation about having kids together in the "discuss state of relationship" card stack, as above. You'll gain the label "prospective co-parent" in your relationship menu.

After that, either prospective parent can interact with the hospital or the pharmacy in town and select "adopt baby". Your para will be busy for two hours and then exit with a new baby to name.

Life simmers have been chronically bored for years—so much so that asking "how do you keep Sims 4 interesting for yourself?" is a bit of a cliché. My theory is that life sims need to be harder, or at the very least get back in touch with the strategy roots that made The Sims so enticing way back when. I truly thought I was just yelling at clouds, and yet Paralives has just launched into early access and it is, in fact, doing the exact thing I was begging life sims for.

Before you jump into Live Mode for the first time, Paralives asks you to choose from three default "storytellers," personified figures who hand out nightly gameplay effects, personality upgrades, and pull the strings of the game's difficulty from a laid back experience to a more challenging one.

Unlike The Sims 4, which avoids stepping on my toes in Live Mode so much that it often feels like nothing interesting happens, Paralives just starts with the option for tune-able difficulty. What a concept!

By default, Stella the dog gives new households slightly higher starting funds and ensures that they automatically eat and use the restroom while away at work. The more challenging storyteller Ricardo does not recognize workplace bathroom breaks and also makes the rate of conceiving twins lower. You can also create a custom storyteller to adjust values like the ratio of in-game time to real time, the length of life stages, and the threshold for getting "strikes" at work for poor performance.

They don't play drastically differently right now, but Paralives notes in-game that it plans to expand the storyteller customization options even further, which I'm quite psyched about. I'm hoping to see controls for the rate of broken appliances (currently quite high, honestly) and Paras falling ill, or even controls for things like speed of skill gain and relationship gains.

Diet strategy

Even without using its custom difficulty settings, Paralives has folded the kind of lite strategy gameplay I've been craving into its core experience. Starting with the basics—two Paras talking to one another—I've got to strategically consider how to progress a conversation. Instead of spamming any interaction I want from a radial menu, I have to wait for my Para's conversation meter to fill and then choose one of three interaction cards that are given based on their current mood and the state of their relationship.

While chatting up a new acquaintance, I might have a flirty option to "discuss the best food for a date night" because of my Para's Food talent, but it's only got a 22% chance to succeed, which the menu tells me is a result of five different factors including my Para's traits, our compatible vibes, and the fact that we barely know each other. I look at the time and realize it's already 10 pm and my Para needs to get to bed for work in the morning. So do I risk it for the flirt, possibly taking a mood hit for failing, or play it safe and friendly and try again next time?

Personality trait effects, percentages, and simulated events are all over Live Mode in Paralives. My child Para caught a digestive bug at school (classic) which greyed out his hunger meter and cut his sleep and bladder meters in half, meaning he was constantly low on both, waking up in the middle of the night to potty and unable to fall asleep again. His dad's "good at taking care of others" social perk gave him the option to make some chicken noodle soup, but then he caught the bug (also classic) and they were both laid up at home.

As I've made more households, I keep being delighted with the way that some personality traits and perks nudge the way I need to play each Para. My "energectic" Para has a bonus energy meter that means he's tired less often and can take power naps but when that surplus energy meter is full he feels stressed and is more likely to draw negative interaction cards during conversations. My "good at being alone" Para has a "me time" meter that depletes while with others and refills while alone, making her tense when it's low—relatable. Each of these traits and perks also have the ability to morph with new effects and perks as my Paras complete daily "wants" and level up their personalities.

My Paras moods aren't just for flavor, either. If they're upset enough they'll be locked out of gaining experience for any skill actions they do. Being stressed or flirty or happy will influence the types of interactions they draw as possibilities in each conversation. I've found myself actually considering my Paras' moods as a strategic part of playing.

That's the big win in Paralives. All these little bits of strategy with visible effects and percentages that I can see reflected on my Para's face are genuinely influencing the way I play. It's making sure I always have a challenge to overcome and a motivation to play so I'm never stuck staring at my screen wondering what to do next.

Paralives has just hit early access, and while it is very much a work-in-progress right now, it's also the most fun I've had playing a life sim in a hot sec. As a lifelong Sims player, I've been noticing loads of neat stuff in Paralives that you just won't find in The Sims 4, even after all these years. Not that the two games have to be exactly the same or completely different, but the Venn diagram between Simmers and Paralivers is basically a circle, y'know?

It's been really cool seeing unique little things in Paralives, stuff that I either wish was in The Sims (without needing mods!) or stuff I never knew I wanted out of a life sim until now. I've gathered up the coolest bits about Paralives you won't find in The Sims (or at least, in The Sims 4) for those of you who are interested in what stands out about this new cosy newcomer in the genre.

Neat stuff in Paralives that isn't in The Sims 4

At long last, there are a whole three full-scale, Sims-style life sims available now that Paralives has launched into early access. It feels like there may finally be something in this genre for all of us to chew on. With a handful of real options to consider, is Paralives worth getting in early access?

I've played Paralives (and accidentally stayed up late doing so) quite a lot already so I'll lay out the big features life simmers expect, what the early access state feels like right now, and whether it might be worth trying for you depending on what kind of player you are.

Paralives features

What kind of life sim is Paralives?

Paralives is a stylized, Sims-like life sim with Build/Buy/Live modes and character creation that also borrows ideas like a community center and townie quests from the other side of Life Sims: Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. One of its big claims is that it "will never have paid DLCs, only free expansions," setting it apart from The Sims series.

My favorite feature so far is the conversation meter that prevents spamming the same interactions over and over. You have to wait for the meter to fill over time and then pick from a hand of interaction cards available based on your Para's mood and the current direction of the interaction. I might have two flirty options and a friendly one, or an interaction based on my Para's low Charisma stat, or one that lets me comment on another Para earnestly or sarcastically. It's totally changed my relationship to Live Mode in the best way, because time and interactions are both limited. I have to actually consider the strategy of each conversation rather than spamming the exact choice from three clicks deep in a conversation menu.

What Paralives lacks right now is a whole lot of bug fixes (more on that below) and a lot of staple life sim features, just like Inzoi did at launch. The amount of furniture, clothing items, and swatches isn't huge—though truthfully I'd compare it to something like base game Sims 3 which I still enjoy the challenge of over Sims 4's total asset glut. It's also got a long list of features life simmers will be clambering for still on its to-do list during early access: pets, seasons, pools, basements, family trees, a calendar, and social event organizing (more on that below too).

Paralives early access state

How 'early' access is it?

After her first 10 hours, my fellow simmer Mollie said that Paralives is very, very early access, in a lot of ways. It's buggy, which we expect from every life sim, for better or worse. Even I—normally the one having a fine time in games where others see tons of bugs—have been hit with bugged menus, buttons that don't work, camera glitches, and a grilled sandwich permanently attached to my stove. There's no denying that Paralives is a bumpy experience right now, particularly in Live Mode.

Load times when booting the game up are long, but I've otherwise found performance to be just fine on my desktop PC. I saw a lot of community speculation about simulation lag based on videos by content creators playing ahead of launch, but didn't experience that myself.

What's on the roadmap?

The Paralives roadmap is pretty stacked with things that are planned as game updates over the next two years. I won't cover all of them here exhaustively, but it looks like Live Mode and Build/Buy Mode have the biggest laundry lists. In Live Mode it will be things like seasons, weather, swimming, pets, cars, and so on. For Build Mode it's pools, basements, better roof and stair tools, and a whole lot more furniture objects.

Should you get Paralives in early access?

Is Paralives worth it?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: consider waiting to play based on what you value.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 If you're a major life sim fan: Paralives is totally worth it. You'll just need to factor in your own tolerance for jank to decide if you play right now or wait for a couple months of bug-stabilizing updates. Paralives is doing so many neat things with strategic gameplay and customization that remind me of everything I missed in the Sims 2 and Sims 3 era. Along with lots of little quality-of-life touches clearly inspired by a deep, lifelong love for the genre this really does feel like a simmer's life sim.

💻 If you're a casual gamer: Paralives isn't worth it until later in early access. There are settings to help tune the experience as difficult, or laid back, as you'd like which is great for casual players. The current state of the game is very buggy though, lacking features that life simmers feel attached to, and may really put your PC to the test if you're one of those folks getting by gaming on a low spec laptop that's meant for schoolwork and slide decks. The $40 price tag feels like a big ask if you aren't accustomed to early access games, so let us guinea pig this one and come back when it's more polished.

🎬 If you're a Live Mode-only player: Paralives is worth trying and coming back to. I truly think it's doing some awesome things with Live Mode like its gamified conversation system and its storyteller difficulty settings and town quests. Frankly, I'm pretty smitten. I acknowledge that I'm really a Build Mode lady, though, and the true Live Mode lovers may find the current state of Paralives runs out of possibilities for them. There's not a ton of infant gameplay, animation variety, pets, seasons, activities, you name it.

As I start my new life simming adventures in Paralives, I've realized that decades of using shortcuts in The Sims have spoiled me. The strategy of it all is brilliant, but if you're anything like me and just want to play in build mode sometimes, then you'll be happy to hear there are Paralives cheats to help with that.

It's just like using The Sims 4 cheats, and if anything, I can appreciate how simple the Paralives shortcuts are to use. I've been playing and testing its long list of console commands for a while now, so here's what I've found while trying out Paralives' cheats for money, wants, needs, and more.

How to use Paralives cheats

Basic commands for getting started

• HELP - Displays a list of all cheats (Alias: CHEATLIST)
• CLEAR - Clears all text from the cheat console
• ALIASES - Displays a list of commands with alternative shortcuts
• SHOWCURRENTCHARACTERGUID - Displays the unique GUID assigned to selected Para

Paralives money cheats

Paradime cheats

Paralives character cheats

Customization cheats

Pregnancy cheats

Aging and death cheats

Household cheats

Relationships and social cheats

Paralives wants and needs cheats

Need cheats

Some Paralives cheats in this section require you to input a specific variable to edit your para's needs. You can use several of the following commands with the need IDs below.

Need IDs

Want cheats

Skill and occupation cheats

Using general knowledge skills or more targeted talents

Just like with needs, you'll need (heh) to use specific IDs to edit your para's skills. Every Paralives skill has a main knowledge skill it falls under, and improving those collective knowledge categories makes learning specific skills (like Piano, Cooking, etc) faster.

Skill cheats

Skill IDs

This is the same list provided by the SHOWSKILLS command, but since Paralives is still in early access you may notice a few skills (Outdoorsiness and Fishing) don't work. I've only included skill IDs implemented into the current build in the table below.

Occupation cheats

Live mode cheats

Time and day cheats

Fire cheats

Newspaper and mail cheats

Build mode and item cheats

Build mode cheats

While there are a few debug commands for broken objects and inspecting lots, there aren't many cheats for building tools. I've included the two I tested, but they're not nearly as useful as the Paralives item cheats that follow.

Item cheats

Performance, System, Debug cheats

Performance and UI cheats

Save cheats

Debug cheats

Misc cheats

A few more Paralives cheats included just for fun

Just like its life sim cousins, Paralives has quite a few money cheats you can use to get rich quick, but maybe they're tucked away in an even longer, more complex list of Paralives cheats you don't want to dig through. I get that, not everyone wants to know about item IDs or time hacks.

I've combed through our big list and made a quick and easy reference just for Paralives money cheats. The table below should have you covered, but if you also need some help with how to use Paralives cheats, I've included that at the end.

Paralives money cheats and how to use them

It's finally happening: we're getting a third life sim on the block when the Paralives launch arrives later today. The Sims series is about to have yet another new neighbor and this girl next door is looking like a real diamond in the rough. Paralives is not coming in flawless at its early access launch, but it's got a whole lot of promise for those of us who wanted a new life sim to shake things up.

When is the Paralives launch time?

Paralives launches in early access at 10 am Eastern on May 25, 2026. It will be available on Steam for $40. Lucky for those in the US and UK, that's a day off for many of us, so you've got a whole day to drain in character creation.

Here's the Paralives launch time in other time zones around the world:

• 7 am PDT (Los Angeles)
• 10 am EDT (New York)
• 3 pm BST (London)
• 4 pm CEST (Berlin)
• 12 am May 26 AEST (Sydney)
• 2 am May 26 NZST (Auckland)

Is there preloading for Paralives?

There does not appear to be preloading available for Paralives, so you'll have to download it after purchasing on launch day. The system specs list a required 8GB of storage space, which wound up being a 7.62GB installation size on my machine. So the good news is, it's not a huge honking game that will take you hours to download.

Real life is terribad right now. What better way to cope than shedding this reality in favour of becoming worryingly invested in the lives of fake videogame people, watching them cock up a grilled cheese as I ignore the fact I haven't eaten anything for several hours?

If you couldn't tell, I'm back on a life sim kick. I've been having a wicked time decorating houses in Paralives (we don't talk about the state of my own home), but the hand of nostalgia has also yoinked me by the scruff in the direction of The Sims 2.

Much the same as anyone who grew up in the early 2000s and had access to a family computer, it's the game that shaped my formative years. That extends to my music taste, too—I literally got into Paramore because the PlayStation 2 had a Simlish version of Pressure, and more recently The Last Dinner Party became a regular rotation in my Spotify playlists thanks to their appearance in The Sims 4: Life and Death trailer.

The Sims and iconic music have always gone hand in hand. EA has somehow convinced a slew of well-respected and rather famous pop stars to nip into a recording studio and do a gobbledegook rendition of their biggest hits. But there is one iconic corner of The Sims discography that does not get even close to the love it deserves—the soundtrack for the Sims 2 expansion, Nightlife.

Nightlife (or as a former PC Gamer writer called it: Sims Slutting About) was the game's second expansion and it was a banger. A bunch of new romance options, aspirations, community lots, and vampires(!!) made Nightlife the coolest thing out there to tween Mollie. But it's also the expansion that sparked a love for house music, and that's all thanks to the fact that EA enlisted some of the best DJs and electronic artists of the 2000s to put a nightclub spin on its best tracks.

To the dancefloor

The Sims 2: Nightlife remixes may be one of my absolute favourite videogame soundtracks to ever exist. DJs like Junkie XL, Adam Freeland, General Midi, Hyper, and Timo Maas and electronic band Lemon Jelly put their unique spins on tracks that were already defining The Sims 2 in its base game and its first expansion, University.

The result is an incredible blend of the playfulness and whimsy that Mark Mothersbaugh's original score radiates, with all of the dance-worthy heavy bass, whomps, and synths that you'd hear in a real-life nightclub. It's the sort of sound I had never heard before, and one I've never come close to hearing in the 20 years since this soundtrack was conceived.

My absolute favourite remix outta the bunch has to be General Midi's rendition of Stop and Sim from the University expansion. Its original version is a light and quirky tune—lots of high plucked notes that make for a fresh and youthful track.

General Midi takes the song in the complete opposite direction with tons of low reverb and these deliciously dirty distorted synth sounds that remind me of a speaker being pushed to its absolute limit by heavy bass, the pulsating sound reverberating through the entire plastic casing.

Then there's the Lemon Jelly version of Sim Time Sim Place. Mothersbaugh's original score is another light, plucky track that really leans into the game's playful and bright vibe. Meanwhile Lemon Jelly's Nick Franglen makes it downright weird (endearing) by kicking off the remix with this glorpy alien-ass synths before slowly building the track to a choir booming out deep "bah bahbahbah bahbahbah bahbahbah" over and over again. It's something that isn't even present in the original track, but I absolutely love whatever the hell Franglen was cooking when he made this track.

While I'd call Motherbaugh's style a little weird (again, endearing), Franglen takes it to straight-up freakytown in the best possible way. It's weird in a different font, but one that is so downright fitting for The Sims 2 and the Nightlife expansion.

There are a dozen other remixes and I would suggest you go and give them all a listen. The soundtrack is available on Spotify, where I am sure it will make its way into my Wrapped this year for how often I've been listening to it.

While I've never quite found the same high from other tracks as I have from The Sims 2: Nightlife remixes, I recently saw this excellent TikTok from Will Geraint Drake who compared it to modern works like Charlie XCX's BRAT.

And you know what? I see it. For all of the iconic music The Sims has pumped out over the years, Nightlife's remixes are most definitely at the top for me. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if their influence has trickled down into other iconic works over the years.

Paralives Studio has been busy tempering expectations for its life sim in the run up to its early access launch on May 25—the game's been cooking for close to seven years now, but that certainly does not mean it's done. And after spending 10 hours with the game, I most definitely understand why the developer is trying to remind people what "early access" actually means.

That's because Paralives is not one of those games parading around in Steam's early access tag with what is essentially a fully functional experience. It's buggy, it's far from feature-complete, its UI is messy and oftentimes unintuitive. There's little feedback on why things go wrong—interactions regularly fail to go through with no reasonable explanation, and errors are vague.

But that doesn't mean Paralives isn't one of the most promising, exciting life sims to come onto the scene. It's got the bones of something really incredible, with all the warmth that comes from being made by fans of the genre. People who've poured thousands of hours across their childhood and teenage years into the lives of virtual people and their homes. People like me. Except, y'know, they actually know how to make videogames.

For every annoying little snag that has me despairing, a gem lurks beneath the surface to pull me in and get me right on board with Paralives' ongoing journey.

Living for it

If you're a build/buy enjoyer like myself, you are going to have a whale of a time decorating homes in this game. Resizing objects! Snap-free clutter decoration! Colour wheels and texture options! Different door handles on kitchen counters!! While Paralives isn't resplendent with decor right now, that has not stopped me from going buck-wild creating the cosy home of my dreams.

The Paramaker is also full of lovely features that people more creative than me will surely love. Layering makeup and clothing items along with height sliders are two things that really stuck out to me, along with a bunch of neat inclusive stuff like various disability aides (something that took The Sims 4 close to a decade to add) and an actual toggle for vegetarianism instead of relegating it to a trait.

Unsurprisingly, Paralives' biggest weakness lies within its live mode. It's where most of the bugs are to be found, and where performance tanks the most as I dash around the open world from lot to lot. Menus sometimes stay permanently stuck, forcing me to restart the game. One time a Parafolk was perpetually caught in a loop of levelling up his personality. I ended up with a whopping 62 personality points, which I think is more than he was supposed to ever have.

Autonomy is pretty bare-bones right now, which means Parafolks require extra babying compared to other life sims, which took me a bit of getting used to. But I love how interactions between Paras work—letting a meter build up and then giving a handful of dialogue options, which stops me spamming the same thing over and over again.

I also love the townie requests—a feature that feels drawn from cosy games like Stardew Valley. They're often small, like visiting a gym or cleaning up trash on the beach. But they're a lovely reason for my Parafolk to get out of the house for a bit and actually explore the town rather than staying cooped up all day.

I'll have more to say closer to the game's launch once I've had a weekend to sink some more time into it, but right now I am more than willing to sort the wheat from the chaff because the game has so much potential, and an awful lotta heart.

Ultimately, I think whether you have a good time in Paralives depends on where your priorities lie in a life sim. If you play like me—that is, a chronic interior decorator, an occasional Paramaker enjoyer and dabbler in live mode—there's a good chance you'll be able to see the same special spark in this game as I can.

By the team's own admission, there's not hundreds of hours of game to completely lose yourself in just yet. But unlike my time with Inzoi, I can see Paralives becoming a game I return to time and time again as it continues to sand down the rough edges.

Paralives is finally right around the corner—it's launching into early access on May 25 following last year's delay. As that day quickly approaches, Paralives Studio is well and truly dangling the carrot in front of us with a nine-minute video showcasing some of the bits we can expect.

I suspect this is intentional, but so much of what is shown off is the kind of stuff I've wished to see in The Sims for years. Tiny quality-of-life tweaks here, or mind-bogglingly absent features in The Sims that are happily present in Paralives' early access launch.

The video kicks off by showing a little bit of the character creation screen with—gasp—adjustable height sliders! It's such a small feature that's missing from The Sims, but one that I think can add so much variety to Paras. Everyone needs at least one short friend and one ridiculously tall friend in their lives, with Paralives' slider going up to a whopping two meters tall—that's 6'5" for our British and American pals.

We then get a little look at some build/buy goodies—we've seen plenty of it in previous trailers, but getting another glance has made me giddy all over again. Being able to scale objects up and down and even place them on top of each other without having to enter a single cheat code is a life sim builder's dream, and I love how the trailer showcases shrinking down a bush to pop on top of a planter, creating an entirely original object.

There's even snap-free clutter decorating, y'all. As someone who has constantly wrestled with The Sims' desire to have about six snappable spots on its surfaces—we all know the whole "move the counter, place object in the air, move counter back to check if it all looks okay" hack—I cannot wait to freely place all the junk without a care in the world.

When it comes to the actual day-to-day gameplay of Paralives, we get small snippets into some of the activities to participate in. Something I really loved was that it looks like a lot of jobs give several different options for both times and days to work, which should come massively in handy when trying to manage larger households.

There's some other neat stuff too, like:

• Being able to drag and select a group of people to partake in one activity together
• Steam Workshop for custom community-created content
• Different "vibes" for Paras like their cleanliness, tendency to rise early/late, and how sociable they are
• A vegetarian toggle! I hate having to use an entire trait slot for it in The Sims!

I am curious to see how Paralives' gameplay will actually shake out, away from a heavily spliced sizzle reel of interactions. If my time with Inzoi was anything to go by, making a smooth and engaging gameplay experience outside of character creation and house building is bloody hard work. Paralives at least has the safety net of being an early access game—one which has been doing a lot of tempering of expectations as release draws nearer—but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for something that at least borders on… y'know, playable.

Stardew Valley celebrated its 10 year anniversary earlier this year, and after over a decade of supplying fans with feel good farming its creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has reflected over what keeps him happy and why the sim stays so affordable.

"I just genuinely value the love of the players more than the money that I could squeeze out of everyone," Barone says in an interview with GameInformer. "I just know that that would not bring me as much happiness as being beloved by the community. So it’s like, to me, it’s kind of a no-brainer. You might even call it selfish, because I’m really doing what is going to make me the happiest. You know, you can either chase the dollar or you can chase the respect and admiration of the community. And [chasing the community] is just what I prefer. That makes me feel better than having money."

There's been six major updates since Stardew Valley first released, none of which have been paid. That even goes for the massive 1.6 update which added a new farm type, bonus chickens, all accompanied by a ridiculously long list of patch notes.

It's certainly a rare trait to have in gaming right now, but Barone doesn't want it all to be blown out of proportion: "I don’t think of myself as some great, moral person. I don’t think I ever would, no matter what, because I just feel like it’s not a good way to think about yourself. It’s always better to be thinking you could do better.

"The theme of Stardew Valley itself is about returning to a more authentic way of living, more natural. I think that speaks to people across all ages. Especially as the world gets crazier and crazier. I think people look to Stardew Valley as an escape and a return to what is really human and the kinds of goals that we naturally have."

None of this is to say Barone is strapped for cash. Over the course of Stardew Valley's life the game has sold tens of millions of copies and made more money than Call of Duty in its second year. It's also gone on to inspire concerts, cookbooks, and a whole lotta merch. But a guy's got to eat, so all of this revenue is by no means a bad thing. In the end the most important aspect of this all is that a dev has been rewarded for their hard work and dedication while also valuing the player.

"Ultimately, I just want to bring magic to people", Barone adds. "I want to delight people with magical feelings. It’s the same way that when I played games when I was a kid, I felt that—and not just games but other things, movies or books or whatever—but [games] gave me this special magical feeling that it’s almost hard to describe. It’s like when you’re looking at the horizon, and the sun is coming down, there’s a certain feeling you have. It’s this ethereal feeling that it just makes—I don’t—it’s so hard to describe."

Fans have been clamouring for Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone's next game, Haunted Chocolatier, for a almost five years now, and while he's largely kept a lid on its development he has revealed in a recent interview with GameInformer that it's not taking more of his time than Stardew Valley.

"It’s kind of hard to switch gears sometimes, to be honest, but it’s just what I’ve got to do," Barone says. "It’s just another challenge, because I have two games that I’m working on. I just have to do it. It’s not my preference, but it’s just what needs to be done." Barone is now working on Haunted Chocolatier five days a week, with the remaining two being spent on Stardew Valley.

"It’s a lot harder than when I was making Stardew Valley," Barone adds. "I’ll be honest. [During the making of] Stardew Valley, I was a nobody. Nobody knew who I was. I didn’t get fan mail. I didn’t have business people asking me for this or that all the time. I could just literally lock in and work.

"I need to just disappear, go into a cabin, and work without distraction. So it is very difficult and distracting, I’ll be honest, to have Stardew Valley and have people sending me fan mail. I appreciate that people love the game so much. But it is true that it’s difficult to juggle all those things and to be able to fully lock in."

Hopes have certainly been set high for Haunted Chocolatier, Stardew Valley isn't exactly the easiest game to follow on from. But Barone isn't pulling any punches: "It’s way bigger than Stardew Valley, at least in terms of the amount of maps, the amount of monsters, the depth to the whole item system, and all the equipment slots and all the stuff like this. Everything is cranked up."

But unlike Stardew Valley's cosy farming, Haunted Chocolatier will explore slightly different, more creepy themes. "The ghosts, the haunted nature, the castle, allows for a lot of interesting, creative things that I can do that are kind of creepy," Barone says. "Not totally horrifying, but maybe slightly, you know, creepy stuff. I want people to be delighted by things that are unexpected and that they’re kind of like, 'Wow. Like, I have no idea what’s going on, but I like it.'

"There are other things I want to share, there are other ideas I have, there are other themes I want to explore, just to fully express myself as a creator. So that’s why I feel like I need to make Haunted Chocolatier and beyond. It’s part of my own need to fully express myself while I’m on this earth."

Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone, creator of Stardew Valley, one of the most impactful indie games of the last decade and dev behind the upcoming highly anticipated Haunted Chocolatier, knows a thing or two about being creative. And like many other creatives he's recently been touting the importance of human-made art and listening to your gut instead of relying on a machine to drop prompts in your lap.

"I think anything’s lost when you use AI for any creative thing, any step of the way—unless it’s being used for very specific zoomed-in cases, maybe," Barone says in an interview with GameInformer. "You’re offloading creativity to an algorithm, which I think is always gonna undermine the pure and authentic human element of what you’re doing."

AI being used as a creative tool is an unfortunate yet all too common development we've seen in this industry—whether it be in benign AI video contests, Sony using it to "augment artist capabilities, or a as glorified yassification tool. But even still there are even more artists holding steadfast in their own creative capabilities by demonstrating just how valuable human-made art is.

"For me, as someone who wants to express myself in an artistic way, I wouldn’t ever want to use AI for any sort of creative thing, because it’s beside the point of what I’m doing," Barone continues. "My goal is to express myself in a creative way. Why would I let an AI do that for me?

"At the very least, let another human being express themselves if you need help. That’s probably what I would say. There are plenty of humans out there that would like an opportunity to express themselves. I feel like that should take priority over a soulless machine."

But Barone isn't the only creative to warn against the lacklustre beast that is AI:

• Mass Effect's director dubbed it as "creatively soulless".
• Rockstar's co-founder sees AI's products as too "generic" to be any real threat.
• Take-Two's CEO not-so-lovingly refers to it as "a combination of metadata with a parlor trick".
• Baldur's Gate 3 actor Neil Newbon declares: "AI sucks".
• Larian's publishing director denounced any idea that it could replace QA workers.
• Demonschool's devs even said they'd "rather cut off our own arms" than use it.

As Barone hints at, some studios can use machine learning to actually improve the work load of their creatives, such as Warcraft using it to cut out the busywork, leaving them more time to get on with the good stuff. That's not what concerns me. I care more for retaining the complexities, imperfections, and astounding creativity of art made by fellow human beings—I enjoy playing games that have clearly been made with a passion and dedication that only a human is capable of.

Following reports claiming that Stardew Valley may soon let players divorce or cheat on their in-game spouses, Eric Barone has embarked upon a social media blitz to say no, that's not actually happening, and asking everyone to please calm down about it.

Barone mused on the topic of Stardew infidelity in a wide-ranging new interview with Game Informer, saying that some players have expressed a desire to marry Caroline, Robin, or Demetrius—but noting that in order to do so they'd have to break up families in the town. Barone said he's against that "on a moral level," but then went on to say that people should be able to do bad things in sandbox games—and suffer appropriate consequences for their actions.

"I would be open to doing something like that, but I wouldn’t baby people about it," Barone said. "There would be very serious consequences." In the context of Stardew Valley, though, he added that he also feels like such things might be "too real," and that "maybe Stardew Valley is supposed to be, to some degree, an escape from those kinds of things."

That quote caused a bit of a stir, to put it mildly, and Barone has been working hard on social media to correct the record. "I'm not going to actually do this," he wrote in response to one report on the misquote. "I was just talking theoretically, that if I WERE then I wouldn't just make it some consequence-free thing, everyone would hate you, there would be severe consequences for your moral failures.

"If you're making a sandbox game I think it's interesting to allow people to do things, even bad things. But there should be consequences. That teaches you a life lesson. If you just get away with it or everyone is chill with it, that would be bad."

Some of the uproar may have been sparked by a machine translation gone really wrong. Japanese gaming site Automaton covered the GI interview, and when its translation was flipped back to English, it came out quoting Barone as stating unequivocally, "We are considering the introduction of infidelity and divorce."

"The only thing I had ever 'considered' was allowing players to break up Pierre/Caroline or Robin/Demetrius, but even that is probably too heavy and serious, and would be a ton of work to adjust all dialogue and tone of everyone in town in consequence, and Grandpa ashamed of you," Barone wrote in response to Automaton's post.

"It was just some theoretical idea I've toyed with. I don't condone doing it either. But there is precedent for things like that in Stardew, like going to the Dark Shrine of Selfishness to turn your kids into doves, and then they haunt you forever." Yeah, that sounds pretty morally iffy, alright!

Barone posted a few shorter replies referring to the Automaton report as "fake news" or a "clickbait article," and said in one that the untranslated quotes are "taken out of context," and "if you read the actual interview it's clear that I'm not going to add it."

He also, as is his way, swerved off course momentarily to tell a disappointed Stardew Valley player that "you're born with a specific fairy godmother, I don't make the rules," and to congratulate another player who got an A+ on a presentation on the art of Stardew Valley.

I think you actually do, Eric!

So it's much ado over nothing, then, but that's probably for the best: After all, would you really want to disappoint Grandpa like that?

"Press F to pay respects" is out and now it's "Press A to run away," which is the very first thing I do in vampire-themed farm sim Moonlight Peaks. Dracula is my not-so-dear dad and I'm ditching his castle and his dracul-onian rules to find space for myself at the family cottage in the countryside. When I arrive in Moonlight Peaks the family property is—you guessed it—overrun with weeds and boulders for me to clear out so I can start farming blood grapes and "cruelcumbers."

What you won't guess is that my next interactions, in order, are: a hungover vampire patriarch passed out in front of my house, the werewolf mayor and his brother arguing over fixing a broken bench, and a self-obsessed warlock hitting on me by way of relentless interruptions. That's all in the first five minutes.

The next five hours introduce me to an old feud between the supernatural families, a doomed dinner party, and a rogue love demon. Moonlight Peaks has a soft, chibi-fied art style but this place is seriously toxic, which I say with affection. Farm sims are so often relentlessly wholesome (side-eye at Clint aside) so maybe a sloppy bunch of grumpy paranormals is the vibe shift some of us need.

Otherwise, all my nights (instead of days, because I'm a vampire, see?) in Moonlight Peaks will be very familiar to anyone who's played a farm sim in recent years. I wake up at 6 pm, use my limited energy to water my plants and chop trees on my property, walk into town to chat with the locals or buy supplies, pick my favorite supernatural cutie (werewolf lady Saga) to obsessively gift my produce to in a bid for marriage, decorate my property, and slowly build a fleet of crafting stations to turn all my raw materials into products my neighbors need to solve their problems before passing out at *checks notes* 6 am.

Two quick farm sim minutia points: Moonlight Peaks has no combat, so far as I've seen in its mines area, so the cozy game purists are safe. It also highly recommends playing with a gamepad for the best experience, be aware, though keyboard and mouse are supported.

Moonlight Peaks brings a couple of its own flourishes like a small spellcasting minigame for watering plants and other energy-saving unlockable spells. During my first few weeks I also unlocked a shapeshifting ability to cross town faster and explore hidden areas. It's also got a very cute flower arranging activity. Later on there's needlepoint, potion brewing, and a card game, though I didn't get to play any of those in my six hours.

All the farm simming bits are executed competently, so whether or not Moonlight Peaks is for you is mostly going to come down to taste in art style and tone. The visual style you can see for yourself. The tone is a sort of sitcom-ified Real Housewives where all the feuding factions in the neighborhood can't get through a conversation without an explosive argument.

Apart from the family of seers and Luna the farming witch, most everyone else in town is standoffish and spikey to begin with. It does lean pretty hard into vampire family head Orlock as a comedic relief alcoholic in a way that feels a bit dated in the year 2026, but otherwise the cast is endearingly flawed. I imagine, in true farm sim fashion, my role as the plucky outsider will be to rehabilitate the town by tempering all those tempers, Orlock included. I can fix him all of them.

If I've got any complaint about Moonlight Peaks in the six hours (20 days of in-game time) I got to play, it's just that its tightly quest-controlled progression moves a tad too slowly in the first few weeks. Several times I found myself heading off to bed early because I'd run out of energy to do chores with and was blocked from unlocking new activities by a main quest step that would take several more days to complete. I could have done with staying busy by unlocking things like bug catching and spellcasting a bit sooner.

Moonlight Peaks launches in full on July 7. Until then, it does have a public demo available, though it tosses you onto a partly-furnished farm in the summer season to try planting and potion-making without the full character creator or story that I played through.

The Sims 3 review - PC Gamer issue #202 (UK, July 2009)

My wedding was a disaster, beginning when one of the guests died during the party. We weren't close, but witnessing his ghost prompted a recurring wish to see more. Soon I was wandering the catacombs beneath the graveyard, getting emotionally scarred by zombie bears and emerging, smeared with dirt, in only my underpants.

To make matters worse, I misunderstood the purpose of a 'Wedding Party'. It's not meant to celebrate the engagement, but to be the wedding itself. My guests left unhappy when no marriage took place, and both my fiancée and I felt guilty for missing our big day.

Make no mistake. That 'I' is me—a smaller, virtual but no less hairy me. The Sims 3, like the previous games, is all about controlling people.

All growed up

You begin by moulding their appearance (bearded, thinnish, roguishly handsome), selecting their five personality traits (Childish, Good, Friendly, Artistic, Computer Whizz) and dropping them into their own home in suburbia (two- bedroom, single floor, modest).

In the original game, what followed inevitably trapped you into being a kind of incorporeal maid, buying the furniture and making sure your little masters didn't wet themselves.

Those days are gone. Set their free will to full and your Sims are now capable of maintaining their own needs: Hunger, Social, Bladder, Hygiene, Energy, Fun. Stick the game on fast forward, wander off, and when you return your characters will have showered, used the toilet and gone off to work all by themselves. You can, if you want, completely ignore their needs and focus on the far more enjoyable job of fulfilling their wishes. That desire to see ghosts? That wasn't mine, that was Little Graham's.

Replacing the system of wants and fears from The Sims 2, wishes take two forms. Lifetime Wishes are chosen when you first create a Sim and limited by your selected personality traits—Graham's life goal is to become Master of the Arts by learning to paint and play guitar.

Along the way, smaller wishes inspired by the events in a Sim's life present themselves. When your Sim wishes something, you can dismiss it or promise to make it happen.

There's no punishment for failure, but accomplishing wishes gathers Lifetime Happiness points that can be spent on special rewards. Like, for example, a fertility treatment that increases the chance of twins and triplets. A ghost seen, a wife married, a newly learned recipe and some guitar practice later, little Ada and Boudica are born.

Wishes not only give your play direction, but meaning. Events inspire wishes. The fulfilment of wishes in turn inspires more events.

Life moves forward in a compulsive loop of improving skills, gaining promotions and buying new stuff, all of it purposeful because your Sim wanted it, and had a reason for wanting it.

A life less ordinary

Broadly defined, there are three roles a Sims player can assume: The Narcissist, who creates their own lives in lovingly accurate or idealised detail; The Soap Writer, who crafts tales of illicit affairs and melodrama; and The Sociopath, who locks Sims in a room, removes the door and watches unfeelingly as they weep, collapse and eventually starve to death. I find I move from one role to the next as my interest and attachment fluctuates.

Modelling Sims on yourself and your loved ones changes the way you play. The callous whims that might otherwise dictate your decisions are now too uncomfortable to pursue.

I only want a quiet, comfortable life for Little Graham. The great flaw of The Sims, unchanged in The Sims 3, is that accomplishing this goal renders the game boring. Each day becomes rote: go to work, come home, help the kids, kiss my wife, go to bed and start over. I become trapped in a life of Ballardian comfort, and it's here that I hit my mid-life crisis as a player.

In lieu of erotic car crashes, I start hitting fast forward. I strive for more anecdotes, quicker, but the character being me encourages caution. Eventually, I wish for nothing more exciting than to cook a good meal.

We know this from every other storytelling medium: the most interesting lives involve suffering. My next creations are still inspired by the real world, but I'm far more willing to lead them to pain and heartbreak. Meet Ross, Tim, Craig, Tom and Tony, five bachelors sharing a two-bedroom house, each shabbily designed in the insanely detailed Create-a-Sim tool. I put myself in there, too. I couldn't resist.

Small town life

Their house is in Sunset Valley, the only town to ship with the game. While The Sims 2 had destinations beyond your own house, visiting them meant a discouragingly long load. Now your hometown is exactly that, explorable on foot, bike or car. While you run your Sims, others are living, dying and breeding all around you. This once claustrophobic game now has a greater scope and a sense of exploration.

Each location serves a purpose. Tom's Lifetime Wish is to become a Creature-Robot Cross Breeder, so he gets a job at the science facility.

Tim wants to be an international secret agent, and starts by working at the police station. If you have the funds, you can become a partner or owner of these businesses. Tim also bought the local diner, Tim's House of Meat-Like Byproducts, and became a director of the local hospital. Tim's wages kept the entire household in spaghetti.

You can't see inside any of the work-related buildings. Your Sims' actions there are influenced via a drop-down menu. Tom's Workaholic trait causes him to default to 'Work Hard' status, but I make sure to set Ross, the resident Party Animal, to 'Meet Co-workers'.

Graham, meanwhile, is directed to use the fitness facilities at the military base. Time at a local French restaurant has rendered him chubby.

Buildings you can see inside include community lots—a gym, an art gallery, the park—or neighbourhood houses. Ross visited one of the rich families in town, letting me try their cool, expensive toys. After being distracted by Tim, who had again set fire to the kitchen back home, I was surprised by a message telling me Ross had stolen a lamp from his new friends. Possessed by the Kleptomaniac trait, Ross could—with or without provocation from me—thieve randomly. Coincidentally, I'd later direct Ross to befriend all the other rich families in town, gradually collecting a nice living-room set in the process.

Traits let you clearly define the personalities of your characters, and create entirely different situations. Craig's Evil trait inspires him to pursue the criminal career path, but he struggles because he's also Inappropriate and Insane. Aside from being arrested after his first day of work, he's also stolen candy from a baby, insulted that baby to her mother, and eventually entered into a fistfight with the woman. Which he lost. These things wouldn't happen with Tim, whose Excitable, Childish and Over-Excitable traits mostly just cause him to really like playing computer games.

Sim-ilaraties

Fundamentally, The Sims 3 is still The Sims. Although a significant improvement, wishes are just a small change from The Sims 2's wants and fears. Traits are just a better version of the previous personality points.

The roamable town feels essential, but it's mostly a technological leap. There are new video editing tools, letting you create sets, soundtracks, edit and share custom content, but people were doing that before, too. You'll be doing exactly the kinds of things you did in previous games. It's just a lot slicker.

What EA have done is create a platform for a new generation of expansion packs and downloadable content. Depending on where they take it, this might be like 'needing' to buy all your old films again on Blu- ray, or it might allow for new, exciting additions as towns expand in scope and scale. If you already have expansion packs for Sims 2 that add seasons, pets and witches, the basic Sims 3 feels like a step back.

Yet the core of The Sims 3 is more powerful than ever. Their world, all jaunty music and exaggerated animation, isn't just a platform for expansion packs, but for exploring your own feelings.

Tony was the first of us in the house to die. 93 days old, he was cleaning some dishes in the kitchen when it happened. We buried him in the front garden next to a gigantic meteorite Ross had found, and engraved upon his tombstone an epitaph: "He made our writing gooder. A lot." That night the entire house mourned. Even Craig. At the far corner of the house, Tony's bed stood out, empty. After playing for nearly 40 hours, I still haven't reached the role of The Sociopath.

Every so often, I am hit with the intense urge to bulldoze everything in my Sims 4 neighborhood and start over from scratch. I don't know why I do it, but I love wasting at least one week of my annual vacation razing the earth like some sort of unappeasable Sims 4 deity and rebuilding neighborhoods from the ground up, only to do it all over again the next year.

It's a habit I've had since my earliest days with the series. Those days when I was hardly big enough to sit in front of the family computer, and had to quietly hush my sims for smoochin' too loud. I've been playing The Sims for a long time.

I'm under the impression this isn't a unique experience. I love listening to other simmers endlessly complain about the chore of starting fresh in The Sims, only to spend hundreds of hours meticulously crafting every home, business, and person, before they tear it all down and start again. But that's the beauty of the process, isn't it? How else would you have become the Simly scholar you are today?

That's what brings me to today's quiz: How well do you know The Sims series? Are you a life-simming veteran forged in the days of Neighborhood 1, or a more relaxed Sims 4 carpenter who builds a few things before logging off?

For your sake, I hope it's the latter; for your score's sake, I hope it's the former. Either way, give our quiz a go, and let us know how you did! And if you're craving more ways to test your knowledge of The Sims after this, try our quiz on every Sims expansion.

The Sims 4's big ghost overhaul expansion turned the afterlife into an entire occult sim experience with new ghost abilities and a Soul's Journey quest to dog your sim past the grave. This full list of Life & Death cheats can help you max out your Thanatology skills, cheat to the top of the new active career as a Reaper, or quickly unlock those ultimate abilities for your ghost sims.

See our main list of Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on all the basics, or scroll down to get the trait codes you need for defying death.

Life & Death Career cheats

There are two new career paths in the Live & Death Expansion: Undertaker and Reaper. If you want to become a scythe-wielding dealer of death, the Reaper career is the objective-based active career you're looking for.

Life & Death new death cheats

There are a few new ways to die in Life & Death, technically, but mostly they're just new contexts for existing deaths like old age. You can find all the relevant base game death cheats in our Sims 4 cheats page. The one truly new death in the expansion is the Murder of Crows.

I have not managed to find any cheat code for the Murder of Crows death. Below I will tell you how to achieve the death quickest but I have not found a way to undo it, so proceed only if you're certain!

How to get murdered by crows

• Place a "Grim Standard Ascendant Crow" from Buy Mode
• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Shift + Click the crow and select Cheat Relationship > Set Min Friendship
• Normal click the crow and select Socialize > Provoke
• Repeat the provoke action several times until the crow is "dangerously" angry

How to get unmurdered (in theory)

As mentioned above, there is not a known trait cheat to remove the death by crow status easily. Below is a way to un-ghost yourself with cheats otherwise but this method has not worked for me and when re-entering Live Mode my sim remains a crow'd ghost. Here's how to remove a cause of death:

• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Enable cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Shift + Click your sim and select "Modify in CAS"
• Open the "cause of death" panel in the top left
• Hover over the currently selected death and click the x to remove it
• Click the ✔️ in the bottom right to save changes and exit Create-A-Sim

Life & Death skill cheats

The Life & Death expansion comes with just one new skill track for Thanatology. Use the cheat testingcheats true before setting a skill level via cheat code.

Life & Death trait cheats

There are three new standard sim traits in this expansion: Chased By Death, Macabre, and Skeptical. You can easily add or remove these by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Modify in CAS"
• Find all three in the "Lifestyle" traits section

You can also add or remove these traits in the cheat console with the codes below.

Personality traits

❗ Remember that Macabre and Skeptical are mutually exclusive traits. You'll have to remove one before you can add the other.

Grief style traits

Grief styles are part of the new system for this expansion that controls what type of mood your sim will usually experience while grieving a death. They're noted in the simology panel with all their other traits.

Reward traits

Soul's Journey cheats

Add bucket list items

To easily add items to your sim's bucket list in the Soul's Journey section of their Aspirations panel:

• Enable testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Shift + Click your sim
• Use the interaction path Pack Cheats > Expansion packs > EP17 - Life & Death > Add Unfinished Business Objective

From there, choose a bucket list category like "I want to create!" or "I wanna party!" which will open a menu to select a specific bucket list goal.

Earn Soul's Journey ranks

To easily complete ranks of your sim's Soul Journey, use the cheats below to jump to a particular rank. You can skip to the end of your Soul's Journey by using the highest rank cheat right off the bat.

❗You must become a ghost to progress to ranks "Newfound Purpose" and "The Big Picture" but you can use these cheats to skip ahead to the final rank after going see-through.

Ghost mastery cheats

After becoming a ghost, your sim will have ghost experience points to unlock in their Simology panel like other occult sim types. To jump ghost ranks and unlock ghost powers, use these cheats below.

Ghost Mastery ranks

Ultimate Blessings

After leveling up to Transcendent Wraith rank, you can cheat your way to unlocking the good or evil Ultimate Ability as a ghost with one of the cheats below. Use the interaction category "Ghost Mastery" on another sim to either grant them longevity and need fulfillment or drain their life force and siphon their needs meters depending on your alignment.

The Sims 4's small business-focused expansion added a couple new skills and several new panels and menus for managing your operation. With a full list of Businesses & Hobbies cheats, you can swap the alignment of your in-home hustle from lawful to shady, level up your painting and tattooing skills, or skip the work to grab some new aspiration reward traits.

See our main list of Sims 4 cheats for a refresher on all the basics, or scroll down to get the trait codes you need for unlocking those new abilities.

Pottery and Tattooing skill cheats

The Businesses & Hobbies expansion comes with two new skill tracks. Use the cheat testingcheats true before setting a skill level via cheat code.

❗Remember that the artistic pottery reconstruction art Kintsugi is not a separate skill track. You unlock the "repair ceramic" interaction at Pottery skill level 7.

Businesses & Hobbies trait cheats

There are two new standard sim traits in this expansion: Idealist and Shady. You can easily add or remove these by:

• Using testingcheats true in the cheat console
• Using cas.fulleditmode in the cheat console
• Clicking your sim and selecting "Edit in CAS"
• Find both in the "Social" traits section

You can also add or remove these traits in the cheat console with the codes below.

Standard traits

❗ Remember that Shady and Idealist are mutually exclusive traits. You'll have to remove one before you can add the other.

Reward traits

Hidden Traits

Businesses & Hobbies small business cheats

Find the Small Business menu in the very bottom right of your interface in "Owned Businesses" where you can see your small business alignment and renown level. You can control both values with the cheats below and then open the "Small Business Perks" menu from the same panel to buy perks with your renown points.

Small Business rank cheats

The easiest way to increase your small business rank is with a Shift + Click cheat. Make sure that testingcheats true is enabled first, then Shift + Click on your sim. Use this interaction path:

• Pack cheats > Expansion packs > EP18 > Increase small business renown

That interaction will move your small business rank up by one level at a time. If you want to set your small business to a specific renown level, use the cheat code values below.

Small business reputation cheats

The fastest way to directly set your small business alignment is with a Shift + Click cheat. Make sure that testingcheats true is enabled first, the Shift + Click your sim. Use this interaction path:

• Pack cheats > Expansion packs > EP18 > Set small business alignment

You can choose any of the seven alignment values by selecting their name. You can also achieve the same thing with these cheat codes:

Skill Mastery perk cheats

This expansion introduced skill mastery perks with powerful skill-boosting side effects which you can find at the top of the Skills panel. You can unlock these perks naturally, buy Mastery Perk potions from the Satisfaction Points rewards menu, or just cheat them. Your sim can only have four skill mastery points at once, so you can use the cheats below to add or remove them at will.

• traits.equip_trait [trait code]
• traits.remove_trait [trait code]

Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth, the sequel to Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, is basically the perfect example of a cozy game.

It follows Moomintroll as he accidentally wakes from hibernation in the middle of winter and emerges into a snowy, unfamiliar world, where he must meet strange creatures and go on adventures in order to bring back spring. This story, familiar to generations of Moomin fans (and retold in basically every Moomin adaptation you can imagine), comes first from Moominland Midwinter, one of the original chapter books written by Tove Jansson.

It's also a story that generations of Moomin fans will recognize as, uh, not actually cozy, which makes Winter's Warmth a fascinating example of the priorities and emotional landscapes that wholesome games have to conform to. To make my case, please indulge me while I recite the journey of a children's book written 68 years ago.

Moomintroll waking from hibernation is textually an interruption to his normal cozy life. He spends early chapters trying to get back to sleep (he can't), change Moominhouse to be as comfortable and warm as he's used to it being (he can't do that either), and then deciding since he can't he'll cross the mountains to find Snufkin, who's always wandering in summer (he gives up on this very quickly).

When he can't return to what he knows and finds comfortable, he starts looking for others to reassure and guide him.

What he finds instead are the wise but cryptic Too-Ticky, who spends the winter in the Moomins' bathing house; his brash friend Little My, who's also awoken from hibernation but can't be bothered to be upset by it; and an air-headed squirrel, who immediately runs afoul of the Lady of the Cold and freezes to death, horrifying Moomintroll (but not Little My, who attempts to make a muff out of its tail.)

Moomintroll sustains himself with dreams of summer. He finds the winter beings strange and unhelpful, and their blasé acceptance of his confusion and fear frustrating. When he lights the Midwinter bonfire that Too-Ticky promises will bring the sun back, and the sun only returns the next day for a mere few seconds, he's so angry that he immediately opens a forbidden cupboard and lets out his thousand-year-old ancestor. Winter continues anyway, and he meets other odd creatures, and slowly learns the ways of the unfamiliar season.

By the end of the book, when Moomintroll falls into the sea after the ice breaks and the cold he catches finally wakes Moominmamma, his time enduring winter has become another exciting adventure.

In many ways the game follows this loyally. After Mooomintroll wakes up from hibernation, I guide him between minor videogame tasks (closing windows, lighting lamps and boilers, discovering broken vases whose pieces must be collected). Then I wander out into the world to meet the doomed squirrel and Too-Ticky. There are many other characters to encounter, minor problems to solve, and beautiful landscapes to explore, but there's also a key difference from the book: the Midwinter bonfire is the climactic event, promising to bring back spring, upon which all of Moomintroll's hopes hinge. Once Moomintroll collects approximately a million logs and convinces his erstwhile neighbors to show up to the party, the end of the game rolls quickly by.

In Jansson's story, the Midwinter bonfire takes place (as one might expect) in the middle of the story. Moomintroll's disappointment at spring not returning—and his slow acceptance of winter as a time of year with wonders all its own—are the second act. In fact, the reader spends longer with this weary, wary Moomintroll than they ever did with the hopeful one.

What this does is change the primary emotion we witness in Moomintroll in the game versus the book. In Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth, he's motivated by hope based on misunderstanding. The promise of a return to familiar comfort and a decisive, quick end to the harshness of winter makes him, for the vast majority of the game, a determined and committed protagonist. His disappointment and anger after the Midwinter bonfire come in the last section of the game, and spring returns (for the player, over four-ish hours playtime) fairly quickly.

There's a sense that, although Moomintroll is young and naive, he's also right: justified by the structure of the game in his belief that he can make spring come through hard work and helpfulness, and that the discomforts of winter will not stay with him for long.

In Moominland Midwinter, his frustration after the bonfire is given much more narrative importance. It's not his pluck and bravery in trying to bring back spring that is highlighted, but his experience of disappointment and his persistence despite it that becomes the main takeaway. That's part of what makes it such a strange read, especially as an adult. It feels somber, a bit tough-love, to watch Moomintroll face the brief fingernail of sun over the ocean and to know that spring can't be hastened. It also feels a bit more like adulthood than the promise that pluck and elbow grease will always bring their just rewards.

It highlights, unintentionally, that these two versions of the story have almost opposite goals. A children's book tries to introduce complicated emotions in a safe form, to give kids the skills to handle them on their own. A cozy game, on the other hand, wants to relax, comfort, and appease. It's important, in the game, for Moomintroll (and me) to have a reasonable amount of agency, and for our encounters to be manageable and lead to a good outcome, and for him to be a pleasing character to follow around. The sense of predictability is important to the player; they know that they're going to make it through winter, after all, that one day the sun is going to come back, and Moomintroll won't be stuck in the cold landscape of uncertainty forever.

They're also playing the game to relax, so evoking that feeling of uncertainty through mechanics, whether through something more skill-based than gentle puzzles or through some sort of survival system, would undermine the genre's goal of being calm and unstressful.

This is a reasonable choice for the game to make. The player, after all, probably doesn't want to be confused: it's still a videogame, and you've still got to know what to do. Concessions have to be made. Too-Ticky, for example, is much more of an articulate and patient mentor in Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth than in Moominland Midwinter: it might offend the sensibilities of gamers looking for a relaxing escape if they struggled their way to the first major NPC in their game and she said, as she does in the book, "One has to discover everything for oneself, and get over it all alone." Damn, Too-Ticky, alright.

Still, it's striking how differently these choices make it land. It's still the same story, about Moomintroll waking up alone, fording his way through the winter, and learning a lesson at the end. It includes many of the same characters, hits many of the same narrative beats, and ends in the same place, with the faithful return of the sun. But reading Moominland Midwinter, even as an adult, exposes you to difficult emotions—anxiety, fear, frustration, confusion, anticipation—and then encourages you to sit with them as winter rolls slowly through its stages.

Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth (which is now out on Steam) doesn't spend nearly as much time there. It can't; otherwise it wouldn't be cozy.

The result is a fairly faithful adaptation that nonetheless sharply deviates in emotional tone, deemphasizing the uncertainty, disappointment, and anger that were prominent in the book. It instead emphasizes Moomintroll's agency and intentional role in helping the denizens of Moominvalley make it through winter. While it would have been possible to design a game around the more uncomfortable aspects of Moomintroll's journey, that would pull Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth away from its genre-defined goals of evoking safety, abundance and softness.

Neither of these are the wrong approach. Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth is a lovely game, and I certainly don't think it would be accomplishing its goals any better if you spent the whole time following around a stressed and sad Moomintroll. It does exactly what it sets out to do: reassures the player, and Moomintroll, that with hard work, friendship, and bravery, spring will come. It also exposes the contradictory nature of adapting a story from a children's book, one intended to challenge and disrupt within a safe environment, to a cozy game, which is intended to calm and reassure, to provide a reliable source of spring within the insistent winter of modern life. It's a comforting message, just slightly different from the one Jansson wrote, which focused on adversity and discomfort not as the problem but as the point:

But the Snork Maiden had come across the first brave nose-tip of a crocus. It was pushing through the warm spot under the south window, but wasn't even green yet.

'Let's put a glass over it,' said the Snork Maiden. 'It'll be better off in the night if there's a frost.'

'No, don't do that,' said Moomintroll. 'Let it fight it out. I believe it's going to do still better if things aren't so easy.'

HoYoverse is no stranger to "shameless ripoff" allegations, having contended with Zelda: Breath of the Wild comparisons since Genshin Impact released its first trailer. Genshin, as it turns out, isn't very much like BOTW at all. But Petit Planet? Yeah, I feel pretty safe calling it a blatant Animal Crossing: New Horizons ripoff. How could I not when almost every moment of its opening few hours gave me vivid flashbacks of Tom Nook and his merry band of mortgage apologists?

I'm not talking 'vaguely similar' in the way every life sim with fishing and furniture is these days, but almost scene-for-scene, feature-for-feature familiar. The influence of Nintendo's mega hit starts immediately, as I take control of the only human inhabiting a tiny planet with lovable anthropomorphic animals. From there I set off on a familiar journey creating a character, choosing a terrain type for terraforming my tiny planet to my liking, having a campfire meal with my neighbors, acquiring tools, setting up a few houses, and eventually having a weird dream about an intergalactic being called Oumuamua. (K.K. Slider called, he wants his dreamscape debut back.)

After all that there's a lot of shaking fruit trees, mining, farming, and catching bugs, fish, and sea creatures for the eventual grand opening of the Omni-Gallery—a museum displaying all of your finds. I could go on, but you get it: this is all very familiar. And yet, after 15 hours with Petit Planet, I’m finding it hard to care.

HoYo hasn't just slapped on an intergalactic paintjob over ACNH and called it a day, much as it may sound like it. Instead we're treated to the streamlining and improvement of just about every complaint ever lobbed at a life sim, a bunch of cute new systems, and characters imbued with that signature HoYo charm.

A home amongst the stars

Perhaps the most obvious example of Petit Planet improving upon the familiar is a bit of the game called Starsea Voyage. Instead of Kapp'n and his boat, you get in your car to explore a beautiful, sparkling cosmic landscape. Pick any bite-sized islet from here to go farming with a few neighbors in tow, who help with grunt work like mining and fishing. While they were toiling away I went hunting for treasure, talked to potential new neighbors and solved some basic puzzles. Gone are the repetitive resource runs—now we're treated to a sense of discovery wrapped in a striking nebula skybox.

If designing is more your jam, then fear not, as Petit Planet has all the bells and whistles. A catalogue of thousands of items, decorating your house and getting it rated, customizing almost the entirety of your planet. However if, like me, designing has never been your forte, PlanetMaker mode and set blueprints make customizing outside space mercifully easy.

Bulk crafting, the ability to carry everything instead of running out of pocket space, and a precision farming mode are also welcome improvements. As is the inclusion of the Luca Arbor, which in theory is just another level-gating system, but in practice makes sure you don't get overwhelmed by every new feature at once. This glowing space-tree only doles out unlockables like more farming plots, changes in weather, and new features like a wholesome letter-writing activity after you complete certain quest milestones. Which also means you have to wait actual days, as the game runs in real time. There's no "time traveling" allowed either, as you play on a server.

I actually think this is part of the secret sauce that makes Petit Planet a truly chill experience. There may be dailies to tick-off, because of course there are, but rare is the live service game that actually encourages you to log off satisfied instead of endlessly grinding something in an endless compulsion loop.

One thing that might keep you around a little longer every day is the Galactic Bazaar, a space to chat with other players, take part in group minigames, and relax in a coffee house run by an AI chatbot character called Nalo. It's hard to gauge just how good the multiplayer is, as playing on a preview build meant my bazaar was completely empty, but talking with Nalo surprised me—she turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the game.

Nalo is clearly designed to be endlessly positive and emotionally supportive—part cozy companion, part digital therapist. I'm sure there are those who'll talk to Nalo for her intended purpose, but for me, trying to break her logic became its own minigame. She really makes a great straightman to some monumentally stupid conversations. At times her boundless optimism tipped into slightly worrying territory as she responded to obviously bad scenarios with cheerful neutrality. Funny for now, but I can only imagine what horrors Nalo's going to excuse with a smile when more people get access to her.

I like Nalo for now, because she's a novelty, but I'm thankful none of the neighbors are AI. I'll take a voiced cast of unique, human-written personalities over chatbot shenanigans any day. Especially when those characters are so lovingly designed as they are in Petit Planet. You won't find a cookie cutter personality type like "Big Sister" or "Snob" here. I suspect the trade-off is having fewer characters in total in Petit Planet than in the latest Animal Crossing, but with so many quests, unlockables, and backstory tidbits attached to each neighbor, I'm perfectly fine with that.

And he may not be a neighbor, but I have to give a shout out to Glenn—the autumnal squirrel shopkeeper—as he may just be the most adorable thing I've ever laid eyes on. In fact, the entire game is utterly adorable, thanks to chibi anime art and a vibrant color palette. It's a genuine delight to just exist in this world. Well, worlds.

While there's a lot to love about Petit Planet, my biggest concerns are actually unknown quantities. The first is how monetization works, as there's nothing past an optional battle pass packed with cosmetics in this preview build. Will it be gacha? Will the gacha involve characters, furniture, cosmetics—all three? Will you be able to skip time, or go on more Starsea Voyages if you pay up? Because that would completely change its carefully crafted no-pressure design.

My other concern is it turning into Roblox 2.0, as the Galactic Bazaar and other multiplayer features involve speaking with strangers directly. With Petit Planet so clearly targeting the family market, I hope there will be stringent privacy safeguards in the full release.

The biggest known issue remains the Animal Crossing of it all. And yeah, HoYo’s first stab at a cozy life sim remains unquestionably derivative, but that becomes less of a bother the more layers of charm Petit Planet reveals. I'm just having fun with my daily trips to the Starsea, annoying Nalo, wanting to pinch Glenn's li'l cheeks, and taking my sweet time enjoying each new feature as it gradually unlocks.

So if HoYoverse can handle the monetization sensibly and put proper protections in place for its social features, it's hard to imagine Petit Planet not becoming everyone's next cozy obsession, as it has been mine this past week.

Graveyard Keeper came out a few years before everyone started using the word "cozy" for farm sims, but it still gets brought up as a recommendation for Stardew-enjoyers looking for something new. The klaxons sounded with a Graveyard Keeper 2 announcement and now I'm trying to find out if the original is worth going back for.

Coined as a cemetery management sim, you’ve died and now you’re living in a strange medieval and mythical purgatory where you take on the role of the Graveyard Keeper while trying to figure out how to get back to the world and your love. You’ve got the usual crops to grow and fish to catch, just set in an unusual place, but you’ve also got bodies you have to autopsy and bury (or throw in the river) as well as buckets of blood to collect. If you’re thinking about giving Graveyard Keeper a try ahead of the sequel’s release, here’s the lowdown on what you can expect if you’re a farm sim fan.

Graveyard Keeper features

What kind of life sim is Graveyard Keeper?

Graveyard Keeper is a life sim focused on cemetery management and crafting quests. Yes, you’ll be able to farm crops, but you’re also in charge of an entire graveyard, church and a town of NPCs that want a heck of a lot from you, juggling tons of quests simultaneously while finding no qualms in giving you several each. And they’re not easy quests, ranging from specific defficult-to-retrieve items to gathering piles of crafting materials and more. You're going to spend more time tending your crafting stations than your plants.

My favourite feature in Graveyard Keeper is that I can take it as slow as I like. Unlike other farm sims like Stardew Valley, there’s no seasons dictating when I have to get things done. My quests are all accessible in the menu, but no-one’s rushing me to complete them. Sure, I have to wait until a certain day in the 6-day cycle to meet with particular characters, but I can get those lined up on my own schedule. Another feature making my life easier is that there are no seasons to affect my crops and I don’t even have to water them.

What Graveyard Keeper lacks is an easy way to sell my crops or items. There's a sort of complicated supply-and-demand system that means if you try to sell too much of one thing to certain NPCs, they’ll pay you less for them over time. They're also very specific in what they want to buy, so you can’t just turn up trying to sell your wares to anyone.

How complex is the crafting?

Graveyard Keeper has some pretty complicated parts, particularly the Technologies tree and the crafting system, which are deeply interconnected. It reminds me a lot of Starsand Island’s multitude of machines, growing in complexity as your quests get harder. In Graveyard Keeper, you’ll also be darting between your stations from anvil to carpenter’s bench to furnace trying to keep track of what you’re crafting and what you need.

Before you can even craft most things, you need to unlock the blueprint for the station in your technology tree, which requires points from completing most tasks, as simple as gathering flowers or cutting down trees. You get the picture. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was even using the notes on my phone at some point to write down exactly what I needed.

Will you like Graveyard Keeper?

Will you like Graveyard Keeper?

If you like dark humor: I love Stardew Valley and fortunately, Graveyard Keeper looks a lot like it… if it was based in a warped Halloween-esque vibe where ruined books and decomposing bodies are a hot commodity. This game is a lot more dark in nature, but fortunately that comes with a whole lot of humor to boot. Take a talking donkey and a skull with an attitude problem as two shining examples.

If you’re in it for the characters: If a great sim for you is about personalities, don’t expect wonderful friendships and meaningful connections in Graveyard Keeper. It’s very much centred on a mutual understanding that you give the NPCs things and they give you something in return. You won’t form any emotional friendships here as it’s based on reputation.

If you’re a sucker to the grind: I’ve played a lot of sims and I think Graveyard Keeper might just be the grindiest one I’ve come across. There’s a lot to do and often, I’ll find myself doing one thing and getting distracted by another. Or, I’ll set out on one task and realize there’s about five other tasks I need to do before I can finish the first one. Not forgetting how complicated the crafting is in the first place. For me, I love the grind. For others, it might be a step too far. But know this, if you’re also a fan of task gratification, you’re really going to enjoy ticking off all those boxes.