Life by You is a life sim as deep as the Mariana Trench

Fans will need to do the digging, though

Paradox Tectonic’s Life by You, a life sim that’ll very much remind you of The Sims, is as deep as life sims get without dropping the ‘sim’ part. At gamescom 2023, I followed one day in the life of a young woman called Ronnie. She works as a yoga instructor at a nearby gym in the pretty seaside town she lives in, is a bit of a troublemaker, and likes gardening and flower arranging.

Her house is honestly a bit of a mess and she doesn’t seem to clean up a lot, but no matter – it’s time to go to work, so the Paradox Tectonic representative at the mouse sends her to her place of work. The gym is right across the street and we don’t need to wait for any loading screens as we leave the premises of Ronnie’s house – we can just zoom out and see the entire town, look into every house, and interact with every single person living there. We can observe what anyone does at any time, listen in on conversations they are having. It’s like those little encounters you can have in real life that make you step out of your self-centered bubble for a moment and make you realize how big and complicated the world really is with everyone living their own lives next to each other.

Meet Ronnie, a local yoga instructor and troublemaker / Paradox Tectonic

Anyway, we could just hop into any of these characters and play as them, but we’re focused on Ronnie for now. She slips into her work uniform, which counts as the first of seven work tasks she has to fulfill over the course of the day to get paid. We’re role-playing here, though, so we go into troublemaking mode and chat up a colleague, where we have various conversation options from being flirty to being confrontational – naturally, Ronnie is the latter, so she tells her colleague straight-up that he doesn’t deserve to be promoted. Ouch. This was possible due to the context in which the two characters met up – they are colleagues and at their workplace. Had they met out at the beach or in a restaurant, I’m told, the options would have adapted to this context. You can also just type out the text you want your character to say, if any of the given options aren’t what you had in mind.

After this rather unpleasant encounter, Ronnie decides to leave work early and go home. She loves gardening, so we decide to harvest some flowers she’s planted in front of her porch. After another change of clothes, which resulted in another pile of clothing on the floor and me getting the urge to clean it up (I’m somewhere on the other side of the personality spectrum), Ronnie makes some food. There’s a ton of recipes and more can be unlocked with a higher cooking level, but she’s just going for a salad. Again, the cooking animation we see is based on this context – Ronnie is making salad, so she’s chopping up veggies. Were she baking a cake, we’d get something completely different.

Eating takes up a lot of our precious showcase time, so the developer simply fills Ronnie’s hunger meter manually. This is something players will be able to do as well – you can completely ignore the needs of your characters if you want to focus on other things, or you can play that all out.

Life by You's possibilities seem truly endless / Paradox Tectonic

Remember the flowers we picked earlier? Ronnie can make a little arrangement out of them and the bouquet she’s made features the exact types of flowers we harvested – it’s not a generic model. If she keeps practicing her arrangement, she could even quit her job and make a living off of this. That’d be the dream, huh? In Life by You, it’s not impossible.

I have many questions after seeing a day in Ronnie’s life and pretty much all of them were able to be answered by ‘Yes, you can,’ or ‘Yes, we’re giving you the tools for that.’

And that’s the thing about Life by You. In a way, it’s not really a game. It feels like a playable demo for a massively powerful and potent toolkit people will get into their hands. Objects, careers, stories, dialog options – yes, the base game will feature all of these, but the main objective is that players will create more of all of these by themselves, sharing them with the wider community. Paradox Tectonic is currently finalizing exactly how that’s going to work – an in-game platform? Steam Workshop? Everything is on the table.

Life by You truly feels like it offers endless possibilities, it has the depth of the Mariana Trench – but players will need to dig down first before they get to enjoy the dive. Success will likely hinge on how much of a hassle this digging is going to be.

Life by You goes into Early Access on PC on March 5, 2024. For more from gamescom 2023, please visit videogames.si.com.