With Life By You canceled and Paralives not out until 2025, this lo-fi life sim is the best game like The Sims to play right now

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(Image credit: Ellpeck Games)

Tiny Life - Two tinies flirt outside the library

Yes, actually. While we wait for the other big contenders, there is one Sims-style life sim that’s already out. Don’t let its lo-fi face turn you off, either, becauseTiny Lifeis great.

Tiny Lifelaunched in early accessback in May 2023 and up until recently I’d only played its demo and then forgotten about it. But in my desperation for something new, something I can actually play, I bought the full version and spent about a week with it only to find it harkens back to some parts of The Sims 3 that players have been missing, and has some jazzy old software vibes too.

Tiny Life has the same basic principles as The Sims: you can create a family of Tinies, build them a home, and live out their little lives through job changes, new relationships, births, and silly social situations. It has an open world neighborhood, lots of mood-specific interactions, skills and life goals, craftable furniture, and the ability to build your own non-residential lots like bars and libraries.

Tiny Life - Rebekah meets several new neighbors at the park.

Tiny Life immediately endeared itself to me with a bit of humor. I tried out one of its default families first, siblings Bernard and Bridget Benson. Turns out that Bernard has the “mean” trait which I only realized after he went to work. I got a series of notifications in this order:

Bernard straight up insulted every single one of his new coworkers and got a +2 embarrassed mood status from “embarassing conversation at work.” Well done, Bernard.

Next I went to build my first tiny suburban house. Though the catalog of furniture and decor isn’t huge, it does offer a nice amount of customization. It’s not as powerful as the color and materials picker I love in The Sims 3, but it does allow you to individually choose colors for different parts of an object like bed frame versus sheets, which I wish The Sims 4 allowed. Build Mode may look a little clunky with its pixelated aesthetic but it’s relatively permissive with the ability to turn off snapping to the grid, hide walls while building, and other niceties that I’m accustomed to in The Sims.

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It may be tiny a pixelated, but customizing multiple colors on one object is a blessing.(Image credit: Ellpeck Games)

Tiny Life - Decorating a small living room with furniture

After that, I grabbed another pre-made Tiny—you can make your own families, but that’s my least favorite part of life sims, sorry—Rebekah Brunch, because her backstory as a wealthy lawyer moving to the suburbs to pursue art meant she had enough Tiny Bucks to afford the 3 bedroom house I just built.

Tiny Life - Carl and Rebekah are love interets, sitting at her house together.

Tiny Life is never going to be as big as The Sims, but it’s doing a lot of fun things in its small world. As a long time Sims player I’ve just been hungry for somethingnew. And until the bigger contenders like Inzoi and Paralives show up, the only recommendation I’ve been able to give fans is just to go back to an older Sims game, which is the illusion of choice at best. Though it’s small, Tiny Life isn’t just something different, it’s actually worth spending time with.

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