Paralives

The single most useful sentence written about Paralives is in a negative review with 627 votes, and I'm going to lead with it because it will save some readers NZ$56.99:

KEY ADVICE: Do NOT create a Para. Choose a family and play as that family before your two hour limit to refund the game is up. Try the live mode gameplay and make a decision as to whether you want to keep the game. Do NOT get sucked into spending hours building a house and creating a character like I did, only to realize the live mode gameplay is lacking.

That is the whole review in one paragraph, and it's why this one scores a 7 rather than an 8. Paralives is two halves of a game glued together, and they are at very different stages of completion.

The half that works

Build mode is superb. Walls go where you want them, furniture resizes, colour applies to almost everything, and the whole thing is precise in ways that its enormous competitor has never quite managed. The Paramaker character creator is quick and flexible. The art direction is warm and distinctly its own.

You can measure this from the criticism, which is the most reliable way. "Build" appears in 64 of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews — and it's almost always praise. "The game's paramaker and build mode are both very solid," writes a 1,035-vote negative. "Sure, the build mode and Paramaker are good," writes another at 1,054 votes. Same shape as The Ascent: people opening a thumbs-down by saying what they love.

The half that doesn't

Then they pivot, and they pivot to the same place every time. A 1,023-vote reviewer puts it most cleanly: "at the moment Paralives is missing the 'lifesim' part of a lifesim."

Live mode — your people going to work, forming relationships, having lives — is thin. Interactions are shallow, personality traits don't express themselves much, careers and children are closer to placeholders than systems. A 449-vote review lands the criticism that will sting most, because it's the one levelled at The Sims 4: "it's pretty, but lacks a soul. It's a doll house… everyone forgot that build mode and creating characters used to be the foundation, not the entire game."

The playtime data agrees. The median across those hundred critical reviews is 6.2 hours — long enough to build a house, not long enough to live in it.

Is the 91% about this game, or about the other one?

This is the genuinely interesting question here, and the corpus raises it itself.

The most-upvoted negative review, at 1,504 votes, exists specifically to argue with the score: "I felt compelled to do so due to the extreme over-positivity of current reviews… To those of you glazing the game just because it's not The Sims 4, I wish you would really stop; it is not ready by any stretch of the imagination." Its author is careful to add that their position is "not yet, not not ever."

And the most-upvoted positive, at 6,061 votes, opens by framing the purchase entirely in competitive terms: "For the price of one Sims 4 expansion, you'll get this lovely indie game with ALL future updates being free," before noting that Paralives grew from a solo project to a team of 15, against the 1,000-plus people credited on The Sims 4's base game.

Both of those are fair points. But a reader should know that a chunk of this 91% is a vote against a DLC catalogue rather than a measurement of what's in the box today. The monetisation score here is a 9 and it's deserved — one price, no expansion packs, free Workshop mods — and it is also not the same thing as the game being finished.

Early Access conduct

This is where Paralives earns real credit, and it's the test I apply to every Early Access game.

Six numbered patches in eight weeks — 0.1.2 on 29 May, four days after launch, then 0.1.3, 0.1.4, 0.1.5 and 0.1.6 through to mid-July — plus hotfixes, public "Known Issues" posts, and Steam Workshop support added on 3 June. A million copies sold by 24 June. The negative reviews fall away as it goes: 57 in May, 31 in June, 11 in July, 1 so far in August.

That is the Dead as Disco pattern, not the Assetto Corsa EVO one. A studio shipping fortnightly and publishing its own bug list is a studio you can reasonably bet on.

The verdict

Paralives earns a 7. The building tools are the best in the genre, the pricing model is honest in a way this genre badly needed, and the developers are visibly delivering.

It isn't higher because NZ$56.99 buys you a magnificent dollhouse and a life sim that hasn't arrived yet, because performance is rough on capable machines, and because the camera reportedly makes people motion sick. Those are Early Access problems in a game that is genuinely early — but you pay today's price for today's build.

Buy it if building is the point for you, or if you enjoy growing with a project. If you want the lives more than the houses, wishlist it and check back in six months. And whatever you do, spend your first two hours in live mode.