inZOI is a life-sim where you create various characters called Zois that live out their lives as you see fit. They are semi-autonomous, so they will take care of their basic needs on their own, but the player has the ability to guide their lives through significant life choices like choosing their job, their home, their family, and their romantic partners (or lack thereof). From the womb to the tomb, your Zois will experience all kinds of different events and situations, and it’s up to you to help them through it all.

Life Simulation

Similar to The Sims, inZOI could theoretically play itself. When you create a Zoi, you give them a core trait, a life goal, and an ambition, which influences their overall behavior in-game. After that, all player involvement is optional. You can switch over to play a different family or character and leave your created Zoi to their own devices. For most people, though, you’ll want to continue playing as them from their youth to old age. Sims veterans will recognize many of the core features available. You can go to school to get an education, get a job, climb the corporate ladder, socialize, build relationships, etc. There’s a very solid foundation that doesn’t stray too far from what you’d expect from the genre, although it could be considered a little barebones and lacking depth.

The needs system is pretty standard; you have eight needs, like hunger, sleep, hygiene, and socialization. There are a variety of skills to master, like fitness, art, critical thinking, and gardening. Zois will get assigned values based on their personality. A Zoi that is a perfectionist with dreams of career advancement will have a high accomplishment value, while their pleasure value will be quite low. This then influences the things they do when not under player control, as well as their responses to others. This builds towards the game’s main source of gameplay-related enjoyment, which is creating storylines for your Zois. They really start to build their own personalities over time, which is fun to see. Your rude Zoi, who aspires to be a famous criminal, will constantly start fights with people and try to scam them, frequently ending up in jail. Your Zoi, who wants to be a famous singer, will go to the park and sing for people there. Zois build relationships with each other, go on dates, get married, cheat on their spouse, then have a child out of wedlock. None of this is particularly unique to the life-sim genre, but it’s still a lot of fun to see it play out.

Creation and Building

There’s a large focus on creation, both for Zois and for objects. One of the things that really stands out are the import tools. You can import images and frame them around your house as paintings or pictures. You can take a picture of a real object and import it via the “3D Printer,” which tries to create an in-game version of it (with mixed results). Other players can also create and upload furniture for you to download and use in your game, along with things like new clothing options or hairstyles.

The build mode itself is also quite extensive. There are different wall heights allowing you to create homes with very high ceilings, partial walls to add some modern architectural aesthetics, many different pre-made objects to customize your home with, and even a number of blueprints you can use if you aren’t the creative type and want a well-designed room made by the developers. Blueprints even extend to entire homes that have been created for you to use. All of this can also be done by other players who want to upload their creations for people to use.

Customization seems to be one of the game’s guiding principles. The vast majority of features in the game can be fiddled with and tweaked, even to the point where you can move around any of the UI elements to tailor your game view to what you care about while playing. This bodes well for the game’s future, as it seems that it will only get better over time.

Presentation

Graphically, the game looks quite nice. It has a fairly realistic art style compared to the cartoony style of The Sims. To compensate, the computer specs required to play the game at max settings are significantly higher than most people have available to them. The character creator is quite good, although a bit lacking in certain areas, such as hairstyles for black Zois and certain styles of clothing. For example, dressing like a trendy Korean young adult is extremely easy with tons of customization, but if your sense of style doesn’t align with that, your options are more limited. This will improve over time, but it’s still worth noting the current state of things.

The music is decent, but I can’t say it’s particularly memorable. As background music while you manage your Zois, though, it does the job. Voice acting is great, as the characters don’t speak a real language, but a sort of Korean-styled gibberish that is delivered with a good amount of life and emotion.

Usage of Generative AI

One of the controversial elements of the game is the use of generative AI. It’s used as part of the “Smart ZOI” feature. This allows you to give an AI prompt for a ZOI, which will then influence their inner thoughts. This works decently well and seems to be a form of AI chatbot retrofitted to appear as the Zoi’s thoughts. I tested it by giving a Zoi a prompt that their father was secretly gay. Most of their thoughts were about things they were doing: “This mango was delicious, it really hit the spot,” “I hope she doesn’t think I’m trying too hard to impress her.” But occasionally they would think something along the lines of “Keeping Dad’s secret is stressing me out, he needs to come clean.” It’s an interesting feature, but could definitely use some refinement.

As for the morality of this, I think this is actually a good use of generative AI. It’s trained using data belonging to the developers, plus, it is used for things that a human employee wouldn’t be able to do, which is coming up with infinite amounts of inner thoughts and then coding them to appear at relevant moments. It’s not feasible for these sorts of things to be handcrafted, so an AI doing it makes sense. It is also an optional feature that can be ignored if you don’t want to use it.

Early Access and Future Development

As an Early Access game, a certain amount of flaws are acceptable and expected. There’s a decent amount of stuff to do, and the things you can do are fairly interesting, but the total amount of content is a bit lacking. Part of that is due to the main point of comparison being Sims 4, a game with over a decade of post-release content updates and roughly $1300 of DLC. On the other hand, it’s not on the player to justify why inZOI is lacking content; the end result is still the same. It’s hard to say that inZOI is a true competitor at this stage in development, as it simply doesn’t have the content to stack up against it.

All that being said, I believe the future looks bright. There is an extensive roadmap featuring modding tools, expanded content in virtually every area of the game, as well as technical improvements. The potential is massive, to the point where it could truly compete with The Sims in a meaningful way, while remaining at a reasonable price. But this is all one big hypothetical. The roadmap is intentionally vague, so the developers saying they will “improve relationships” could mean anything. Time will tell if it lives up to the hype, but for right now, I’m cautiously optimistic.

Verdict

I enjoyed my time with inZOI, despite its shortcomings. If you already own hundreds of dollars of Sims 4 DLC, I can’t recommend this game in good faith, but for others, I believe it’s worth a shot. If you are on the fence, there’s no harm in waiting for future content updates or even a full release. Some people will play it as is and love it, but I think that will be specifically players that love the building and design side of life-sims, rather than the more simulation-oriented areas. If you want large amounts of content and depth, you are better off waiting on this one. Overall, though, it’s a solid game that should only improve, and I’m happy to go along for the ride.

7/10

• inZOI Studio, KRAFTON, Inc.
• Steam
• $40