Played a bunch of Paralives
As soon as I got home from Santa Fe, I played quite a few hours of Paralives, a very direct Sims competitor which just came out in Early Access.
One of the things which interested me most about this game was watching Sims fans discuss it online. A lot of these people have never played an early access game before... the Paralives team actually had to explain the concept of early access to their audience. I love looking at corners of the industry where Gamer Shit isn't widely accepted or understood.
The game is extremely early access. The team very clearly focused on person-building and house-building gameplay, and the bit I enjoyed most as a kid myself - making the characters actually run around and do stuff - definitely took the back seat here. I have a two-year-old computer with relatively nice hardware, and it's lagging every second or two in some situations. Scrolling my camera around the town is difficult because the game will hang and then update my camera position a few seconds later, in a completely different part of the town I do not recognize. You sometimes have to hit the "unstuck" button and teleport all your characters and their infants to the curb.
Nevertheless, the game is playable. I feel like I've been trial-and-erroring my way through a lot of it, though, trying to figure out its logic for how human life is supposed to work. It has its own beliefs about how relationships are supposed to progress, what type of furniture a child can use at various stages of their life, etc. Some of this stuff is very clearly unique to Paralives - the conversation cards you can use to direct social relationships are definitely a good add. There's also a relationship system based on overlapping tags and statuses which seems cool (though clearly only partially implemented).
I never played very much Sims DLC, so I assume that some of the gameplay I'm not familiar with is not necessarily new to Paralives, but rather inspired by certain conventions in recent or old Sims expansions. Taking care of kids is the big one - it feels a lot more involved and difficult than what I remember from the old Sims games I played in high school and college, with UX flows I don't quite expect.
It's funny that I have played every single Sims game, many quite extensively, but still feel like an outsider here specifically because I rarely bought Sims DLC or used mods. I was totally satisfied to spend dozens of hours in some of the bare-bones shipped games, particularly when I was in college and didn't have a ton of money to spend on DLC for one game. The game definitely feels aimed at people who spent time in the wider Sims ecosystem rather than fickle fans like myself.
Anyway, I think I'm much more likely to return to this one over The Sims. I think I've passed the point in my life where I'd be willing to purchase hundreds of dollars of DLC in a life sim. I do think, however, that I'd be willing to slam the "subscribe" button on a bunch of Steam Workshop mods...