Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is very good
I played a ton of the new Tomodachi Life over the last few days. It's extremely impressive! If you like procgen storytelling, or if you know what "story sifting" is, or if you like thinking about the design of The Sims but haven't played it in a while, you might get a lot out of Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream. I unreservedly recommend it.
The game asks you to manage a town full of simulated people. It feels like managing a toybox full of chaotic action figures. You design them using the Mii character template common in a lot of other Nintendo games. Miis are easy to design and the toolset has a high expressive ceiling, so you can make fairly recognizable copies of famous people and fictional characters. My town currently contains Ms Marple, Stephen King, Lydia Tar, Zohran Mamdani, Gollum, Nein Nunb, Sun Tzu, and Ripley from Alien.
The game actually encourages you to fill your town your characters based on real people, celebrities, and fictional characters. The game is best when it's creating relationship chaos among cartoonishly-broad parodies of people you already have opinions about. They will do things mostly outside your control - you can fulfil their desire to hang out with a potential friend or crush, and you can TRY to intervene and stop someone from crushing on someone else... but it won't always work, and you can't cause someone to develop a crush on someone else. In general, you have a lot less control over the characters than you might in The Sims.
There are guard-rails here to keep things appropriate if you try to fill a home with the real members of your actual family - you can set familial relationships when you create a character. You can set a character's romantic preferences as well. But things are funniest when most of the characters on your island are pansexual and are getting into chaotic love triangles. When Ms. Marple became obsessed with Mamdani, and Gollum became obsessed with Ms. Marple, I crossed my fingers that the Mamdani pawn would fall in love with Gollum... and he did.
The funniest outcome of that was how the game decided to "cast" the storylets where various characters on my island confessed their love for one another. Both times that my characters have asked someone on a date, the Stephen King Mii showed up to interrupt and try and steal the love of the target pawn for himself!
In this game - and in other games using salience-based narrative design - the system that chooses who to place in each scene will have some templated narrative that they will "cast" by filling slots with characters. You can imagine this as being similar to those old Mass Effect planet quest cutscenes which could flexibly include any party NPC you brought along. In this case, however, the game is choosing which Miis will participate in the storyline at the moment it triggers to run.
I suspect that Stephen King was picked both times because he is, it seems, the most unpopular and awkward Mii on my island. he has extremely low relationship values with most other people, and is an "ambitious rogue" - some kind of blue quadrant personality type. I'm certain one or both of these qualities have turned him into a character who is frequently cast in socially awkward or villainous roles in cutscenes. It doesn't matter that this is repetitive - in fact, the more times it happens, the funnier it gets. I am extremely excited for Stephen King - whom I've dressed in a skeleton mask and a custom tank with the words "SLIME! SLIME! SLIME!" - to be romantically rejected by everyone on my island.
I'm impressed by the sheer number of story templates the game has. The game has multiple different meet-cute storylets which trigger based on the how the two characters involved are positioned near each other when the player clicks on one of them. Gollum started crushing on Ms. Marple because I clicked him just as he and Marple were approaching the same corner in a path from different directions. The game instantly transitioned to a cutscene of these characters colliding at the corner - and Gollum going starry-eyed for the woman he'd just walked into.
Similarly, When I clicked on Mamdani, he was walking along with Gollum a tile or two directly behind him. The game immediately started playing a cutscene where an object he owned fell out of his pocket and Gollum picked it up. Instantly, Mamdani fell in love and asked me whether he should pursue it.
The diversity of these scenes and the speed with which they trigger makes it pretty difficult for me to deliberately trigger them. I've found several event triggers which only seem to trigger unsuccessful meet-cutes, and I've placed a bunch of characters into those contexts in an attempt to trigger them - but they don't happen for everyone, it seems. I've only seen socially awkward characters - characters with a history of failed conversation events - fail a meet-cute in a restaurant, for example. Each time, the conversation was completely different, too. It's really impressive at how reactive these events are and how often I'm surprised by them.
These cutscenes are proccing based on the Miis' heading directions, physical distance, the activities the Miis were performing, and possibly even the type of floor tiles they were standing on (like when Gollum and Marple were pathing on the same player-drawn path). The game is evaluating all the things that COULD happen, and if something juicy could happen, the game pulls the trigger and shows you the content.
This game is also "casting" the scenes with player-authored text. It constantly prompts you to write in phrases that these characters would say, topics they're interested in, etc. It also has the characters ask you about "the real world," which they know exists, and then record your answers to discuss later amongst themselves. I told Lydia Tar to ask Mamdani about Democratic Socialism, and now characters constantly bring it up amongst themselves all over the island. They will even discuss it during cutscenes - including in sequences where Mamdani is not present. The game calls this body of text "island lingo" and allows you to modify it freely whenever you want.
The game isn't all meet-cutes - it's got a much larger number of platonic interactions between characters which trigger based on where they're sitting, what they're doing, and who else is around. Many of them are charmingly pointless - the characters will do something so odd or awkward that you're not quite sure what the game is trying to say about their relationship. The game seems to be deliberately pursuing a "huh????" attitude with a lot of this content. It works - if you're packing the game with discordant groups of fictional characters, that kind of random story event is very much in line with the overall tone of the game.
There's also a few event systems which act as stubs for a variety of different interpersonal interactions. For example, characters often fall down and need help to get up. They may advance their relationship with whoever you assign to help them up - and sometimes they pivot that interaction directly into a meet-cute cutscene where the rescued character falls in love, and the player gets a chance to tell them whether or not to pursue it.
It's really cool to see a Nintendo game doing this kind of stuff. When it comes to Nintendo, I mostly only play Pokemon games, which have pretty indifferent narrative design. It's gotten me into a place where I don't expect to see a lot of sophisticated narrative systems when I pick up my switch. Animal Crossing games usually have much stronger narrative systems... but Tomodachi Life is really hitting another level, I think. I think anyone who works in games narrative would find something interesting in here, craft-wise.
I think the game also demonstrates that a lot of these systems are easier to "sell" to the player if the content is silly, stupid, and kind of random-feeling. It's very hard to build rigorous consistency into systems like these. The player does a lot of work of papering over disjoints between the storylets and telling themselves the story of how it all fits together. If the entire setting of the game is parodic and kind of random-feeling, then disjoints are just part of the experience. The game communicates this with the art, too - all items in the game are just photographs of real-world items, often with the color saturation turned up so high that they look like images from the Tellytubbies. I just won a minigame which awarded me with a photograph of a stag beetle. I gave the beetle to someone as a pet. The pet has minimal animation and sometimes scurries around on the ground as an unanimated photograph of a beetle. It's incredible. All the food is just photographs of food, too.
Despite this, it doesn't feel "too random". You spend so long fiddling with these people that the game avoids the curse of feeling completely random. Because... the events are salient! They emerge correctly from the context of your gameplay! It feels completely natural to me that everyone on the island is falling in love with Gollum!