inZoi early access review
I was, like so many of my 1990s-born peers, a huge Sims girlie. I spent hundreds of hours as a teen and young adult making people I knew, characters from shows I was obsessing over, or original characters I wanted to experiment with, and diligently following their life paths and ambitions. I played it as a traditional life sim and I also got into all the weird, scrappy lore. I played with all the cheats and glitches and I, of course, put my sims in the pool and took the ladder out so that they were forced to drown.
Try as I might, I could not capture any of these feelings in InZOI, Krafton’s early access life simulator that I would not typically immediately compare to another game if it did not beg for it by lifting every part of its design from the 25-year-old series that defined the genre. At first, navigating my shiny, photorealistic, model-perfect Zoi’s around the shiny, photorealistic, model-perfect world, I feared that I am simply thirty years old and that the whimsy in my heart has withered with time. But in the end, I must insist that it’s not me who is wrong. InZOI simply has awful vibes.