Life By You got canceled, Paralives isn’t coming until next year, and with no release date for InZoi yet to bolster my hopes, the life sim renaissance I’ve been waiting for is drifting further out to sea instead of pulling into port. Won’t any game show up to take on The Sims?

Yes, actually. While we wait for the other big contenders, there is one Sims-style life sim that’s already out. Don’t let its lo-fi face turn you off, either, because Tiny Life is great.

Tiny Life launched in early access back in May 2023 and up until recently I’d only played its demo and then forgotten about it. But in my desperation for something new, something I can actually play, I bought the full version and spent about a week with it only to find it harkens back to some parts of The Sims 3 that players have been missing, and has some jazzy old software vibes too.

Tiny Life has the same basic principles as The Sims: you can create a family of Tinies, build them a home, and live out their little lives through job changes, new relationships, births, and silly social situations. It has an open world neighborhood, lots of mood-specific interactions, skills and life goals, craftable furniture, and the ability to build your own non-residential lots like bars and libraries.

Tiny Life immediately endeared itself to me with a bit of humor. I tried out one of its default families first, siblings Bernard and Bridget Benson. Turns out that Bernard has the “mean” trait which I only realized after he went to work. I got a series of notifications in this order:

• Bernard has just talked to Kerran Carter for the first time!
• Kerran Carter just became Disliked with Bernard Benson
• Bernard has just talked to Malik Osman for the first time!
• Malik Osman just became Disliked with Bernard Benson
• Bernard has just talked to Liam Lungo for the first time!
• Liam Lungo just became Disliked with Bernard Benson

Bernard straight up insulted every single one of his new coworkers and got a +2 embarrassed mood status from “embarassing conversation at work.” Well done, Bernard.

Next I went to build my first tiny suburban house. Though the catalog of furniture and decor isn't huge, it does offer a nice amount of customization. It's not as powerful as the color and materials picker I love in The Sims 3, but it does allow you to individually choose colors for different parts of an object like bed frame versus sheets, which I wish The Sims 4 allowed. Build Mode may look a little clunky with its pixelated aesthetic but it's relatively permissive with the ability to turn off snapping to the grid, hide walls while building, and other niceties that I'm accustomed to in The Sims.

After that, I grabbed another pre-made Tiny—you can make your own families, but that's my least favorite part of life sims, sorry—Rebekah Brunch, because her backstory as a wealthy lawyer moving to the suburbs to pursue art meant she had enough Tiny Bucks to afford the 3 bedroom house I just built.

She started teaching herself to paint out on her back porch which is how one morning I spotted the garbage collector Carl Dyrté coming by to pick up her bins one morning. I got it into my head that Rebekah's perfect Hallmark storyline involved a chance meeting (not so chance, as I made her stand outside every day hoping to catch a word) with the local trash man, who she would marry and have 2.5 kids with while supporting the whole family on her treasure horde of retired lawyer money.

Their love story took full advantage of the sandbox qualities that I've been really enjoying in Tiny Life. Its open world neighborhood let her spend mornings painting at home and then walking to the cafe to make new friends. She relaxed at the park, then called up her crush Carl to invite him to hang out there. They progressed from love interests to sweethearts and, after much flirting, shared a first kiss at the park surrounded by someone else's kids who showed up to eat the chicken wings she grilled for him. They started dating, moved in together, and both got a +6 “frisky” boost for several days to commemorate the new relationship. Oh, and then I had to appoint a new garbage collector to take his place.

Later on I realized that Rebekah’s “Perfect Painter” life goal wanted her to complete a painting while in a museum and that my neighborhood didn’t have one by default. But there are plenty of player-made public lots in the Steam workshop and getting one added to my game was quick and easy—though I would like to work on building some non-residential lots of my own soon too.

Tiny Life is never going to be as big as The Sims, but it’s doing a lot of fun things in its small world. As a long time Sims player I’ve just been hungry for something new. And until the bigger contenders like Inzoi and Paralives show up, the only recommendation I’ve been able to give fans is just to go back to an older Sims game, which is the illusion of choice at best. Though it’s small, Tiny Life isn’t just something different, it’s actually worth spending time with.