In The Biggest Sims Rival, AI Is The Feature, Not The Bug

There are plenty of games sporting AI, to varying degrees of disruption. There’s the never-ending Universe of No Man's Sky (overwhelming in its scope, perhaps underwhelming in its sparsely populated realism), and Persona, Hades, and Diablo have all used procedurally generated AI in development at least, so the landscapes, caverns, and dungeons include AI inspo. But there hasn’t quite been fully generative AI like what I found playing Inzoi, where, with the toggle of a switch, I can turn my character on — and let them run wild. The results are charmingly chaotic and a great fit to a game where such havoc is the point. AI gaming is fully here — and in Inzoi’s hands, it’s less uncanny than it is entertaining.

Inzoi is a new game from South Korea, from publisher Krafton, best known for one of the most popular shooters, PUBG. Hailed as a Sims rival, Inzoi has a number of extremely exciting features to anticipate, which has probably led the game to be wishlisted even more times than the likes of Hollow Knight: Silksong. First and foremost is its robust character creation menu. A close second: You can use generative AI to give its characters general guidelines on what to do and think.

The character selection menu is glorious. You could lose hours to crafting your character, so plan accordingly. I made my characters minutes after creating a hero in Dragon Age: Veilguard, and I must say the difference is night and day. There are tons of trendy outfits and make-up styles, and so many more options for Asian faces than the usual one or two presets. There’s also a user generated option, so you can expect to see the number of outfits, AI emotes, and other customized items to grow once this game reaches more people.

You’re encouraged to make a family of Zois to start, so I made a mother-daughter pair, plus a random male roommate (who I would later set up with the mother to try out the romance and procreation features.)

Within a day of me enabling the generative AI feature on my Zoi creations, the university fired one of them for too many unexcused absences on the job. A quick look at the guide that Krafton sent journalists showed me that this was a known issue with Smart Zois — if you turn on gen AI, the characters start ignoring their work schedule. Still, it was initially perturbing and a bit ironic to see that AI had led to my Zoi’s unemployment, five days into his assistant professor role. He had been so close to promotion too! I quickly sent him off to try and be a lawyer instead.

Aspirationally, Smart Zoi is supposed to help Zois act smarter, such as not eating a snack ten minutes before a scheduled dinner, as Inzoi said in a recent GDC talk. But in practice, we haven’t gotten there yet. I told my Zois to become great CEOs and wonderful family members, but they just mostly loafed around the house and park. One pregnant Zoi became a hardcore gamer while she inched closer to giving birth; I wasn’t sure why.

In one playthrough, I made one guy very family-oriented. But since his personality was set to “Authoritarian,” he ended up thinking things like, “I must dominate the family,” which is both an odd and hilarious outcome. I had fun.

The joy you get from Inzoi is totally self-made. Which is to say, if you can tell yourself fun stories and come up with wacky scenarios, Inzoi is a great sandbox to play in. At one point, I decided to order everything off my in-game smartphone, and revel in the packages. It made a real mess at my lobby but the sight was funny to witness. Not only did I have endless boxes at the front door, but I also had to manually unpack and place each food item on various tables around the house. Food perishes within a few hours, too, so soon the mansion was just covered in rotting gunk.

If you love building houses and decorating cities, Inzoi has plenty of features. I’m not personally much of a fan, so I glossed over those particular aspects. Even though my Zois kept failing to show up for work and getting fired, I managed a tidy sum thanks to a pre-early access money hack, and got my Zois the largest possible mansion.

And of course, just like the Sims, when you zoom out, Inzoi feels like an allegory for life. Time passes so fast in Inzoi, before I knew it, my Zois had gotten wrinkly, the baby was going to elementary school, and I was getting text messages about my contacts passing away. The wrinkles aren’t very realistic — my character can’t possibly be older than five days and she’s still wearing the hair and makeup of a stylish K-pop ingénue, so the extra lines feel strangely out of place. But the metaphor still stands — if you find Inzoi pointless or boring, it might just be that it’s too similar to real life in many ways.

After I bought my Zois their dream home and car, I wasn’t sure what to do next in the game, and it felt like I had maybe reached the end. Naturally, I started throwing a party within inappropriate places like the convenience store or K-pop training studio. Weirdos kept visiting me at my house and I enjoyed kicking them out. And all was right with the world, again.

Inzoi is available in Early Access starting on March 28 on PC, the PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.