Game info

• Title inZOI
• Developer [inZOI Studio]
• Publisher [Krafton]
• Year 2025
• Platform Mac
• Genre Simulation

inZOI is a life simulation game where you can visualize stories of life with immersive, realistic graphics and deep, detailed simulation that creates unexpected occurrences.

Player Select

There have been a few games being talked about recently that could be competition for the Sims, at least one has fallen by the wayside, but inZOI has finally come to fruition. It was just recently released on the App Store for Mac, so I immediately downloaded it only to find it wouldn’t work on my hardware. Luckily there was no quibble about getting a refund, and I found a friend with a better laptop to do the downloading for me. Not a great start, but eventually managed to get playing.

It’s in the Game

Even with the higher specification, and after turning down some of the graphics settings, the game is pretty laggy but I can see why. The graphics are outstanding, incredibly realistic and well done - beautiful scenery, sharp designs and realistic movement. Shadows all in the right places and everything behaving as you’d expect. It’s intense on the hardware but worth it if you can get it running.

In terms of gameplay, it’s pretty similar to the Sims - you create the character, control them going about their daily lives, design their house, get them a job, etc etc. There are levels of wants and ambitions and tasks to keep you busy, but ultimately it’s just about playing about with the characters and telling their stories. The one concern I have with it is the level of realism is just a bit too much… we’ve all previously built a swimming pool and trapped a Sim in there by taking away the ladder, right? But it would feel wrong to do that to these Zoi characters because they are so realistic, it’s inhuman somehow.

I do try and approach the game without making too many comparisons to Sims, as hard as that is. But there are niggles with it. I keep losing the characters inside buildings, and navigating around doesn’t feel too intuitive to me. I like that there are four levels of fast forwarding time, but the controls are quite confusing, and some buttons and toggles haven’t been translated from Korean. I think it’s quite early in the game’s development, too. Obviously the Sims has so much history and learnings to build on and the gameplay is quite ingrained now. This one feels a little bit aimless and like it’s early stages but there’s so much potential for more, it’s exciting to consider the possibilities.

Thoughts

This game isn’t going to replace Sims for me, and I don’t think I’ll be spending lots of time on it or any future potential expansion packs. However, I do think it’s an incredible feat of engineering and it’s definitely going to be worth dipping in and out occasionally just to admire the world that’s created and the details contained within.

Rating: 3 / 5