bingewatches

Everything is beautiful in InZoi. Using InZoi’s shockingly robust character creation, I don’t think it’s possible to make an ugly person. Hair has realistic textures; eyes have depth and brightness. The clothing looks as if I might be able to put it on my human self, rendered beautifully down to detailed stitching. The comforter on my character’s modest bed has a dimpled weave. When she makes pancakes in the morning, she distinctly cracks an egg into a bowl of powdery white flour, a dutiful and accurate re-creation of the act of cooking this particular breakfast dish.

That is, if your computer can handle the demands of PUBG: Battlegrounds publisher Krafton’s ambitious, photorealistic life simulator. Running on a computer just above the minimum settings, InZoi looks quite rough when you start playing. You can still see the craft in the rendering of its assets, but the game is bogged down by tables and chairs popping into the screens, characters disappearing on collision with potted plants, and a horrendous re-creation of my gorgeous character’s face. InZoi will be an early access game — meaning it’s not finished and will continually be updated — when it’s released on March 28 for the price of $40, and that in-progress status is very apparent. InZoi isn’t ready. While the experience may be better realized on a powerful machine, the majority of those looking forward to the game will likely experience the game on a computer more like my own. There’s promise in InZoi, but at this point, what’s available now is barely a spark.

InZoi has been called a Sims competitor, and even a potential Sims killer — a game that could be the next The Sims. But InZoi lacks any of the personality that makes the Sims franchise iconic. There is story and flavor in the sandboxes of The Sims, a semblance of a community wherein your own stories are to be built. I haven’t found that in my first few hours of InZoi. I’ve found very little of anything, in fact. I’ve wandered what would be gorgeous Korean-inspired city streets on a better machine, marked with food trucks, parks, and temples. I’ve chased the non-player characters around these areas trying to make conversation, to set some sort of emergent story in motion. I’ve spread paranoia around the city, telling everyone I meet that I’m sure my life is being surveilled, that there’s a cat following me around that only I can see, that “Life’s best teacher is death.” (Yes, these are actual dialogue options in InZoi.) I’ve tried a more normal approach to making friends, too, but that’s led only to brief interactions and occasional text messages on my in-game phone.

The little moments that I so adored, like the lovely cooking animations, have their frictions too. Like with the pancakes, my character also painstakingly made bibimbap for dinner, but while washing the dishes, the dark bowl she was using magically transformed into a white plate. It’s in little details like these where I can see InZoi pulling apart.

There’s an element of world-building in InZoi as well; the overarching framing of it all is that you, the player, are an intern at an augmented reality company that’s tasked with managing this world. Though you jump in as a character, there are ways to impact the environment as a whole; you must keep the city’s “karma” score acceptable or risk a scolding by your boss. (All gameplay is inside the simulated world; the introduction cutscene sets up the framing.) There are sliders in one of the overworld menus that allow you to tweak things like city safety, the number of vehicles on the roads, and general emotional health of the residents. It tracks how many people have died, and lets you adjust other factors, like the city’s animals. Sick of cats? You can swap them for alligators for a more chaotic lifestyle. (For testing, I did this, but I still haven’t seen alligators roaming about. Just cats.)

Beyond its lofty gameplay ambitions, Krafton is also determined to make generative AI a cogent piece of the game — a move that’s misguided in several ways. The many environmental and ethical arguments against AI aside, the draw of a game like InZoi is the creative freedom it gives its players. The Sims’ community is robust and thriving because of the real people who’ve dedicated their lives to inspired and meaningful content for fellow players. 

InZoi currently lets players “3D print” items into InZoi using a generative AI process instead of building whatever it is yourself. (I tried it with a photo of my dog, and it was horrifying.) The same goes for clothing patterns, too, allowing users to prompt AI to customize fabric. There’s also a place to upload a video to create custom emotes. Again, putting aside the many, many questions I have about the ethics of these processes, the technology just doesn’t work well at this point. It’s just there because it’s there; it adds nothing to the game.

I can see potential in InZoi. I can see the game, in a few years, being something that can contend with life simulators like The Sims. There’s a lot to InZoi, maybe too much. InZoi may one day become a game that can rival The Sims, but right now, it’s little more than a pretty face.

InZoi will be released in early access March 28 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a prerelease download code provided by Krafton. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.