Life By You is the life sim with a world of possibilities

29.08.2023 - 15:17 / thesixthaxis.com / Life Sim

Life By You might be a game that’s technically within the life simulator genre, but it could just as easily be a god game. Yes, it’s challenging The Sims’ crown, and many people will surely play it as a drop-in replacement, but this game’s design is so inherently customisable and mod-able that you barely have to play within the “rules” if you don’t want to. At every stage, you can inject your whims and desires into Life By You for the ultimate in role-playing fantasy.

At its core as a life sim, Life By You looks pleasantly broad and expansive, right from the off. Our hands-off demo followed Ronnie Maisonet as they got their day started and went to work at the gym.

Looking to continue their crawl up that particular career path from a basic trainer to higher positions at the company. To do so, you’ll have various performance goals to meet, whether it’s making sure that the gym is clean and tidy for customers, reviewing gym applications, creating new workouts, or simply practising yoga routines to run classes with.

Bumping into a colleague in the morning, the conversation that follows is a mixture of personality traits and a deep real-language dialogue tree that aims to cater for whatever situation your human can face. Perhaps feeling a little put out after missing out on a promotion, an antagonistic set of dialogue options let Ronnie just outright say “You didn’t deserve that promotion”, but one of the most immediate ways you can personalise the role-playing in the game is to replace the written dialogue on the fly. The underlying chat tree doesn’t change from that, but you can inject a little more personality into how you stink up the workplace relationships.

However, just as in real life, a job can be just a job. Ronnie also has a budding interest outside of work in gardening and flower arranging. Tending to her front garden is a simple case of watering the plants to start off with, but with more experience and levelling up, she’ll learn about fertilising and more. She can also take cuttings and use them to spend time flower arranging indoors, creating a bespoke decoration for a housewarming party in the evening. Get good enough at it, though, and she could pack in her job at the gym and instead start a career as a florist.

But here’s the thing: none of this can apply to you if you don’t want it to. If your human’s tummy is rumbling or they’re busting for a pee, but you don’t want it to interrupt the task that they’re currently engaged in? Well, by default Life By You lets you mouse over the pee meter and drag it out of the pants-wetting danger zone. It’s a change that’s up there with Fire Emblem making permadeath optional – you can still choose to abide by the character needs meters, or you can deactivate