Cosy life sim Paralives launched into early access this week, sweetening the initial reception with a roadmap full of free goodies. I’ve been looking forward to the game, if only because there has been such disappointment of late on the life sim front – Paradox Tectonic’s Life By You fell foul of funding cuts, Inzoi is a horrible haunted Botox catalogue, and EA’s plans for The Sims 5 remain nebulous and live-servicey.
Paralives? It appears both throwback and forward-thinking, a game of rosy cheeks, antique shops and smaller mechanical touches like skill progression juddering to a halt if your character’s needs aren’t met. It’s the champion this wayward genre needs. What could go wrong? Ah, it seems the character creator has been making people physically ill.
Developers Alex Massé and team have posted a list of Known Issues on Steam. In amongst the more routine entries about glitchy save files, delayed boot-up cycles and AI issues, there’s a note about “motion sickness in the Paramaker”, the Paramaker being the game’s character creator. The first time you create a character in the Paralives tutorial, you’ll do so aboard a train trundling towards the game’s rustic smalltown setting. As you adjust and dress your character, you’ll see trees and bushes pass through the window behind, and it turns out this has been giving some players the heaves.
I think this might be the first time a videogame character editor has ever had a motion sickness problem. I couldn’t quite believe the Steam post, so I took an overnight express to that rustic smalltown setting known as Reddit, and yep, there’s a thread full of people brandishing barf bags. I myself don’t find the Paramaker train sequence nauseating, though the motion of the world beyond the train grates a little. Anyway! The Paralives team’s proposed solution is breathtaking in its simplicity: add some curtains.
There’s probably a piece to write about the causes of videogame motion sickness, given that it seems to afflict people at random. I’ve never been able to complete the wonderful Sable, for example, because something about the protagonist’s animations versus the movement of the camera makes my stomach turn. Oh hang on, Sir Jeremy of Peel has already written that piece for VG247.
