Gameplay:

An aspect of this game, that took a little getting used to but I’ve grown to enjoy, is the communication between your ‘Para’ and other ‘Parafolk’, unlike other life sim games you don’t just spam as many dialog choices, you have to wait for the communication meter to fill up, then you’re given dialog options in the form of cards, to progress the conversation, choose an incorrect option, it has a negative effect on the Para’s relationship, it adds a weight to conversations, and when you do get it wrong, it sometimes hurts. With other games, I’ve always found you can just push through conversations, manipulating them to get the result you want, with this, it’s much more of a challenge, which is a good thing. To balance off having to wait for the bar to fill up, you can multitask, my Para will happily continue their conversation whilst practicing programming for example, I haven’t noticed this slowing learning down, which would be a nice touch as, some of us, certainly myself, cannot multitask at the best of times, let alone whilst programming. There has been some negativity around the card communication mechanic, but the developers have already said this is a mechanic which is staying in the game, they have a feature that they believe in and it’s great to see they’re not bowing to pressure. This mechanic makes it stand out, and personally I like it, I don’t think you are going to challenge a giant of a genre just by copying them. I will say that now the dialog options are liner, it seems that when my characters are communicating, there is a lot of repetition.

The map is essentially open world; you can zoom out of your property and select a shop and after a short amount of loading time (usually by the time your Para reaches it) the lot is accessible. The map also contains collectables, mushrooms and ores, mainly and also the odd buried chest, again it’s a neat feature where you can collect the items, donate them to the museum, this gives you bonus items and financial boosts, you can also get similar benefits from donating rarer items to the community center however, with the added bonus of restoring it to its former glory.

The building mechanics takes a fair bit of getting used to, some of the flexibility, like changing the size of almost every item, are fantastic and once you do get used to it, building décor is a breeze. I’m excited to see these tools experimented with and see what people can create. I found it easy to create a corner sofa combining two of the same sofas together and adjusting their size for a relatively perfect fit. You could spend hours making every little detail perfectly, size, shape, colour, pattern even uploading your own photos to certain items like picture frames but also you can throw together something that looks half decent relatively swiftly. I’ve built 3 properties of different styles to get a feel for the mechanics. One thing I have found is using curved walls became more frustrating after the initial interest. Maybe it’s my lack of toolset skills, but I always seemed to end up with a spare bit of wall that was painted the same as the next room, almost as if the curved wall must be contained in a room. It’s something I will continue to play with and try to get working in future builds. Another thing I found is the area you’re building in, doesn’t seem sectioned correctly, I built a townhouse, fitting in between two already established buildings. The squared off area didn’t seem to fit correctly, and I had to build at odd angles to fit walls in, the final results ended up not looking too bad but I feel it would have been a lot simpler to be able just to use the already in place neighboring walls and just add the front and back walls to create a room.

The careers system seems a lot more in depth than other life simulation games, to apply for jobs you need to achieve a certain number of points over different categories, to achieve a required total before you can even apply. Once an application is successful, you even get to choose your start time, out of a few options, which is handy if you like a lie in. Once in a job, your rank goes up using a simple performance meter, allowing for promotions. My Para was able to jump between several different jobs in his selected field and get upgrades to rank and promotions regularly. However, underperforming Para’s receive strikes, if you get 3 strikes, yourrrr out! You get sacked basically. Jobs also pay out daily, which is handy.

Building my ‘Parafolk’ was a decent enough experience, a lot of features to change size and all sorts of shapes, I’m sure the internet is going to feature a lot of freaky looking characters with this building mechanic. Clothing options were basic and lacked detail. It does have editing features for items with colours and pattern choices, but the art style just made the clothes look a bit bland and boring. With future additions promised I hope these will boost my interest in the clothing options.