inZOI | Impressions – XboxEra

‘inZOI’ is an unusual game. The amount of technology developer inZOI Studio and publisher KRAFTON have jam-packed into this life-sim management game is unreal, to say the least. We’re talking a game with a realistic character creator, bordering on the uncanny (maybe deep into it!), custom item and animation creators, numerous gameplay factors that can impact the lives of the Zois that wander about and go their daily lives, and true simulation of all warm bodies across the map?

Well, I’ve been enjoying inZOI quite a bit. More than I should have, really—some duties got shirked during the making of this impression! I got to play the “playtest” build of inZOI, and got quite a lot of insight into just how impressive KRAFTON’s coming life simulator is poised to be.

inZOIng the Character Creation

Beneath the layers of cats and he cat-related naming scheme inZOI deploys, the game will have players take on the management of a city of Zois (the little toons that walk about), managing their behaviours and keeping them on their best behaviour. Well, if you want to, of course—you could very well send every playable Zoi on a spiral fracture of insanity, insults, and void of all relationships with a couple of clicks. Or, you could just let the marauding morons do it themselves because without your intervention, your city’s Zois will be doing a lot of weird and self-destructive acts for seemingly no beneficial reasons at all.

When you first start playing inZOI, you’ll start off with the game’s character creation system. Here, you can make a playable character and families of up to eight Zois. This character creator is both technically in-depth and yet, missing some crucial features. For one, players have six age groups to choose from: babies, kids, teenagers, young adults, adults, middle-age, and seniors. We can set our Zoi’s gender to be male, female, or non-binary as well as their type they’d be romantically interested in (or not at all!). And then from there, we can choose between a number of preset Zois to make a toon right away or modify to our heart’s content.

inZOI’s character creator can go quite deep into how players can modify their Zoi’s facial structure, less so their bodies. You can swap between a simplified or detailed editor for the faces at any time to create a unique looking character, while bodies have more limited range on what directions they can be pulled. Still, they’re enough tools to do the job—the real issue comes down to a lack of presets for particular features, such as lips and eyes, which would have been nice to have. Hair styles are also extremely lacking in the build of the game that I played, including beards and body hair types. The tools are there, but more options are sorely needed.

Now perhaps what’s interesting in this character creator is that you can use an app on your phone to test out facial capabilities of your Zois. No, I’m not kidding—by downloading the Live Link Face application from Apple’s App Store (and only available on iOS, very annoying!), you can make funny faces and they’ll reflect real-time on the Zoi. There is even a custom animation creation option that captures data from available hardware (and though I wanted to test this out, I had no time). There is also a “Canvas” web feature that wasn’t live during my time with the game, but from what I understand it’s a community service that lets players download the creations of others for use in game. What that can entail for the player remains to be seen, but I am curious since you can use a local language model (read “AI”) to create objects and textures for use in-game.

Now besides the technical aspects of things, let’s talk traits. You can set a Zoi’s personality by clicking between a number of options that determine their likes and dislikes. Their life goals can also be set, which has them focus on a particular growth point, such as seeking a life of tranquility or advancement. There’s a lot of growth options and I really like being able to make these choices for Zois as, from what I can tell over the course of the 15 hours I sank into the game, their traits do play a big factor into their desires.

And despite my complaints about the character creator, I still took an hour to make my twin siblings before shoving them right into the digital world.

inZOIng My Life

inZOI has a lot of management mechanics. I don’t even know where to begin explaining some of the features that are available. Let’s start with the city itself: when we drop our first Zoi family into the fray, we can currently choose between two maps—a city in the vein of Seoul or something closer to that of Miami Beach. I like the beach and scenery proper, so my first family was dropping right there. With the limited funding this new family had, they bought out a little condo on the outskirts of the city—now isn’t that wish fulfilment!

While I was fiddling about with the menus, I noticed that you can quite literally change a large number of the city’s faculties. Weather, what billboards display, wildlife that roam the streets, grass, trees, you name it. Here, I even noticed a “Karma Report” system alongside options that let me adjust the rate of life mechanics (such as rate of romance or aging). Going into these one-by-one would take a while, so all you need to know is that inZOI really wants you to be in command of every aspect of these Zois lives—you can even modify each character’s schedules to include or remove events that they’d be interested in! But there are things you will also not be able to control, like bouts of illness that make it through the city.

Anywho, let me cover the basics of Zoi control. When you’re playing inZOI, you’ll always need to be in control of a family for the simulation to continue. Just like a very popular, long-running franchise of the same style of gameplay, we can pause, play, and fast-forward through time if need be. We can add and remove objects and building components through the editor’s build menu, and more importantly: have direct control over the Zois in the family. By direct, I mean you can quite literally move them around by pressing the WASD movement keys and they’ll cancel all queued actions to do what you want them to do.

Interactions between Zois is plentiful. And I do mean that quite literally—upon clicking on another Zoi you’ll be shoved a number of conversational options you can hold, with more being hidden behind menus. There are plenty of ways to be friends and enemies, even if it’s done over a computer! Speaking of which, there are also plenty of ways for Zois to grow their skills through said computer, even going as far as making money off of any skills or certifications they may earn. Dare I say there’s significantly more to do here than the base game of competing products! It’s a bit cracked.

But one thing I learned about inZOI is just how fast the game will descend into chaos. Upon setting my first family into a home with each other, both of their first actions were to immediately start bickering with each other. Look, I may have made them into the likeness of my little brothers and yes, they do argue, but not to this level. I mean, one moment they’d be doing their own things and the next it’s back to arguing. And “secretly farting” near one another. I spent a good hour trying to get them to talk like normal human beings living under the same roof, all the while forcing them to find employment to earn “Meows”. Yes, this game has a slight love for kitties.

After applying them to aspiring jobs such as “furniture store cashier” and “teacher assistant”, I backed out of their lives to check out another family’s. In inZOI, players are not only able to see the lives of other families living in the world but are highly encouraged to do so. Remember the Karma Report function I mentioned earlier? Well, part of your job is making sure your city doesn’t devolve into a cruel joke of a hellhole. Zois are actively tempted to do dumb things to one another and themselves and this report shows you just who is being on the naughty or nice list.

I’m going to keep mum on this so you can see what can happen for yourself, but let’s just say a city of bad Zois is not good for you. Nor is it for the eyes that are keeping watch behind your shoulders.

You’ll need to intervene when possible! Be it through the Karma Report system or by simply walking into their lives and keep them from doing the dumbest things. And here’s one of my favourite things about inZOI: as long as time is moving, every family across the city is having their actions simulated. Time does not sleep for this city, meaning that you might be keeping things in order for one part of the world but that doesn’t stop someone’s house from catching fire and having those Zois fall into mental anguish. And I mean that literally: when I returned to my sibling’s abode, I found their dining table on fire and the firefighters showed up to… Sit down and have tea.

A thing with this sort of game is that 15 hours simply isn’t enough for me to really go into depth on how a fully city within inZOI can simulate. What I can say is that I love the choices it gives me with regards to how I can make my Zois and what I can command them to do. But it’s also more than just directing orders: you can walk away from the computer and come back to Zois actively improving or ruining their lives, even with families your client is actively not observing. I haven’t had fun like this since ‘The Sims 3’, and I put up with that game’s horrific load times.

Speaking of which! inZOI is a heavy, heavy game. When it launches into Steam’s Early Access programme next week, know that it’ll bring down gaming laptops to their knees even on the lowest settings—forget about alt-tabbing! My desktop build crunched through inZOI with little issue, but that is a 32GB Ryzen 9 7900X monstrosity with a cute little Intel Arc B580 rendering the game at its defaulted “Ultra High” settings with ray tracing enabled. My poor little Zephyrus g14 with 16GB of RAM can saunter through the simulations, but it kills Steam’s recording functions and any chance that I can alt-tab away from the game to procrastinate.

Surprisingly, the visuals aren’t the real killer for performance, considering how pretty the game looks! Not that it made much of a difference as I brought settings up and down. Intel’s XeSS and Nvidia’s DLSS were observed as upscaling options by the way, all though the game won’t let you switch between any others from what I remember. Controls can’t really be modified at the moment either, so I hope that can be resolved over the course of the game’s Early Access period. There are a number of systems that have yet to be implemented as well, from what I understand, including a whole school life system and pets and all that.

I’m really happy with the features that are available in inZOI right now and I’m really looking forward to what will be added in its future. Right now, I hope the developer can resolve some of the more basic but key features such as more hair styles and presets for body characteristics. This is a really charming game (fluffy cats and their ability to help aside) and I’ll be coming to inZOI very often over the coming months for further impressions and to follow the game’s progress. If you’re a life simulation fan, you’ve got to try out inZOI. ∎