Tiny Life could very well be a The Sims 4 and Life By You competitor, as the new life game just entered early access, and it offers up an excellent alternative for fans of the genre both in its visual style and more open design. The best part? Tiny Life also has a free demo and Steam Early Access sale.
Tiny Life developer Ellpeck Games has itself compared the life game to The Sims, saying it “aims to capture the essence” of those games but in an isometric pixelart style. Wearing its Sims inspirations on its sleeve, Tiny Life has you “control a set of people that live together in a household. You take care of their daily needs, build their skills, forge new relationships… or just mess up their entire life in whatever way you can think of!”
In fact, Tiny Life even calls its people Tinies, clearly playing on The Sims people being, well, Sims. You can also build homes and community spaces like parks and cafes, and you’ll need to balance how much houses cost with the skill gained from the items in it, to minimise the lot’s final price.
Just like The Sims, Tiny Life has you building and decorating homes (and more general lots for other landscapes too), while letting your Tinies interact, learn, and engage with family and friends. Unlike classic The Sims, though, this is a little more like an open-world game, as you can control multiple households on one save and explore many public spaces across the world too.
On top of all that, Tiny Life looks to be hitting the ground running with how it wants to let people create and share user-generated content too, which could very well give this life sim quite the longevity. Steam workshop integration lets you upload households and lots to Valve’s storefront, and a built-in C# modding API helps would-be developers and programmers share excellent creations too.
Tiny Life is currently in Steam Early Access with 15% off the asking price, but you can also try out a demo for the game before you lighten your wallet to see if The Sims competitor is for you. If you’re on Linux or Mac Tiny Life also has some demo downloads that don’t require Steam, so you can try it out no matter what you use (thanks, Rock Paper Shotgun).
Tiny Life may actually end up in our games like The Sims 4 list, which has plenty of great alternatives to the biggest life game around. Alternatively, now that The Sims 4 is free you can download it and check out the best Sims 4 mods to spice up your experience instead.
