I’m not sure anything has ever made as much sense to me as the fact that Rod Humble—studio head of Life by You maker Paradox Tectonic—used to work high-up on both The Sims and Second Life. Watching the game in motion in a demo at this year’s Gamescom, how could it be otherwise? The game looks like a strange, ungainly, but undeniably intriguing mixture of both: part life sim, part modders’ toolkit, part chaos generation engine.
Where has been polished to a (relative) mirror sheen over the course of four main games, two decades of development, is an ambitious and slightly ramshackle-looking thing. At times, it threatens to spill over into calamity as the game’s wheels begin to pull clear of the tracks, but gosh, doesn’t that have an allure all its own?
