Okay, we all know that the point of sim games is to simulate something – whether that’s real life or a survival scenario, a career you can’t perform in real life or a mundane task you could. But with The Sims 4’s new expansion pack, Growing Together, its simulations of family dynamics — even with characters freshly created and spawned into the world — are getting a little… uncanny.
For most Sims players, the primary focus of the new expansion was the also-fresh addition of infants – a brand-new life stage that bridges the gap between newborns and toddlers to make aging Sims up feel a little more natural. I was incredibly excited to explore the brand-new life stage, of course, but I found myself equally intrigued by the way that adults were affected by the expansion, too. The more I explored it, the more I was amazed.
More than anything, Growing Together makes Sims’ relationships feel more dynamic — more like real life. I created a new family to test out the limits of what I could do, and just to make things interesting, I decided to put three generations of Sims in one home: A married couple with a baby on the way, and the expecting father’s parents. Even in character creation, I was surprised. I could not only select the Sims’ basic relationships to one another; I could also thoroughly define them. I decided Alonso and his father, Armando, would have a supportive, loving relationship, but his relationship with his mother would be a bit more strained, just to keep things interesting.
The fireworks started immediately: Rylee, Alonso’s mother, walked in to see Alonso and his wife Raquelle cooking together. She struck up a conversation with them, and it was entirely tinged with sighs and dismissive Simlish. She thought of herself often during the conversation, and several times the relationships between the characters were penalized.
The drama all culminated at the end of the meal when Raquelle set out a perfectly good plate of eggs and toast for everyone. Rylee picked up a plate, took a single bite, and then walked to the fridge to get herself a bowl of oatmeal instead. Now, I’m not going to lie — that could very well just be Sims task-managing weirdness, but we all know that sometimes Sims act a little too autonomously.
So I decided to do a little bit of a test. I worked with their relationships, encouraging positive interaction between Rylee and her son and daughter-in-law. I even threw a baby shower (a new event addition with the Growing Together expansion) so everyone could get together and celebrate the impending arrival of baby Amina. As time went on, Rylee’s Simlish got less dismissive. She became more kind and caring, sharing parenting tips with Raquelle and genuinely enjoying herself. She seemed to be excited about her first granddaughter, and before long, the relationship had shifted for the better.
In all that, however, I didn’t actively make any changes to Alonso’s relationship with his father, who functioned mostly autonomously, growing to love the outdoors and fishing more and more every day. During the baby shower, Armando gave his son several lectures on financial security and familial responsibility. B before long, I received a pop-up indicating that something had shifted in their relationship: Armando was now a strict parent. The change actually caused him quite a bit of stress; several times, I saw he had a sad Moodlet indicating he wondered if he should be a little less hard on his son.
I was shocked at the fluidity; the relationships between the Sims shifted in a matter of days. It could be that they were still finding their footing — they had, after all, just been brought into the world a few days prior. But still, the interactions were uncanny. My Sims really were *buh-dum* ‘growing together.’ I found them emulating real-life relationships and changing over time, with each interaction shaping how future ones would go. The Sims has always had a decently robust way of tracking inter-Sim relationships (friendly Sims get closer over time, while enemies get more and more prone to fighting), but this is something new entirely.
It’s almost cathartic, in a way. Growing Together could almost be a form of self-care; there’s something beautiful about watching Sims heal their relationships, especially if you yourself have dealt with broken relationships yourself. The way the family dynamics shift and change over time is impressive, but you as the player are, as always, in exactly as much control as you want to be. You can choose to act out carefully scripted storylines, initiating fights and making up as you see fit; or, you can sit back and just see what happens, leaving everything to the mercy of RNG and the Sims’ autonomous behaviors.
Either way, Growing Together is a thing of beauty. I can’t believe the sheer amount of depth it adds to the game. There are many, many hours waiting in my future, and I can’t wait to see what’s next for Alonso and his family.
