The Sims 4 recently spawned infants into its life sim sandbox via a free update, and the substantial Growing Together expansion. At launch, Sims would go from nascent babies to walking, talking kids, skipping the infant years that teach them, for example, how to talk in Simlish, although that does sound like baby talk too. The new expansion adds a lot to Sim’s life stages, but the real show stealer here is a pesky bug that elongates babies. Yes, you read that correctly.
This cursed bug stretches our infant’s legs so they’re a regular adult height, with a baby on top. An infant on stilts, if you will. Simmers have taken to Reddit to show off their eldritch horror babies enjoying playtime, or learning how to wal… I mean float? Even more horrifying. Redditor u/wats08 has a stretchy baby with both the legs of a grown-up and the adult autonomy to microwave pizza rolls. It’s almost a threatening reminder to both the parents and the player that we’re no longer needed in this new, tall-baby world.
Our expert Sims correspondent Rebecca informed me that there’s a precedent for this in the franchise. In The Sims 3, to my horror, babies would stretch in the opposite direction with their faces, hands, and torsos expanding in what looks like painful ways. The Sims is quite poetic in this respect – one game has elongated leg babies, and the other has stretchy torso ones – it almost rhymes. Let’s just hope The Sims 5 brings together both bugs for the ultimate cursed infant.
Rebecca explained that the bug usually occurs when an infant or baby enters an interaction that they’re not animated for, causing their small frames to contort and clip to a different skeleton. You can see this pretty well in the Cats & Dogs expansion where pets would react to fire in human ways – meaning they’d transform into anthropomorphic beasts and freak the hell out.
Sacrilegious infants aside, the Growing Together expansion adds some much-needed life to our Sims’ relationships. Rebecca was impressed by its added complexity, although she was suspicious that it “felt like a proof of concept for The Sims 5.”
