MySims

 

    With how prevalent the “cozy game” genre is now, it might surprise you to know that it actually had something of an uphill struggle reaching that level of popularity. Series such as Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing and Boku no Natsuyasumi laid the ground work for what the genre would eventually become, but for a surprising amount of time, no one saw fit to iterate on it or even rip them off. It could be that most companies just didn't see the value in copying something that was mostly seen as an oddity at the time, much like casual games as a whole were. Of course, the Wii very swiftly opened the doors for casual games, and by extension cozy games, to develop, thus the existence of MySims.
    While it is a spin-off of The Sims, it barely has anything to do with the original series except some of the house building and social elements. It's very much meant to be in the style of something like Animal Crossing, and you can immediately tell right from seeing the intro to the game. You're the new face in your town, and you get tasked by the mayor of the town to slowly rebuild it and move as many people in as possible. You do this by collecting essences, floating emoticons of a sort that represent different objects, which are used to eventually build the houses and furniture. Thus the usual routine of a cozy game sets in; you go to Sims and ask them for tasks to complete, which always requires finding essences either by planting trees, catching fish, finding them with a metal detector or obtaining them from other Sims, and completing them lets more Sims with more tasks move in. Nothing you would be unfamiliar with if you've played a cozy game before, but it's the details that make it worth noting.
    When you do move Sims in, you have to build the houses yourself and build furniture for them, each with their own editor. Building the houses is cut down compared to how it is in the usual Sims games; you can make the houses any impractical shape you want and it'll still have the same interior. While that is fun on its own, the furniture building is the surprising highlight. It gives you an outline of the item you need to build with lots of pieces to choose from, but so long as you cover the glowing stars at certain points in the building process, it'll function as intended. This means you don't have to follow the instructions exactly, and letting your imagination run wild is where a lot of the fun comes in. I was able to make non-euclidean chairs, turntables shaped like fish, and a mirror with flowers growing out of it among other silly things, and the building process itself has an almost Lego-like satisfaction to it.
    It helps that the characters you're building this stuff for are genuinely, truly weird. While the voices are still in the trademark Simlish, MySims has actual dialogue boxes for all its characters showing what they're saying, and it manages to be entertaining enough to where I went out of my way to read as much of it as I could. Every character has dialogue unique to them and the things they say range from quirky facts about themselves to genuinely bizarre statements that don't even make sense in context. For some examples, one time I saw the man that runs the museum wandering around town at night, and going up to him led to him murmuring about his secret crush on the goth woman that lives down the street. Another time, I went up to the Sim that spends most of his time reading, and he suddenly goes completely off on one about how delicious meerkats are. It's moments like that that caught me so off-guard to the point it kept me playing for a while.
    However, getting to those moments can prove to be a bit of a chore. Granted, with this kind of game, you need that downtime doing bits of busywork while you're working towards the bigger goals, but the game can lay it on a bit thick. For example, to move other Sims in, you need to go to the hotel, talk to the Sim you're going to move in, walk all the way to the plot of land where they'll live, build the house, and then walk all the way back. You can't get multiple Sims to move in at once, so it makes the process that much longer. The sheer amount of essences you need for tasks later on also gets to be tiresome, and more often than not require waiting around the same area for minutes at a time to get them to respawn. Not helping things are that the game clearly isn't the most optimized; I noticed some stuttering during certain moments like when it switched from day to night, and the amount of loading screens is ridiculous. They aren't that long on their own, but the sheer frequency of them adds up over time.
    While that isn't great, I still had a fair bit of fun with MySims. It's fairly unpolished and doesn't quite have the same power to hook you in for weeks on end like Animal Crossing does, but it's got its own offbeat sense of humor and the level of player creativity on offer makes it stand out. I'd say if you wanna play it now, get it as part of MySims: Cozy Bundle, which reduces the load times significantly and comes packaged alongside the game's direct sequel, MySims Kingdom. If nothing else, it manages to reflect a unique moment in time where this type of game wasn't as well established, before you were able to say “I want my cozy game to have Sanrio characters in it” and have a game fit that oddly specific criteria.