I’ve always found it funny how most Sims have that casual don’t-give-a-fuckness that leads them to just go to bed mid-conversation because they’re tired, or wander into another Sims house and make dinner. They want to play guitar or paint a picture, mix drinks at their mini-bar, or spend hours star-gazing with the telescope.

But the more stuff you have, the harder it is to control your Sims. I’m not sure if real life Adam sleeps as much as his Sims 4 counterpart (seriously, the dude went to sleep on the floor of a karaoke bar during a date), but leaving them to get on with it is still as much fun as it ever was. I had forgotten how much of a joy it is to just sit back and watch these little people go about their business. I set to work sculpting the GodisaGeek team, an as finely-tuned and well-rounded a group of individuals as any (honest) and dropped four of them into a pair of newly furnished apartments in the San Myshuno neighborhood available with the City Living pack. I wouldn’t ever usually recommend anyone spend money on microtransactions or DLC unless you really love the game in question, but if you have a bit of spare cash on the occasions when there’s an Origin sale or a holiday sale, it’s worth grabbing a few packs, especially with the base game so often reduced to less than £10. The first thing I’ll say is that stuff is important in The Sims 4.

Is it worth buying if you never have? Is it worth jumping back into if you’ve long since walked away? With a review code from EA and a handful of packs I bought myself, I decided to re-review The Sims. With the addition of Tiny Living, offering small building spaces and minimilist props, it seemed a good time to get back into it. To download all of it runs into the £100s. The one thing I was very aware of was how many content packs, “stuff packs”, game packs and expansions had been released since the launch. Now I’ll be honest, my kids have been playing it on PS4 lately and so I had been recently exposed to it and was wondering how much had changed. And right there was The Sims 4, for the low price of £8.99. And so it was that I found myself downloading the Origin launcher, against the better judgement of whatever remains of my buyer’s conscience. I tend to lurk in Steam for hours, shortcut through the Epic Store when I’m feeling brave, check in with Microsoft to be sociable, etc. Picking up a new PC in December last year, though, led me to wandering around the lonely aisles of the online storefront. Having spent countless hours on the original The Sims way back when, I was impressed with the evolution, but beyond that I just wanted to get back to the nearest shooter or dungeon crawler. I played it for a few weeks and then moved onto other things, having seen it all before – or so I thought. I first played The Sims 4 years ago, when it was first ported over to PS4.

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