Hop on, we’re leaving, and your new life awaits! Paralives is a sandbox life simulation game with a great cast of Townies to meet, as well as a vibrant open-world town to explore and make your own. You will feel right at home, should you choose to embark.

Whether you focus on your career, finding love, building a family, or becoming the richest person in town, the story is yours to write in Paralives. But twists and forks in the road await. What will you leave behind?

Thanks to an ever-evolving catalog of furniture, decor and clutter objects, staging the perfect homes for your Parafolks will be a breeze: resize, recolor, stack and place items freely for a tactile building experience.

Paralives allows truly grid-less constructions with curved walls, split-level floors and more. Recreating your house or building an intricate 8-story mansion has never been this easy.

You will be handed an advanced character creator called the Paramaker. Adjust the height of your Parafolks, tweak a wide array of facial and body features, design stylish outfits and create complex personalities. From head to toe, no small detail will be left out!

Originally planned to launch through Steam Early Access on December 8, 2025, Alex Massé and the Paralives Studio devs decided it needed more work and pushed the release until May 25, 2026.

Hi, Alex here, the lead developer of Paralives.

Unfortunately, we had to make the difficult decision to delay the release. We are truly sorry for the last-minute announcement. After thoughtful consideration, we feel it’s best for the game and the community. This year, we ran many playtests with friends and fans, and we were confident that we could improve the game enough in time for December. In the lead-up to Early Access release, we broadened our playtests with a more varied playerbase, and the latest feedback we received made us realise the game isn’t up to the standard we wanted it to meet for release. Players enjoy the flexibility and the customization of the Paramaker and Build Mode. However, there are still impactful bugs in the Live Mode and a lack of activities to do in the town, which dampened the enjoyment of the players, and we feel it is necessary to work on these before delivering the product to the community.

I started this project wanting it to be a fresh and indie take on the doll-house life simulation genre, which had not been tackled by many game developers. I attribute this partly to the fact that a project like Paralives is a colossal task. Life sims are really 3 games in one: an advanced and flexible build mode, a greatly customizable character creator and a complex life simulation mode. Over the last 6 years of development, starting with 2-3 developers for the first years, to growing to an average team size of only 10 people, we had to alternate long stretches of development between these 3 parts of the game. We are so proud of what we have built, but now, we just need a bit more time to polish the simulation part of the game. This would ensure Paralives offers a great first experience when it launches, making players come back for every exciting free update and expansion that we will put out afterwards.

The new Early Access release date is May 25, 2026. We have updated our detailed roadmap paralives.com/roadmap with what we will be improving over the coming months, with a focus on fixing important issues and improving the first-time user experience. This will ensure that more players will be happy with the state of the game at launch when comparing it to other great life simulation games that sparked everyone’s love for the genre.

On Tuesday, November 25, at noon EDT, we will stream 45 minutes of uninterrupted live mode gameplay on our YouTube channel to show the current state of the game, the various gameplay features and explain what we will be improving before launch. We plan on keeping you all updated with streams and videos leading up to the new release date. We remain fully committed to making a quality and innovative game with the support of the community and to updating it for years to come after release. We’re beyond grateful for your continuous support, and it means the world to our small team of passionate developers!

Alex and the Paralives team

Key Features

• Explore an open-world town filled with shops, parks, restaurants and museums
• Create Parafolks of all looks and styles
• Find a job and try out flexible career progression paths
• Discover unique personality traits, skills, wants, needs and emotions
• Find love and make friends, or enemies
• Multiselect Parafolks and do anything as a group
• Grow up, have children and live a long life
• Enjoy the customization and flexibility of our house-building tools
• Experiment with our in-game modding interface to edit or add content to the game
• Find community-made mods, houses and Parafolks through the Steam Workshop
• To be added during the Early Access phase
  • Weather and seasons
  • Dogs, cats and horses
  • Cars and bikes
  • Boats and houseboats
  • Pools and swimming
  • Calendar and organizing social events (parties, weddings)
  • Story progression for NPCs
  • Family tree
  • Gardening and fishing
  • Tools to edit and create towns
  • More personality traits, wants, emotions, jobs, etc

Paralives is in development for PC (Steam).