We all hoped that Inzoi would be the competitor to The Sims 4 that the life sim genre has needed for years. Thus far, though, things haven’t quite panned out that way. Life sim expert Mollie Taylor described Inzoi’s early access version as a “shallow imitation” of The Sims, while the game’s own director Hyungjin “Kjun” Kim conceded that building a life sim has proven much harder than he anticipated.

Since then, Kim has spent the last year working on new features for InZoi, which I personally hope will result in a much richer simulation. But in his latest Steam update, Kim’s focus was on something entirely different. Alongside the base game, Kim is apparently working on a whole new way to play called ‘Canvastown’.

This essentially lets players roleplay as a single character in the town, rather than overseeing everyone’s lives from a bird’s-eye view. “The main goal of Canvastown is to get away from mundane daily life and capture memorable moments within life simulation so you can jump in and enjoy only those extraordinary moments”, Kim explained.

The mode will allow players to create their own Zoi and customise their house, before entering an dedicated online space called ‘AR Company’ that allows “around 50 people” to “converse and interact in the same channel under mutual consent.” So it’s essentially a mini online village populate by players, although Kim says that NPC Zois will appear in these spaces too. “Like a movie director, you can assign roles and cast your actors to create your scenario.”

He adds that players will be able to further enhance their Canvastown through using “script mods” that will let players “create mini-game like car racing”. Kim doesn’t specify whether players will be able to create such script mods, but does state that he hopes these mini-games “can later be added to the main game as well”.

Kim cites the movie Ready Player One as an example of the kind of experience he’s trying to build, stating he wants players to be able to “step away from reality into this world of Inzoi where they can live out a different life.”

It also sounds like it’ll be a while before players will get their hands on it. “Looking at the current build makes me sigh. There are so many lacking areas, and we have a very long way to go.” He also emphasises that Canvastown is a “side project” and that Inzoi Studio is “very much focused on our core goals.”

It all sounds very ambitious, but I do wonder whether Kim is trying to run before he can walk. As he’s stated in the past, making a standard, run-of-the-mill life simulation is not easy, and I wonder whether it may have been better to keep this side project under wraps until Inzoi had really nailed the fundamentals. This is doubly important considering that Inzoi now has some stiff competition in Paralives, which according to Mollie made a considerably stronger early access debut.