Paralives

Paralives takes place in an open world environment with employment opportunities alongside events such as festivals. Players can build houses, create characters and control their lives in a desired way.

The character creator, titled as "Paramaker", allows the customization of the appearance and personality of "Parafolk", the name of the in-game characters. Players are able to customize the physique and height of the Parafolk. The root and shade of hair, clothing and accessories can be toggled as intended using color swatches, color wheels and texture selection.

Paralives is being developed by indie game designer Alex Massé. After working on several projects such as PewDiePie's Tuber Simulator and a number of demos for Project Tiny, Massé quit his job and began developing Paralives regularly. Development of the game started in January 2019 and was officially announced in June 2019. The game is developed using Unity.

Paralives was initially a solo project by Massé, but as of June 2025, the team had expanded to fourteen people, collectively forming Paralives Studio. Massé created Paralives to offer a sense of endless customization with "powerful and intuitive tools that allow players to easily create any house with precision". He was inspired by the road tool in Cities: Skylines and developed a similar tool in Paralives for building houses. The developers incorporated the technique of procedural animation, which involves automatic reactions based on previously created animations to save developing time.

The early access debut was met a favorable response from gaming publications, who considered the release a promising start that nonetheless needs further refinement, development and content. The most praised aspects were the build mode and character creator. The most critized parts were the user interface, parts of the live mode, and its technical issues and bugs. The game is regarded as a viable competitor towards The Sims, the franchise who is a dominant player in the life simulation genre.

PC Gamer described the game as a promising Sims rival, who is the "very definition of early access". They praised the build mode and character creator. The live mode received the most scrutiny, characterizing it as buggy, and where they encountered the most performance issues. They described the autonomy of characters as "barebones", but commended the interactions between the characters.