The Sims 4 has gained a reputation of allowing players to control not only their character, but the entire household’s interaction with the world. Having such accessible control gives players endless gameplay options. Seemingly, this gameplay always turns to the macabre, exploring the multiple death titles in-game and endless ways to murder the household you so dearly love.
The Sims 4 is loosely a story-based world simulation game, where the player can create their own households, customizing both their characters’ look and home. The player can choose the Sims occupation, love-life, friendships, and how they live their daily lives.
The game works on a simulated day-night clock, with a ‘day’ lasting around 24 minutes of game time – about one Sim hour equaling to one minute. With such a quick turnaround, the characters grow up right before the player’s eyes which should build a close connection to the household you’ve created.
While this may be true for some, many players use this quick turn-around as a way to play with one of the more niche game features: the grim reaper. The grim reaper is one of the pre-loaded characters, or “Sims world citizens” that exist in every player’s world. He can be found in communal spaces, but always shows up when one of the Sims in your household dies, coming to take their spirit. The taken sims still exist as ‘ghosts’ that can be seen roaming around the world as a translucent version of their character.
The grim reaper being so hard to find can be a large incentive for players to purposely bring him to their home. This means a Sim must die. Once he appears, the player can interact with him and build relationships: either through making him a friend, love interest, or an enemy.
The grim reaper also comes with a pop-up notification, indicating the type of death your sim experienced. This is where players get extremely creative in their macabre ideas.
The death icons can range from a wide variety of options; but to name a few there are fires, drowning, starvation, overexertion, death from embarrassment, electrocution, and my personal favorite: the cow plant.
So why spend so much time chasing after the grim reaper and killing the characters you’ve spent so much time creating? It’s oddly fun.
With such a low play-time with your Sims, they become replaceable, and the ghost feature alleviates the fear of losing a Sim forever. It expands the replayability of the game and adds another feature for players to interact with. In most games, death is something you avoid because the player loses progress, but here it’s a fun new interface for a player to utilize, exploring a topic most games tend to shy away from.
If you’ve never played the sims before, or never seeked out the reaper, try it out and see how many fun ways you can meet a macabre death. You might even find some extremely silly ways to die by accident like I did when I left my sim in the sauna while I took a snack break.
