Paralives launches in Early Access on December 8 [Update: Delayed to May 25, 2026]

Life simulation video game Paralives will launch in Early Access for PC via Steam on December 8, developer Paralives Studio announced.

Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:

About

Paralives is a doll house life simulation indie game for PC and Mac. Build your dream house, create some characters and manage their lives the way you want inside their homes and all around an open world town!

Key Features

• Build – Dreaming of building your perfect house but need the right tools? No problem! Paralives comes with innovative tools to create grid-less constructions, curved walls, resizable objects, split level floors, custom shaped stairs, full color/texture customization and much, much more!
• Create – What about creating a unique Parafolk? Paralives comes with an advanced character creator including a height slider, resizable facial and body features, full color customization and complex personalities. From head to toe, you can really decide it all!
• Live – Willing to immerse yourself in parallel lives and achieve your wildest dreams? We’ve got your back! Take care of your pet, focus on your career, find true love, spend time with friends and family, explore hobbies or be as mischievous as ever.
• Discover – Looking to discover an open world filled with opportunities and venues? Summer or winter, there’s always something to do. Put on your best outfit, call some friends and use your bike or car to meet them at the park, restaurant, beach, shop, mountain or anywhere, really!
• Made with the Community, For the Community – What about user created content and mods? Paralives is made by lovers of simulation games with the support of the community to make it the best it can be. Use the Steam Workshop to download user created mods, houses, characters and much more!

Watch a new trailer below.

Early Access Release Date Trailer

Update 11/14/25: Paralives Studio has delayed Paralives‘ Early Access launch from December 8, 2025 to May 25, 2026. Here is the full message from the studio on the delay:

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