InZoi’s early access misses its shot to launch the definitive Steam Deck life sim
InZoi’s early access release isn’t a particularly good fit for the Steam Deck, primarily because it isn’t a particularly good game. Even before you can dig into its sterile person-pushing, though, trying to run InZoi on Valve’s hanhdheld involves involuntarily headbutting the kinds of compatibility problems and weird workarounds that haven’t been common to the Deck since its early days in 2022.
This is frustrating in itself, and doubly so knowing that despite all those years of maturing, the Steam Deck doesn’t really have a heavyweight life sim that slots in seamlessly to the handheld format. The Sims series, InZoi’s clear inspiration and main rival, can be monkey-wrenched into playability, but even the most recent Sims 4 needs a community-made control modification to function – and that’s more about replicating mouse controls on the trackpads than truly optimising for controller-style inputs. InZoi wants to look like the very model of a modern life simulator, but its own lack of portable rapport is, at best, a missed opportunity to plug this gap.