Life By You screenshots that were never released make life sim fans more sad about the cancellation.

Life By You was supposed to be the game which finally gave The Sims a good run for their money. But it was plagued by delays, and then in June, a cancellation surprise, followed almost immediately by a closure of Paradox Tectonic. As is often the case, images of the game that were never released are now starting to surface, giving us an idea of what could have been. And it looks like it would have been really good.

SimMattically, a Sims enthusiast who creates content, compiled the images from the online portfolios Richard Khoo and Eric Maki. The images include basic shots of the creators, but also more impressive indoor and outdoor locations.

It's a sad irony that some of these screens look better than those shared by Paradox before the cancellation of Life For You. This hasn't gone untouched in the Twitter replies: Many people appear to be genuinely surprised at how good they look. It's possible that the real-time performance of Life By You never looked as good as these prerendered images with better lighting that its former artist are now sharing.

Paradox has not yet explained why they cancelled the project, two months after it was announced. This is frustrating. The company stated that Life By You was "lacking in some key areas" and that the "road leading to a release we felt confident about [was] far too long and unpredictable."

Willem Delventhal was the former Paradox Tectonic designer. He said that shortly after the cancellation, the development was outperforming the internal metrics and that Paradox Interactive had never given any explanation for the final delay or cancellation of the game.

It's a shame that Life By You has ended. We said in our 2023 preview, "it looks like The Sims without its brakes" and honestly after a decade with The Sims 4, I think the life-sim genre needs that. Maybe next time.

Check out a few more previously-unreleased Life By You images below: