The new The Sims Game Pack, Parenthood, added a bunch of new ways for sim parents and children to interact. By sending presents and inviting children to hang out, Parenthood makes it feel a lot more like the parents are raising their children now, rather than just having smaller, louder roommates. They’re such good parents now, in fact, that they’ll even take their kid to the park when they’re dead.
On The Sims’ subreddit, players discovered that sims that don’t even live in the house will send gifts for their kids’ birthdays. Cute! But apparently, even dead sims will send gifts! Not so cute!
I wondered what else a dead sim parent would do. Dead sims become ghosts and just generally haunt up the place, possessing different pieces of furniture. Generally speaking, they only hang out at night and aren’t really a part of the family anymore. They don’t call or visit. They’re just ghosts! It’s not out of the question for The Sims to screw up an interaction so sims do things that they’re not really supposed to, like toddlers getting flirty, but I wasn’t expecting dead sims to just act like alive sims.
I’m not actually much of a sim killer—I prefer long, legacy games where I build extravagant houses—but I had to try it out. So I made a family, cheated to make the father and daughter very close, and then cheated to get the father in the near-death state of Hysterical. In The Sims 4, sims can not only die of natural causes, but also emotional states. Hysterical is a mood sims get when they’ve been joking around too much. Why not send him out happy? After making him hysterical, I’d only need to do a “Funny” interaction to cue the death. But The Sims is a finicky game. No matter how many times I had this guy watch the comedy channel or tell jokes to his daughter, the guy wouldn’t die. As I was waiting around, I selected the option for the father and daughter to become best friends, thinking it’d be even more dramatic if he died afterward. I did not count on that triggering his death.
Now it was just a matter of aging her up. But unexpectedly, the next day, this girl’s Ghost Dad asked her to go to the park.
He actually asked to hang out with her literally every day, sometimes in places not appropriate for a kid. Even if you’re a ghost, it’s still sketchy to take your daughter to a bar, dude.
When I aged up the daughter into a Teen, Ghost Dad didn’t send a present. No matter—the whole family went out to the museum the next day.
Alive Mom even gave him a kiss. I felt so awful killing off this guy, but the whole thing’s ended up weirdly heartwarming.