The Sims Project Rene branded 'ugly' & 'boring' after screenshots leak

According to EA, there’re no longer any plans to make The Sims 5 and instead it’ll just be continuous updates for The Sims 4 for the foreseeable future. That’s fair enough, but what does that mean for Project Rene?

The project was initially expected to become The Sims 5, when it was revealed in 2022, but with that off the table, Project Rene now looks like it’s going to be transformed into a multiplayer take on The Sims, with EA describing it as being ‘focused on building ways for friends to meet, connect, and share while playing together in an all-new world’.

It’s not really clear what that means but more information has leaked from those invited to take part in a recent playtest, with the art style becoming the biggest talking point amongst fans.

As outlined by Reddit user DzXAnt22, the playtest focused on a ‘very small portion’ of the overall game in a Parisian-style café, with the build mode, the ability to own your apartments (which was available in a prior playtest), and the option to create a Sim all being absent. The latter, however, will apparently be available in a future test, according to the post.

‘The main gameplay of this build has you working at a cafe with other player[s],’ they state. ‘Once you start working, NPC sims will start coming and sitting down. Somebody has to take their order and it will display a bubble above their heads showing what items they want. Then, you or another player has to go and collect those items.

‘They can choose from Coffee, Espresso, or Croissant. They cannot choose more than one item at this time (eg. Croissant + Coffee). This is the main way to earn money in this build, and it can get very repetitive and grindy after a while.’

The Redditor said you can earn Project Rene’s in-game currency, Simoleons, by doing these jobs or levelling up, with experience points earned by ‘wishing at the fountain, talking to Sims, or completing quests, or working at the cafe’.

What is Project Rene?

A number of screenshots from the build, which was only on mobile, were leaked, ranging from menus to the preset Sims and the gameplay itself. While the leaker stressed that ‘optimisation is usually the last stage of game development’ – so the graphics may improve – they described the visuals in their current state as having a ‘weird blur over everything’ and looking ‘very grainy’.

Despite the caveats that come with an early build, the graphical style hasn’t gone down well. ‘They’ve somehow styled the characters worse and more bland than The Sims 4,’ one commenter wrote in response.

‘Screaming because why does it look so bad,’ another added, while others have described it as looking ‘awful’ and ‘boring’.

‘That is without a doubt the ugliest art style I’ve ever seen in a game,’ said another Redditor, in replay to the original post.

Some have compared it to 2018’s The Sims Mobile, which stopped receiving new updates in January this year. Previous Project Rene tests have been available on PC, so it’s expected to be released across multiple platforms.

Project Rene is one of many projects in the works under The Sims ‘universe’ umbrella. Along with ongoing updates to The Sims 4, there are remastered versions of Wii games MySims and MySims Kingdom on the way, and a dedicated mobile spin-off codenamed MySims: Project Stories.

There’s still no indication of when Project Rene will be released, but it will likely be a few years yet, considering it still hasn’t received an official title.