InZOI

InZOI looks like a hyper-realistic version of a familiar life sim formula, but it plays like you’ve been handed responsibility for an entire city’s soul, not just one household. You’re an intern at AR Company, guided by a talking cat supervisor named Psycat, and your actual job extends past managing your own Zoi to keeping the whole neighborhood’s moral balance from tipping over.

Zoi Needs and Everyday Life

Every Zoi you control juggles eight needs — hunger, hygiene, bathroom, fun, social, energy, sleep, and recognition — that drive their moment-to-moment behavior alongside careers, education, relationships, and aging all the way to death. The default in-game day currently runs 48 minutes, a pace shortened from the original 96-minute cycle in a later update specifically to make daily routines like waking up, eating, and napping feel more realistic rather than rushed.

The open world itself spans two starting cities, Dowon, modeled on a dense metropolis inspired by Seoul, and Bliss Bay, a coastal city drawing from Santa Monica, with Kucingku added afterward as a free download inspired by a Bali-style resort town. Zois roam these cities without loading screens, and community lots like parks and shops give you places to send them beyond their own home.

Smart Zoi and Semi-Autonomous NPCs

Smart Zoi is InZOI’s attempt at giving NPCs their own internal logic rather than scripted routines. Turning it on requires opening the Gameplay tab in the settings menu and enabling it below the Freewill section, after which you can assign individual Zois specific personality prompts — telling one to always be kind and friendly, for instance, while leaving another’s behavior more open-ended. Once active, a Smart Zoi can decide on its own to pick up a hobby, pursue a relationship, or handle a task based on its traits and the situation around it, all tied into the game’s broader thought system.

Players who enjoy watching a city run itself get the most out of Smart Zoi, since it’s specifically built for NPCs you’re not directly controlling, though the feature remains experimental and doesn’t always behave predictably.

What Happened to the Karma System in InZOI

For a long stretch of early access, InZOI’s most talked-about — and most argued-over — system was karma. Every Zoi’s actions, from stealing to comforting a friend, fed into both a personal karma level and a citywide karma report, visible through colored yin-and-yang-style icons during conversations. If a city’s overall karma slid too far negative, the game threatened an in-fiction consequence framed as an interview with the CEO, and Zois who died with sufficiently bad karma lingered as ghosts with unfinished business rather than moving on.

The system became one of the most debated parts of the game specifically because it applied citywide rather than just to the Zoi you were actively playing. Players reported feeling punished for NPC behavior they’d never directly controlled, with idle NPCs racking up petty negative actions on their own and dragging the whole city’s karma report down regardless of how the player’s own household behaved. A later update, v0.4.0, responded to this by removing the dedicated karma score, its icons, and the separate karma menu entirely, folding karma-based interactions into the general interaction system instead — a significant enough change that older guides describing the standalone karma report and its color-coded scoring no longer match the current version of the game.

Ghosts, Funerals, and Life After Death

The same v0.4.0 update introduced actual ghost gameplay: after death, a Zoi can choose to go “on to the afterlife” and be played as a ghost for three in-game days, unlocking special skills tied to death-related urges along the way. New property types — a Funeral Home, a Columbarium, and a Cemetery — let you hold funerals and enshrine urns for Zois who’ve passed. Reincarnation, despite being referenced in earlier karma discussions, is explicitly not part of this system yet.

How does the karma system work in InZOI now?

As of the v0.4.0 update, the standalone karma score, its colored icons, and the dedicated karma menu have been removed, with karma-based interactions merged into InZOI’s general interaction system rather than tracked as a separate citywide report.

How do you turn on Smart Zoi in InZOI?

Open the settings menu with ESC, go to the Gameplay tab, and enable Smart Zoi under the Freewill section — from there you can also limit which Zois it applies to and adjust its screen and queue limits for performance.

What cities are available in InZOI?

The game launched with two open-world cities, Dowon and Bliss Bay, and later added Kucingku, a Bali-inspired resort town, as a free downloadable addition.

Between Psycat’s tutorials, a 48-minute day cycle, and Zois who can now haunt a Columbarium instead of just vanishing, InZOI has changed shape considerably since its early access launch, and the karma system that once defined so much of the conversation around it barely resembles what it started as.