Screenshot : Lilsimsie

Playing The Sims can be a huge time sink—if you’re at all particular about building houses or the way your Sims look, you can spend at least an hour setting things up before you actually let the simulation begin. And that’s before you even get to things like Legacy Challenges, which are supposed to run 10 generations of a Sim family, or more complex builds. If you’re short on time or just want a taste of what the game has to offer before you buy it, these are the Sims YouTubers to watch.




Lilsimsie

Kayla Sims, who goes by Lilsimsie on Twitch and YouTube, is a theater nerd that speaks at light speed and is also an incredibly talented builder in The Sims. I watch Lilsimsie religiously. Her enthusiasm is infectious.




Part of the appeal is watching her grow up—I’ve been watching her all through her senior year of high school and her first year of college. The blue suburban houses she builds are also meticulously detailed, down to the clutter in each room. Since watching her Builder’s Basics series, my houses in The Sims 4 have gotten much more ambitious. She has plenty of fun series, including one where her Sim’s fate is decided by random number generation, but she also sometimes uploads videos that are just the result of a weird thing happening in her game. Just yesterday she uploaded a video where she saw what happened when she left her game unpaused overnight. It’s not exactly a successful experiment, but her commentary is delightful.

James Turner

One of the most charming parts of James Turner’s channel is that he doesn’t like to play challenges that other people make. He makes his own. His long-running Super Sim series has him trying to make a single Sim master every single skill in the game, as well as finish all the collections and achieve every Aspiration. It’s a daunting task. Like Simsie, Turner is also a prolific builder, though he favors modern architecture.

What I really love about Turner is his refreshingly frank outlook on the game, especially when The Sims 4 isn’t putting its best foot forward. His video about My First Pet Stuff, a Stuff Pack that was controversial in the community for its lackluster furniture, manages to be funny and entertaining while he points out the issues. His interest in how the game has grown has also led to some interesting interviews with Sims developers and a cool comparison between how the game played in 2014 when it launched and how it plays now.

Pixelade

Pixelade is just a sweetheart. I recently started watching his Not So Berry Challenge series and was immediately charmed by how much he loves his own creations. Pixelade spends a good minute cooing at how gorgeous the Sim he made for this challenge is. To be fair, she is gorgeous.


Pixelade is the kind of Simmer that lives for drama, which is great for his Let’s Play series. I find it pretty difficult to make compelling narrative video content out of The Sims, given how much of the game is going to the bathroom and eating. With his overactive imagination, Pixelade easily finds scandal even in the most mundane of moments. When his Not So Berry protagonist introduces herself to her coworker at her scientist job, Pixelade spins a whole yarn about anti-mermaid prejudice and a secret mermaid resistance.

Deligracy

While Deligracy is also a talented builder, her challenge series are the gems of her channel. In her Orphanage Challenge series, she creates a thorough backstory inspired by Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children that makes her series all the more engrossing.


Deligracy’s narrative ideas show the great diversity of stories you can tell with The Sims 4. In her Orphanage Challenge series, she plays the game with almost every occult Sim, making a cacophonous house of vampire and ghost children. She also discovered you can have a baby with a ghost in this series, which I feel is worth the price of admission.

Keeyuh

Keeyuh calls herself “the loudmouth gamer,” which is an apt moniker. The girl is loud.


Watching Keeyuh playing games is like hanging out with your very extra friend. She yelps, she screams, she always has a witty comment for when things go wrong. She reminds me a lot of Quen Blackwell, a Vine star turned aspiring singer, who never met a quiet moment that wouldn’t be better served with a loud exclamation. Keeyuh has recently started a 100 Baby Challenge, which I’m so happy about. Even the video that starts the series, which is just dedicated to Keeyuh creating her Sim, is so funny that I feel like I’m about to get kicked out of the school library for laughing too hard.