Paralives just got a brand-new update, addressing some of the most common bugs and adding various hotly requested features to the indie life sim – including alternative camera controls, which I might be a tad bit too excited about.

As per the Paralives roadmap, there’s still plenty to come to The Sims 4 competitor, but the developers have undeniably been on the case. Recently, we saw improvements made to baby Paras’ uncanny appearances – and, now, we’ve got more columns in the Paramaker, new camera controls, fresh animations, and more.

Paralives Studios reveals as much in a post over on X, showcasing some of patch 0.1.8’s big highlights

The alternate camera controls are such a big deal, in fact, that they’ve spurred their own little follow-up thread from the studio, in which it says, “You’re welcome.”

Attached is an amusing edit of various – and I mean various – complaints and screenshots from Reddit and the like regarding the old Paralives camera controls and the (previous) inability to change them. The comments are nice there, too, with many a “thank you” rolling in.

How do the alternative camera controls work, though? “Notably,” as Paralives Studio writes, it “allows players to rotate the camera with middle click and scroll their view with right click.” Yes, please.

As for everything else that 0.1.8 has to offer, the column customization in both the Build Mode and Paramaker is pretty dang great if I do say so myself – especially as someone who uses Sims 4 mods to properly adjust the columns in Create-A-Sim.

There’s also a new set of embarrassed animations, because we all know our Paras might find themselves in some less-than-ideal situations at times. Plus, “various optimizations” to the game’s code, the ability to turn the TV or radio on – something we lost along the way “in the past few patches,” and loads of other bug fixes.

All in all, 0.1.8 is a decent update, and I’d recommend giving the full notes a read on Steam for those able.

Excitingly enough, Paralives Studio has more up its sleeve underway as well, noting that the devs are “still hard at work trying to find proper reproduction steps for many ongoing issues.”

Until then, I’ll be hopping back into the Paramaker for the hundredth hour.

Searching for more new games to wishlist? Here are the best games like The Sims 4 out there right now to explore if you want a Paralives-adjacent experience.