By: Aiyana Hunter, staff writer 

 Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream released its demo maybe a few weeks before it released the actual game, and fortunately for me, I didn’t have to shell out on a Switch 2 to play it. 

Welcome back to another entry in Games for the Broke College Student, where I’m looking at something different.  

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ve definitely heard about the new Tomodachi Life game that came out recently (and have thought “maybe I can make my Gojo yumeship a reality?” or whatever people think of these days). The full game costs about $60, so while I won’t be covering my impression on that, I will be doing one on the demo.  

To be fair, $60 is only a low number when considering the $80 for Nintendo’s digital games and the $90 for physical games. None of those are reasonably priced enough for me to excuse my way out of, though — Metaphor: ReFantazio was $60, as amazing as it is, but at least it’s free on Game Pass. 

My first impressions were interesting. The UI is cool, and the game wants you to be sort of immersed in it, so they try to get you to match it up to the real world with time, region, and currency. The island itself is way more blocky than I remember the original Tomodachi Life being (yes I am a veteran, sue me), but I like that they’ve moved away from a big apartment complex and sort of made a residential block for all the Miis. Soon Yamama Island was established, and I invited its first resident. You can actually go full Animal Crossing: New Horizons and terraform the island in the full game, but in the demo customization is restricted. 

I’ve got to take a moment here to explain just how detailed the customization is — if you thought the Switch port of Miitopia was cool, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is something else. Just the number of hairstyles and colors offered was enough to surprise me. You can make your own custom hairstyles by pairing bangs and backs together, and you can also just completely draw on the Mii’s face (hope you have a stylus and a good eye for curves, because the pixels won’t quite stay the same between the drawing screen and on the actual face). It’s still amazing, and it took me way too long to make one Mii because I was a bit of a perfectionist on the drawing part. The “get help” option was a great crutch until I got the hang of it. 

The island is fairly limited with what you can do (obviously), but for what it is worth, I had fun. I’m upset at certain things that were lost from the original game, but the full game promises quite a few hours of fun and chaos.  

A moment of silence for the players who are forever stuck with lobotomiis telling them to get the full game. 

In all, I’d rate the demo a solid 6/10. It’s great, though way too short.