It’s me, the wound ointment doctor. The injury and insult adder. Life By You, Paradox’s simulation life-em-up, was canceled in June after being postponed indefinitely. The day after the cancellation – which Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester said was due to a “flawed”, unrecoverable state of development – designer Willem Delventhal spoke about his time at the later-shuttered Paradox Tectonic, claiming the team spent a month “in purgatory” before learning of the game’s cancellation and the studio’s closure two weeks before launch, despite being told by higher-ups that work was “exceeding expectations.”

Thanks to a thread by Twxbbly user SimMattically compiling previously unreleased screenshots from portfolios of several artists who worked on Life By You, we can now get another look at a game we’ll likely never get.

Admittedly, the screens don’t look miles different from the latest gameplay Tectonic showed, but that’s not surprising considering how close to the game’s release it was. The character customization looks sharper and more detailed from where I’m sitting, and the bird’s eye shots of the houses and environments look a bit more consistent and clear than previous shots. There are also plenty of stylish outfits, which I’m sure are a big reason why people play these games in the first place, although I personally feel unrepresented by the lack of coffee-stained sweatpants.

“Life by You had a number of strengths and the hard work of a dedicated team that went into making them happen,” said Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox Interactive at the time. “However, if we get to a point where we believe that with more time we won’t get close enough to a version that we would be happy with, then we believe it’s better to stop.”

“This is difficult and drastic news for our colleagues at Tectonic who have worked hard on the Early Access release of Life by You,” Wester said of the studio’s closure. “Unfortunately, with the cancellation of their only project, we have to make the difficult decision to close the studio.”

“Two weeks before launch we were told we weren’t going to launch and now we’ve all lost our jobs,” Delventhal wrote on LinkedIn the next day. “We weren’t informed until a public announcement. This industry has become a place where you can do more than you expected, have AA money behind you and still get the rug pulled out two weeks before launch.”

Again, I probably wouldn’t have spent much time with Life By You, but I still wanted to tinker with it. The Sims could use a serious competitor, especially since recent updates seem to have been plagued with bug issues. So, yes, I’m disappointed for you if you were looking forward to this, and it sounds like the team behind it deserves much better too. Paradox itself is no stranger to glitches of late, and just delayed Prison Architect 2 indefinitely after parting ways with the original developer and handing it over to a new studio. Let’s hope it doesn’t suffer the same fate.