Tomodachi Life

Songs, arguments, and clumsy dates fill the hours on the Mii island of Tomodachi Life, Nintendo's 2014 sandbox about neighbors rather than a scored contest. You feed them, choose their clothes, and assign apartments they promptly clutter. A face built from your own features can move in and start requesting snacks.

No results screen waits at the end of a tidy afternoon. Hunger, moods, and tiny errands call you back, and leaving a resident alone makes the complaint louder. Relationships form, collapse, and sometimes produce a child who then needs a room of their own.

Concerts, dreams you step into, and whatever the shop is stocking give the island its daily loop. The humor comes from Miis misreading one another and from the babble they use in place of ordinary sentences. Nudging two neighbors into a romance does not stop them quarreling about something petty an hour afterward.

Nintendo shaped the island as a place you look in on. A meal settles an immediate mood, while a catchphrase and a messy interior are how one Mii starts to feel like a particular person.