No matter how much fun I’m having with Paralives, I’m not going to stand here and act like it isn’t buggy as all getout in Live Mode. There are glitched menus, failing interactions, and wacky texture glitches, which are all the sorts of things life sim players pretty much knew to expect from an early access game. What we didn’t know was that we’d be hounded by some naked lad sneaking into our save files. Their name is Charlie, and like some ghost of life sims future they’ve now visited my save game too.
I first saw Charlie in a Reddit post on Paralives’ launch day, which I promptly sent to my fellow PCG life simmer Mollie Taylor to have a little chuckle over. Today, naively believing I couldn’t also become a Charlie target, I was messing around with Paralives cheats working on our guide to trying for a baby in Paralives. After adopting a baby, I quit to the main menu without saving so as not to keep the messy testing I was doing in my save file.
Welcome to the family…… Charlie from r/Paralives
When I loaded back in… Charlie was there. They were in my family instead of that unwanted infant. Charlie is bald, butt naked, and staring directly into your soul. I found them loitering out on the industrial side of town browsing their cellphone, which it seems like they shouldn’t have—obvious jokes about where they must keep it aside.
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I needed to know more. I used the “editcharacter” cheat to open Charlie up in the paramaker to find that their legal name is Charlie Default, they are nonbinary, and they have no personality stats. Not suspicious at all.
I went looking for other players visited by Charlie where I found others also referencing misplaced kids. One describes accidentally abandoning a child after asking her single father to move in with his partner, having her claimed by child services, and finding Charlie ominously in her place after rolling back the save file. Another says their game crashed after adopting a baby who was also bodysnatched by digital faeries and replaced with Charlie. You can try to reload your save but Charlie will be there waiting.
Charlie’s true purpose is probably just as a debug character that misplaced paras will fall back to in the event of simulation errors, if the other Charlie sightings are anything to go by. I’ve reached out to Paralives Studio to find out if they’re willing to dish out the Charlie lore though, and I’ll let you all know if I get an answer.
In the meantime, I feel like maybe Charlie deserves to stay in the family. Perhaps I’ll make some outfits for them and bestow some character traits on them as well.
