The Sims 4 Enchanted by Nature review

A moony reflection on why I play The Sims 4.

September 30, 2025

Categorization – Fantasy, cozy sim (is that a thing?)

Where played – PC

The Sims 3 was a seminal part of my life as a teen gamer. I have one bright memory in particular of playing The University expansion pack and hearing the gibberish Simlish version of the song “Sway” by The Perishers. When I (or rather, my Sim, who is always named Scarlett) first heard it playing in a university common room, I was immediately obsessed! Even in the nonsensical Simlish, this moody but super-catchy, alterna-rock song sums up what it was like to grow up as an emo turn-of-the-century pre-adult. Scarlett played it so many times in her dorm room while romancing unsuspecting Sim-athletes. Imagine my delight when I by chance heard it on a real-live radio and discovered that it was a real song.

I then abandoned The Sims franchise for several years, switching over to console gaming for my first love - RPGs. I picked it up again during (surprise, surprise) the pandemic, when it was offered for free one month on a PS Online subscription. As this time I didn’t have a gaming PC, and my curiosity was peaked. I ended up hooked on The Sims 4 during these house arrest months, even go so far as to purchase several expansion packs (because why not? The world was ending), and did enjoy the Realm of Magic and the Island Living ones in particular. They were tons of fun, for awhile, but I grew tired of the clunky console mechanics, which I found made it hard to move my Sim around or read the tiny TV-screen text, and thus, slowly lost interest as the pandemic restrictions loosened up.

Fast forward about five years later to the present day. While I am alternating between playing Pillars of Eternity, which for technical reasons is not the most relaxing game I’ve ever played (review here), and juggling my new 9 to 5 and and being a parent to some wonderful but frolicky children, and therefore deliberating the meaning of my existence, my mind slowly crawls back to reading about the new The Sims 4 expansions at the Gamespot website. Out of nowhere, I recall that there is apparently a new The Sims 4 sort of cowboy expansion pack and one where you can play in a green forest and turn into a fairy. Next thing I know, I am booting up my new gaming PC and mosey-ing over to the EA website, calculating how much it will cost to buy all the expansion packs I want and whether I can justify it given my age and supposed maturity (or lack thereof, as we will see).

And wouldn't you know it, there is a September sale on the EA website and they are offering the expansion packs for a bout 30-50% off and I realize that this chance might never come again or at least for the next quarter. Is it, dare I say, a sign?

And so I spend an unholy amount of money on The Sims 4 expansion packs, some new to me (Journey to Batuu), Horse ranch or whatever it is called, and Enchanted by Nature (the one with the fairies), some old but essential packs (Get to Work, Dine Out, Seasons). I wisely avoid for now some of the ones I have already played before, at least until the next sale, as I foresee a level of diminishing returns entering those worlds again.

On a bright Sunday morning I plug in and absolutely lose myself in The Sims 4 for the next week. Just as I did when I was a teenager. Just like I did during the doomsday years of the pandemic. Some things never change.

And being a fairy is fun and the fairy does a number of cute things like shrink and play in a sink or bookshelf, have wings, fly, bathe in a magical forest pool, and the new enchanted forest-world in Enchanted by Nature is absolutely beautiful, but I do run into the same, I wouldn’t say problem, but ceiling that limits my enjoyment of many Sims pack content, and that is - a lot of the fun new mechanics have to do with influencing how my Sim interacts with other people – in this case, giving them ailments, or absorbing their emotions. However, myself being an almost pathological introvert, I realize slowly that this is not really why I play The Sims.

Which forces me to reflect on why exactly I play The Sims 4.

First, the shallow reason, i.e., the gameplay mechanics that appeal to me. I like:

1.        Watching my Sim cook increasingly more difficult stuff in the kitchen, and watch my Sim family share a meal together.

2.        Watching my Sims garden, build rockets, and make cotton candy, things that I obviously cannot do in real life. I don’t have a garden or a cotton candy machine.

3.        The narration adventures, like in Journey to Batuu, where I go on patrol on a spaceship and solve problems for the First Order. I also like training with a lightsaber.

4.        Watching my Sims go to work and then solving their narration-adventure problems as they arise.

5.        Playing in the snow and jumping in leaves.

6.        Seeing the different kinds of creative things my Sims can make, like canvas paintings, holiday crafts, and clay figures, and then displaying them around my Sim-house. 

7.        Putting collectibles all over the house.

Basically, my Sims have very few friends and if they have somehow accidentally made them, I don’t quite know what to do with them except invite them to eat at home or at a restaurant or occasionally, Woohoo them (only if he/she and my Sim are single, of course, I am not a homewrecker), and maybe do a cowpoke dance together. Which is, sadly, somehow reflective of my real life.

Sidenote: I swear to God that someone should invent a science that will analyze your personality by how you play The Sims 4 - kind of like the simulation-psychoanalysis in Ender’s Game, am I right? I don’t believe in AIs but I suspect that this could be the next AI frontier.

Second, the deeper psychological reason. I never realized until now that my mind goes back to The Sims when it wants to regress to a happier, simpler time. And I don’t mean in the obvious sense of escaping my reality and plugging into the matrix my Sims' world because they have less stressful lives than I do – actually, my Sim's husband got eaten by a Cowplant yesterday and she was unable to save him. Now she is a single mother (but a fairy, so there is that) and is mooning around being sad.

Nope... if only it were that simple.

I mean regression in the psychological way – that when I play The Sims 4 I myself regress to my mental state when I was a teenager, when my life was so easy that I had to cause problems for myself by playing The Sims 3 University and attend classes and find a campus boyfriend and become a cheerleader and later on grind at a Sims 9 to 5.

I guess everyone needs a vice, and this is it for me. Not just The Sims 4, I mean, but a tendency to regress into a younger mental state somewhat when confronted with stress, or changes, or when I am overwhelmed for any reason. And the easiest way for me to do this is to enter the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy in basically any form. Because my love for the genre is the one thing that remains consistent about me, and probably, why it never gets old. Because being a child, will never get old for me. If that makes any sense.

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