'The ultimate funny clip generator' — Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is the perfect Nintendo Switch game for the social media age

The best way to describe life simulator Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is like a bizarre cross between The Sims and reality TV show Big Brother, but even that would be doing its special brand of weirdness a disservice. There’s simply nothing else quite like this strange Nintendo Switch exclusive, which sees you creating bombastic Mii characters, dropping them into a virtual island, and sitting back to watch as increasingly bizarre events occur.

Thanks to its frankly staggering degree of character customization, which lets you create a digital representation of everyone from your real-life friend group to celebrities and even your favorite gaming characters, the whole thing seems tailor-made for generating viral social media clips, and it’s clear that the Japanese gaming giant is already on to a winner in this regard. With just a demo available to the public, my social media feeds have been filled with hilarious encounters — all elevated by the series' trademark charmingly robotic text-to-speech voices.

If you enjoyed the demo or seeing the countless popular posts, then you’ll love the full game. It’s more of the same with everything dialled up to eleven — letting you unleash up to 70 characters rather than the demo’s three, and with hundreds more items and objects to discover. There are some misses, mostly for those expecting a transformative upgrade on Nintendo Switch 2, but Living the Dream is otherwise a raucous time.

Mini Mii

The most important thing to know is that this is quite a hands-off game and clearly meant to be toyed with in short bursts over an extended period rather than ravenously consumed in just one sitting.

The experience opens by guiding you through the creation of your first few characters and outlining the basics of the in-depth character creator. Crafting Miis is a clear highlight, as Living the Dream offers the most expansive system for making them yet.

The possibilities are practically endless, with tens of face types, hair styles, eyebrows, eyes, noses, mouths, and so on. Beyond the impressive range of options, seemingly minor additions such as the option to select a separate front and back hairstyle and the addition of ears (a first for Miis) make it easier than ever to capture your desired look.

I set about creating as many members of the TechRadar team as possible, including everyone from my boss, Rob Dwiar, and Senior Entertainment Writer Lucy Buglass to our iconic Editor at Large, Lance Ulanoff, and never struggled to nail the look.

More elaborate Miis are possible through the face paint system. It turns your Mii’s face into a blank canvas, which you can draw on freely to add everything from little details, such as make-up and scars, to entire new faces based on your wildest dreams.

The only limit here is your artistic skill, and, luckily, if you’re completely hopeless at drawing like me, you’ll be able to take advantage of some pre-set stamps of common shapes, faces, and a few food items.

Although it is an option, you don’t ever have to start from scratch either. You can clone an existing Mii and then tweak it to your liking (a tool I used to create a tiny Baby Lance) or follow a series of question-style prompts that run through the most important visual traits. The latter is particularly fun and surprisingly effective — giving you a great, near-perfect base that you can then fine-tune to perfection.

No matter your chosen method of creation, the final stage is always inputting some biographical information, including a little personality quiz that assigns your character one of a handful of distinct types to inform their behaviour. This doesn’t seem too impactful in the grand scheme of things, though I did occasionally note some differences in how my easy-going, optimistic Miis and confident leaders, for example, would react in different situations.

If you can dream it

From there, you’re let loose on your island, a customizable tropical paradise that serves as the home of your Miis. Viewed from a birds-eye perspective, they all wander around chatting with each other throughout the day, occasionally retreating into their little houses for the odd rest.

Like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the game syncs with real-world time, so you’re likely to see something different depending on when you choose to log on. Miis will also remark on how much time you’ve spent in the game recently; leave for more than a few days, and they’ll miss you dearly.

Sometimes Miis will require some direct interaction, waving up at the sky to offer the chance to play some basic minigames like a quiz that has you guessing obscured objects via their shadows. They’re a bit repetitive, but thankfully totally optional and do have some decent rewards in the random items available if you win. You’ll also see plenty of little thought bubbles, which you can click with the on-screen cursor to chat to the Mii or trigger an animated scene.

They’ll sometimes ask for advice or guidance as well, which gives you another route to customizing their behavior.

Completing tasks for your Miis often grants some cash and glowing yellow liquid happiness, raising their individual happiness level. Increasing happiness unlocks new traits and the option to give them objects to play with, distinct walking animations, new catchphrases to spout, and more. On top of this, Miis have a hunger level to manage. They won’t die if you starve them or anything — but dispensing good food regularly is a sure-fire way to farm a lot of happiness easily.

You’ll want to keep on top of this, as it all pools into an overall island happiness level. This is the main metric of your progress through the game, and as you raise happiness, a handful of unique buildings are unlocked. This includes a clothes shop to outfit your Miis and a workshop that lets you create your very own objects using an extensive digital canvas.

It does get to a point where it feels like you’ve seen most of what the game has to offer, but it still finds odd new ways to surprise you. There are loads of possible Mii interactions: they can form relationships, make lifelong enemies, move in together, and much more. Events can even happen off-screen, too, leading to some rather amusing instances where I logged in to find Miis had radically altered their own appearances with new hairstyles, or started a feud with a former friend.

The lack of Nintendo Switch 2-specific features is undeniably a shame, though. For some reason, Nintendo has opted to release Living the Dream solely for the original Switch, rather than also offer a dedicated Switch 2 version. It is playable through backwards and benefits from slightly shinier visuals, but the lack of support for features like Joy-Con 2 mouse control is noticeable and seems like a huge missed opportunity given the number of mechanics that involve drawing.

Even those on the original Switch will notice that touch-screen support is also quite limited. You can tap icons in the character creator or drag your fingers across the screen to stroke a Miis head, but that’s basically it — a shame when pressing different options on on-screen pop-ups could easily be accomplished with a quick tap in handheld mode.

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Accessibility features

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream does not have a dedicated accessibility menu and, like other Nintendo-developed games, has very few settings.

Your only real options are to invert the X-axis of the camera and tweak the levels of individual sounds. Dialogue in the game is conveyed predominantly through text, though you cannot customize its appearance in any way.

How I reviewed Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream

I played more than 15 hours of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream on Nintendo Switch 2, predominantly in handheld mode using the Joy-Con 2 controllers and relying on the system’s integrated speakers for sound.

During my time with the game, I created countless Mii characters and experienced as much of it as possible, comparing it with the previous entry, Tomodachi Life on Nintendo 3DS, and other life simulation games like The Sims 4.

First reviewed March 2026