The Sims 4 Enchanted by Nature review — Fair(y)ly hit or miss

Since the first installment of The Sims, the Occult types have been a quirky and fun mechanic to create some chaos. I have flashbacks to when vampires were first released and despite consciously buying them, my best friend would be terrified of them sucking her sim’s blood, thus uninstalling it. In an otherwise mundane world where you work a 9-5am and tell your Sims to eat and pee, Sims are at their best when it’s kooky and weird. This pack also has the added effect of providing Simmers with a feature that has been long-anticipated, Fairies!

These whimsical Sims first appeared in The Sims 3, and now finally have an Expansion pack featured around them, not the common Game pack we are used to for main occults – think Vampires and Werewolves. At first the community was apprehensive about this choice, worrying that the new gameplay would be swallowed up by other features. To see evidence of this worry, just look at the treatment of Mermaids, who were included in the Island Living expansion pack. They virtually had no unique gameplay and hardly any customizable options. They were treated as just an add-on. However, I’m happy to confirm this is not the case for our beloved Fairy Sims! In this review, I’ll be splitting it up into the categories first presented in the pop-up players get when you open the game with the pack installed for the first time.

Remember! All content shown and talked about is taken from a special early build that only includes The Sims 4 base-game and Enchanted by Nature. So, there is no discussion of cross-pack compatibility. It’s also an Alpha build, so by the time it releases, some issues might be fixed. But let’s see.

Life among the trees

Nicely paired with Fairies is the focus on having your Sims thrive in nature as the pack includes the skill Nature Living, where your aim is to fulfill your Sim’s needs through the outdoors. Special interactions include sleeping on the ground and foraging for items, but lower levels of the skill produce negative effects for these actions. Your Sim will become uncomfortable from an awkward sleeping position and will get embarrassed from peeing in a bush outdoors. As you level up this skill, these negative effects will dissipate and you’ll be able to take part in more activities, like bathing shallow bodies of water and foraging for specifics, like Apothecary items or collectables.

You are guided through this skill if you choose the new Nature Nomad aspiration, but as you read on, you’ll notice a common problem I have with the three new Aspirations added in this expansion pack. The Nature Nomad aspiration only has two levels to complete in order to complete the whole aspiration. Two! And especially for Nature Nomad, there is a weird disconnect between level one and two. You begin with relatively simple tasks that you can blast through in about 10 minutes – catch a fish, forage three times etc. But then you get to level two, and it asks you to interact with nature using level nine Natural Living skill. This massive jump in level highlights a bit of a misstep on the dev team, as the aspiration is treated like a side piece, rather than your Sim’s life goals. Despite my love for this new skill, with its possibilities for off-the-grid sims being so exciting, its partnered aspiration is a bit of a letdown.

The pack also contains three new traits, Mystical, Disruptive and Plant Lover. Mystical gives Sims an affinity for the apothecary and gardening skills, helping them learn faster. And makes it so your Sim has an easier time at making friendships with supernatural Sims. They’re also more attuned to nature, getting satisfaction from handling plants and maintaining their balance – more on this later. The Disruptive skill is for your mischievous Sims and pairs nicely with one of the paths you can take as a Fairy. It raises your mischief skill quicker and allows you unique interactions that sabotage plants and the like. Finally, we have Plant Lover, which is the skill I have the most experience with due to how ironically disruptive it can be. Sims with this trait adore plants, finding happiness in taking care of them and getting distant and upset when they don’t interact with them. This seemed like a perfect trait for my Fairy Sims and the new houseplant mechanic, but it quickly became an annoyance, as if my Sims weren’t constantly gardening or talking to their house plants, they would get a sad moodlet. It was also a massive pain when harvesting plants, which ALSO gave them a sad moodlet for ‘harming’ them. It just seems a bit overkill and steers me away from wanting to pick the trait in the future. Overall, the new skills are fine.

Finally, as mentioned in our Plant Lover trait description, we have a new gameplay feature in the form of house plants. The pack comes with unique empty pots that you can place around your house and fill them with either the newly created house plants, or with herbs and other sorts of existing plants. On paper, this skill was really exciting for all plant loving Simmers and added a level of depth to managing your home. However, like so many other Sim features – think laundry – this seemingly cozy hobby becomes more of a hindrance in the long-run, as you forget to water them constantly and they just end up dying. I mistakenly added around 4 or 5 house plants to my house and due to focusing on so many other things, house plants quickly slipped through the cracks. This became even more insufferable when I realised that my plant-loving Sims became depressed when plants die. Hence a never-ending cycle of pain, so in hindsight, this feature is a miss for my playthroughs.

A balanced lifestyle

A brand-new gameplay feature introduced in this pack is the balance and luck system, the former being a new bar and the latter working more behind the scenes. These are both features you need to remind yourself to check otherwise you’ll be facing the consequences. Great. Balance is separated into, very imbalanced, imbalanced and balanced. You maintain good balance by doing positive actions and maintaining your Sims needs, aka positive moodlets. However, if your Sim finds themselves spending too long in a negative emotion, your balance will quickly deteriorate, and you’ll find yourself prone to ailments.

Ailments existed before this pack, but now we have a whole lot more of them to worry about.  From the Greenie Meanie to Simoleon Fever ailment. You’ll know when your Sim contracted an ailment because it’ll be visibly displayed on your Sim’s body,  it’s flames up their arms or random spatters of paint on their face. Each ailment will result in consequences that can be rather annoying, the two mentioned above makes you more angry but more affiliated with the gardening skill and the other has you literally coughing up simoleons. These are funky when you first encounter them but also become a bit of an annoyance with how frequent they seem to appear. I played with my Plant Sim for an hour, and I contracted two ailments within that time. You can thankfully turn this off as it gets a bit annoying.

To cure yourself of ailments, Enchanted by Nature introduces the Apothecary skill and Naturopath profession. You’ll be able to gather ingredients – most of which could already be found in the game – and craft elixrs for yourself or for your patients. The profession gives you multiple options for how you would like to work, you can go to work, work from home (which gives you an assignment) and see clients from home. I messed around with seeing clients from home but unfortunately this too became redundant and once I had experienced it 4 or 5 times, I quickly sent my Sim to work instead. The best way to experience this profession is if you decide to pair it with the new aspiration, Elixir Enthusiast. It aligns perfectly with advancing the Naturopath profession as it’ll often ask you to give 3 elixirs to Sims or get to level 4 in your profession. Although, like the previously mentioned aspiration, it only has two levels.

The Naturopath profession has your Sim have ailment inflicted clients come to your house, there you will assess their symptoms by asking them questions or doing pushups. It’s basically — spam until a pop-up in the corner gives you a hint of what ailment this Sim has contracted. You can then identify the ailment and if successful, can craft an elixir and cure them. Working from home seemed like a cute idea until I realised that the patient would not stand still for a single moment. I was constantly having to pause to click a bunch of conversation options and chasing them around the house. I also found that after they were cured, they would hang out for a long while after, not leaving when I prompted them to. Overall, the new profession is okay. Crafting elixirs and treating patients is fun to a point, and then you just end up sending your Sim to work so they’re out of sight and mind.

Briefly, luck is a permanent function to The Sims 4 that cannot be turned off. You can see your luck in the Simology tab and negative and positive luck can affect chance-based encounters in the game. It’ll determine what rarity of collectables you can find or if you get that promotion in work. I haven’t played enough of the game with this new feature incorporated, but I haven’t seen any downright unfair circumstances. So, we’ll see.

Fairest Folk: Fairy Abilities

Probably, the section everyone’s been waiting for, how is the Fairy Sims!? There’s a lot to unpack here, but thankfully the Fairies feel fairly standard for what we normally get with Occult Sims. No corners cut or anything like Mermaids, Fairies are truly the focus of this expansion pack.

To kick things off, how do you become a Fairy? Weirdly, becoming a Fairy is extremely easy, both in how you can just pick the option in CAS straight away and taking on the quest to become a Fairy in-game. The quest involves summoning Mother Nature and simply asking to be a Fairy, she’ll say yes and then you’ll have to go bathe in the emotion pond found in the world. Then, poof, you’re a Fairy. Lackluster? Maybe. Convenient? Yes. Thus begins your Fairy adventure, any Sim can be a Fairy, but babies and toddlers won’t gain their wings until they become teenagers.

Fairies have a range of abilities to have fun with, from being able to instantly fly anywhere, shrink and play with any household objects and retain emotional force. Instead of having to manage your bladder and your hunger, these are substituted with a long emotional force bar, which you can use to do more complicated fairy actions. It’ll deplete like your other needs and can be replenished by absorbing another Sim’s emotional force or spending time in a fairy house. This meant that there wasn’t really a purpose for a toilet and a kitchen in my fairy playthrough and I found Sims didn’t need to be coddled so much. But I was sad when I realised my gorgeous cottage-core kitchen was purely decorative. This needs to be monitored however, as if you become emotionally starving, your Sim can die. This is one of the new deaths in Enchanted by Nature, but don’t worry, it’s not that easily achievable. It acts like your hunger stat, and starvation in The Sims 4 takes a lot of time to kill you off. You’ll also be notified if your energy is too low, so it’s fairly basic to manage.

Doing fairy actions also gives you a new form of currency, Fairy Dust. Which falls off you’re your Sim whenever they complete an action, like showering. You can also obtain it through other means, like shaking a fairy house. This can then be used to enchant certain items, from plants that won’t need to be watered or maintained for a while and the kooky new bring-a-gnome-to-life gimmick. You can use 5 fairy dust to bring a gnome to life and give it certain tasks to do. You can make it garden, protect you, or clean for a short period of time. And the best part is you don’t need to be a fairy to do this, you just need fairy dust, which can be found in the new world.

Focal to a new Sims occult pack is the skill tree you can use to gain unique skills and customize your Sim’s personality. The Fairy skill tree is separated into four columns, Nature, Emotions, Manipulation and Customization and each gives you new skills to be purchased through points, which you accumulate as you do general Fairy biz. For example, you can make it so when a Fairy gardens you harvest a duplicate seed, or you can sway other Sim’s emotions. I won’t spoil many of the skills because some of them get wild but remember that these skills cost varying degrees of emotional force, with more powerful actions practically taking up 90% of the bar.

Within this skill tree are also diverting paths, including your typical good vs evil – but not too evil. You can choose to put points into a Harmonious or Discordant path, and each gives you unique skills. You take more pleasure in doing positive actions as a Harmonious Sim but crave mischief as a Discordant one. These were fun options to engage with and allowed for some fun roleplay and storytelling whilst creating Sims and their stories. There’s not much to stay on this feature as it’s what we are used to, no surprises or ‘wow’ moments, it’s good enough.

I’ll be talking more about CAS later, but I wanted to dip my toes in and talk about the Fairy wings that obviously come with Fairy Sims. On this front, we are talking 10/10 content with how much depth and detail they went into with how you can customize your wings. In CAS, you can pick from a plethora of pre-made wings if you’re not interested in the cosmetics side and you wouldn’t be missing out on much as the pre-made wings are still beautiful. If you decide to though, you can pick an outline/shape and size and then use a color wheel to pick what color you want for each part of your wings. They’ll automatically be symmetrical, and you can even add drawn designs that you make, from love hearts to lightning bolts. Personally, I’m not much of a CAS player but I have to appreciate how well Simmers have been treated compared to other Occults – cough mermaids cough.

Land of Enchantment

All these features and fairies are wrapped up in a neat little bow with a gorgeous, full of life world to use it all in. Innisgreen is a world of natural and mystical beauty, inspired by Celtic myth and the countryside of Ireland which is known for its rich culture of fairy tales. Innisgreen is separated into three areas that are all equally wonderful to hang around in, from the Coast of Adhmor, a bustling community filled with odd shops, stalls, and a giant Gnome statue, to Sprucederry Grove with its luscious greenery intertwined with the Sims that live there, and the Forest of Everdew, the home to Fairies and all things supernatural. Compared to the last few worlds we have gotten from EA, Innisgreen feels massive and full to the brim with life. There’s so much to see and do here and may be one of my top spots for moving in Sims in the future.

Each area has its own unique feel and has an abundance of people to meet; I felt immersed in Enchanted by Nature’s vibe as each villager had interesting lore, like an estranged daughter and a queer fairy couple. Speaking of lore, there’s plenty for you to explore if you’re interested in it. I found this the case especially for the Gnomes which was a delight to uncover, no spoilers here though! Whenever I took my Sims outside the house, I felt like there was always something to do. I placed my Sims in Sprucederry Grove, and it was full of Fairies and Plant Sims to meet, dotted around the area would be BBQs, swing sets and benches to interact with so it felt like I was naturally meeting a lot of people without actually leaving the plot. I also loved the addition of rabbit hole shops that you could pop into, my plot was next to a Gardening store that sold books on the topic and house plants. There’s a lot of these mundane shops scattered around Innisgreen and whilst they are rabbit holes (boo), it’s still nice to see.

Everdew Forest is where you’ll be doing most of your Fairy business as it contains the Fairy High Council and a rabbit-hole hub where you can read up on Fairy history etc. There are also standard bars you can visit, but I’ll make a specific mention of them here because they are STUNNING. Which is helped by how strong the build items are in this pack. Overall, Innisgreen is an amazing addition to the world of The Sims and is a perfect world to fly around as a Fairy and stargaze under the night sky.

Build-mode and Create A Sim

Finally, we have the new additions to build mode, personally my favourite part of this pack and The Sims in general and… Create A Sim. Just kidding. But honestly, playing Sims often makes me reminisce about the age-old stereotype of you’re either a Humanities or Math girlie. In the world of Sims, you’re either a build or CAS Simmer.

We’ll start off with CAS as it was the biggest and greatest surprise I had with playing Enchanted by Nature. I knew we were getting fairy, but the range of outfits on offer are a treat. There are so many floral gowns and t-shirts, cute jumpsuits and dungarees, and whimsical headpieces and leafy pencil skirts. There’s a lot here that I know I’ll be using in all my playthroughs as it fits my vibe perfectly. I’ll include photos below of my young adult and teen Sim, but I’ll also mention we have some cute outfits for toddlers and one or two things for infants. We also have a few hair options that include leaves stuck in your locks and highlights in your wavy ponytail. Any fairy lover will have a blast creating a Fairy or even just a normal Sim with these options. However, a word of advice, when you’re creating female framed Sims, turn off the Feminine tag as it hides a lot of options that would look more than fine on your female Sim – definitely some tagging that needs to be altered as you could end up missing out.

Finally, and certainly not least, is build mode. There’s a lot to unpack here so I’ll keep it brief. I’m staring at the word count now and realise I may be yapping . Build mode includes furniture in most categories, most notably in the doors and windows category where you can pick a more natural wood and glass paneling look or go full fairy cottage core with mismatched colorful windows. Both options pair well with the range of furniture you can choose, often leaning into either aesthetic. You have beautiful thick wooden desks, bookcases and fireplaces that come in a range of colors and patterns, an enchanting rug whose each swatch has its own emblem, from unicorn to griffin and more mystical furniture that incorporates glowing stone and mossy stone, like the shower and bath. You also have a bunch of floral decorations that hang off furniture and can wind up your walls, and amazing outdoor furniture that makes you want to build a whole garden. Finally, otherwise I’ll be listing at this point, we have gorgeous kid room items, from cribs to toys to tree bookcases. The building has never been so cozy and pretty to engage with. I spent hours in the house pictured below, and I could easily spend more time making other homes. My only gripe is that we didn’t really get many plants, ironically. We got a few outlandish purple shrubs and other things, but we didn’t get any new pond décor or many outdoor plants. Since the base-game update, we can place certain plants on roofs, which creates a really nice aesthetic. But potential seems to have been missing here, and trees and other bushes are locked to debug.

Overall, this was a hefty review, but with Sims packs, you want the whole picture to see if spending that much money is worth it. Unlike the past general packs that included Life and Death, For Rent and Businesses and Hobbies, Enchanted by Nature is more niche due to not every Simmer valuing Fairies. If you're not crazy about these winged Sims, then I suggest you wait for a sale, but if not then I hope you have the best time with this pack! It’s good, but not amazing.