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The 5 best but most terrifying Sims 4 challengesTag is not husband material
Tag is not husband material

My guess is that when you were a kid, right, you were one of two types. You either used your action figures to play out imaginative (if potentially weird) stories, or you picked one of them up and went “I bet I can make Lion-O’s legs go in the splits so far that they fall off”, before proceeding to test your hypothesis.
The Rags To Riches Challenge AKA The Rosebud Challenge
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube

But it is also, when viewed dispassionately and just as a set of rules, a perfectly crafted challenge. It has clear goals, is difficult but achievable, and will let you see continual progress. Listening to someone say “how does it take Sims to die of hunger? It’s a long time. I think I’ve tried to kill Sims from hunger before,” carries its own kind of macabre fascination, as well.
The Rags To Riches/Rosebud Challenge rules
The Apocalypse Challenge
I’ve yet to find a video that really showcases a good run at the Apocalypse Challenge, but I really love the concept - specifically because you have to spend time building a loving family and raising a child as part of it. Then, as soon as they reach the young adult age bracket, you assume the nuclear apocalypse happens, kill their entire family, and move the designated survivor to a totally empty neighbourhood. You build a shack for them in an empty lot, which has to have a raised foundation or be on stilts because, quote, “the ground is still covered with radioactive dust”.
The Apocalypse comes with an exhaustive list of restrictions, organised into chunks, and you can only remove one set of them once a Sim reaches the highest level in one of the career paths. Seriously, there are so many rules. But it’d be interesting to see someone play this, especially with the new off the grid stuff, and things like bug farms, coming in theEco Lifestyle pack.
The Apocalypse Challenge rules
The Decades Challenge
There are elements of this challenge that I find genuinely hilarious. The idea is that your Sims kind of live through history (every time a generation of child ages up into young adults, or teens if you prefer, a decade passes), starting in 1890. There are rules about things that make sense, like when you can introduce running water into your home, but if you really want to, you can also optionally gamify historical misogyny, racism and homophobia. Fun!
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube

The actually funny bit, though, is that eventually you pass through huge, world shaking events, and the rules do their best to model their effects in the game. So, for example, any Sim coming of age during the 1930s has to take either the Gloomy, Noncommital or Mean traits, because they lived through the Great Depression. In decades of war, Sims falling into the conscription bracket have to be fed to the carnivorous Cowplant on the roll of a dice, to simulate dying at the front. The sentence “first two children (Of either gender) are sent to war (cowplant) as conscripts or volunteer nurses” is just objectively very funny.
The Black Widow Challenge
This one is almost pathological, I’m not going to lie. You create a young adult Sim, give them the traits Materialistic, Snob, and Romantic, and proceed to romance and marry a neighbourhood Sim. Then, meet a new love interest, move them into your house, andmake sureyour current partner sees you cheating on them.
Then kill them.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube

Marry your love interest and move into their house. Repeat the process 10 times, taking the urns/graves with you as you go.
Fucking hell.
The Black Widow Challenge rules
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube

(Kelsey made the bold choice of making a matriarch who looked a bit like her.)
You can’t hire a nanny, so must juggle your hyper fertility with childcare. Once your matriarch ages out of her childbearing years, the responsibility passes to her eldest daughter. This is basically human women as Ant Queens, and it is a holy terror.