The Sims 4 recently released its “Infant Update” and some players who just want to give their baby a bath are, instead, being forced to watch the bath animation transform their infants into glitch monsters. It’s a wild sight to behold, especially in a game like The Sims 4 which, in many ways, is about the rigors of domesticity. It’s just another example of how sometimes a game’s bugs can lead to hilarious visions of horror.
The Sims 4’s recent March 14th update, which is freely available to anyone who owns the base game, is considered a precursor to the upcoming The Sims 4: Growing Together expansion. One of its new features includes an Infant life stage for babies that comes right after Newborn and before Toddler. With the Infant stage comes a whole new set of interactions like teaching the baby to crawl, burping the baby, and encouraging them to move from mushy to solid foods. Infants are a messy business, so of course, they need a bath every once in a while – a bath that, apparently, the infant hates so much that it transforms into an abstract tangle of flesh in protest.
Some Sims 4 players over at The Sims subreddit have been sharing images of their precious infants exploding into shapes infants don’t typically come in. And all because the parent dared to clean the child. Reddit user MadPoopha just wanted to lower their infant into a luxurious bathtub, but was instead ensnared within a baby skin prison.
User livin_gray found themselves in a similar situation. Upon lowering their Sim infant into a gorgeous raw wood bathtub, the glitch caused their child to erupt. The infant spawned what appears to be large bat-like wings that wrapped around its mother, perhaps in an attempt to hug her to show appreciation or, more likely, to consume her. From an image of the unsettling glitch taken from a different angle supplied by living_gray on Reddit, it becomes clear it’s not necessarily the infant itself that’s glitching, as its character model remains intact. The glitch seems to begin as a stalk of flesh jutting out of the infant’s head, which then tries to form a crude simulacrum of a human being, but one that’s been stretched in a taffy-pulling machine.
It’s a common problem. No game is immune. Characters are made up of thousands of data points. Any number of them can suddenly burst into madness when they interact with another object or character if its various parameters are faulty for whatever reason, whether it be human error or software malfunction. Programmers, like the ones at EA working on The Sims 4, have to dip into the code to figure out what’s causing the character model to turn into a living surrealist sculpture when it performs a specific interaction. It’s an annoying bug that game developers hope to catch before a game’s release. But if they don’t, it can wind up being one of the more entertaining, if unsettling, glitches a player can encounter.
The Sims 4 is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
