21 December 2025

You Can Play a Baldur’s Gate 3 & The Sims Love Child Demo Sooner Than You Think

By newsgame

When I first wrote about My Eerie Lair back in the fall, the game’s full release was slated for Q3 2026. That felt reasonable. Comfortable, even, amidst other gaming priorities. 2025’s release calendar was properly stacked, and a lot can happen in a year. For example, I could very responsibly add several hundred more hours into Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Sims in preparation…for My Eerie Lair‘s release, of course.

My Eerie Lair wears its inspirations proudly. It’s a cozy decorating game with romance-forward ambitions, a fixation on aesthetics, and an unmistakable fondness for morally questionable fantasy men. In a nutshell, it is very much the love child of Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Sims, and I assumed I had plenty of time before it demanded my full, undivided attention. Unfortunately for my free time, it turns out My Eerie Lair will not wait until Q3 2026 to make itself my problem. Therefore, I need to make it yours, too.

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My Eerie Lair Is Like The Sims Meets Baldur’s Gate 3 – It Is Releasing a Demo in January 2026

On December 11, a developer from Bad Vices Games announced via Discord that they are preparing to release a public demo of the Sims– and BG3-like game My Eerie Lair in January. The team is currently finalizing the opening scenes and incorporating comedic elements to contrast with the game’s dark premise.

As an unwelcome reminder: January 2026 is less than two weeks away.

Hear me out: there’s a unique comfort in knowing a game you’re excited about is far away. You can admire it from a distance. Wishlist the game on Steam. Keep tabs on dev updates without mysteriously calling out sick for work. Q3 2026 gave My Eerie Lair that kind of buffer, far enough out to feel aspirational rather than urgent, yet a demo collapses distance. Suddenly, this isn’t something to be excited about “eventually.” It’s something you will soon be able to touch, test, and dangerously get attached to. I’ve used a lot of second-person in this paragraph to deflect the fact that I may be the one to get dangerously attached.

What Is My Eerie Lair?

My Eerie Lair Mary and Victor Official Art

My Eerie Lair is a dark cozy game featuring furnishings and toxic romance, one that understands exactly how strange that sentence sounds and yet commits to the bit anyway. My Eerie Lair isn’t just “The Sims’ Build Mode but spooky” or “Baldur’s Gate 3 Astarion romance but with no shame.” It’s a deliberately focused experience built around atmosphere, intimacy, and the strange satisfaction of making something darkly beautiful, one room at a time.

The Best of The Sims‘ Build Mode: A gridless decorating game set inside a vampire’s sprawling castle, with no timers, no penalties, and no resource management pressure.
The Premise is Unhinged: A vampire named Victor kidnaps his beloved, Mary, and attempts to win her heart by transforming his eerie castle into her dream home. It’s the perfect spawn of viral TikTok fantasies. To top it all off, the BBEG we’re supposed to help looks a lot like Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Astarion—pale skin, coiffed hair, pirate shirt, and all that jazz.
Decorate to Your (Undead) Heart’s Content: Players furnish rooms by unlocking thousands of objects, freely manipulating color, scale, rotation, and lighting to create moods ranging from grim and seductive to dreamy and melancholic.
Two Ways to Play: Story Mode, which slowly unravels the twisted relationship between Victor and Mary as you help fill out the castle. Meanwhile, Endless Mode removes narrative pressure entirely, allowing you to indulge in a game where you can decorate spaces without wondering if the vampire is getting impatient.
For Mature Audiences: While the title is a cozy game at heart, it does not shy away from its tone. The premise itself is pretty eyebrow-raising. The developers flag general mature content, including violence, gore, and suggestive themes, reinforcing that this is not a pastel, consequence-free fantasy.

A Game Like My Eerie Lair Needs a Demo

A game demo signals confidence. It says the developers believe the game’s core fantasy is strong enough to stand on its own, without qualifiers or caveats. For a genre-adjacent title like My Eerie Lair—cozy, narrative-forward, and a little off-kilter—that matters.

It also reframes expectations. Reading about a game and playing it are going to be fundamentally different experiences. A demo lets players feel the pacing, hear the music, and understand how responsive the game can be. It’s the difference between liking an idea and trusting its execution, especially since it has DNA from games like BG3 and The Sims, which have active and opinionated fandoms.

Dungeons and Dragons’ Upcoming Astarion BG3 Guidebook is a Controversy Waiting to Happen

With Dungeons and Dragons’ Astarion’s Book of Hungers upcoming, all eyes are on Baldur’s Gate 3’s Rogue. But that could mean bad news for some fans.

Yes, the TikTok Romantasy Is the Hook in Sims-Like My Eerie Lair (And That’s the Point)

Letting the Baldur’s Gate 3 Romance Afficionados Replay Their Guilty Pleasures

My Eerie Lair Predator Victor & Prey Mary

Romance has become one of the most discussed elements of modern RPGs, but it’s rarely the main event. Even in Baldur’s Gate 3, a game known for its steamy sex scenes, romance exists alongside combat, exploration, and massive branching narratives. Romance is optional in BG3. In My Eerie Lair, though, spice doesn’t have to fight for oxygen.

There’s something almost audacious about centering a decorating game around emotional intimacy, especially when that intimacy involves a questionable preface. But that focus is precisely why it works. By narrowing its scope, My Eerie Lair can afford to be deliberate. Relationships unfold at a pace that feels intentional rather than incidental. And in the worst-case scenario, it lets fans of Astarion’s romance relive their glory days.

Suddenly, 2026 Feels Very Far Away

The promise of a demo has a way of making a game’s release window feel abstract. Q3 2026 used to sound close enough, but now it feels distant. Not because the wait is unbearable, but because My Eerie Lair has already begun to assert itself as a present-tense experience with its demo. And if the demo lives up to the hype? Q3 will be a thousand light-years away from me.

That’s the danger of letting players in early. Once you’ve stepped into a space, arranged it to your liking, and felt the pull of a story that knows exactly which emotional buttons to press, patience becomes harder to maintain. I thought I had time to prepare for My Eerie Lair. It turns out the game had other plans. And if Bad Vices Games giveth, who am I to taketh away?