Sims 4 Life and Death: complete guide to the 2024 pack

Released on October 31, 2024, The Sims 4: Life & Death is the seventeenth expansion pack for a game that, for ten years, often preferred to talk about marriage, careers and cooking rather than death. With this expansion, Maxis finally embraces the subject and turns it into a true backbone of gameplay: new world, active Reaper career, funeral ceremonies, wills, rewritten ghosts, rebirth… Here is the complete guide to understanding what this pack changes, neighborhood by neighborhood and system by system.

An expansion that demystifies death

Life & Death does not simply add a permanent Halloween theme to the base game. The pack offers a coherent take on the entire life cycle, from writing your will to farewell ceremonies, through ghost life and, potentially, a rebirth. Where previous expansions focused on a place or a career, this one grafts on cross-cutting mechanics that apply to your entire save file, base game included.

• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• Developer: Maxis
• Release date: October 31, 2024 (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series)
• Type: expansion pack (EP17)

Life & Death turns death in The Sims 4 into a genuine chapter of life, with its rituals, its regrets, its second chances, rather than a mere punitive animation.

Ravenwood, a world between two worlds

The brand-new world is called Ravenwood, a region with a distinctly European inspiration, somewhere between misty Romanian countryside and old-school gothic. It is divided into three neighborhoods, each with a strong identity.

• Crow's Crossing: Ravenwood's historic heart, with its cobbled streets, its crypt and its central cemetery where Sims love to get a chill.
• Whispering Glen: mystical countryside dotted with ruins, home to the Moon Festival and nighttime gatherings around the fire.
• Mourningvale: a twilight swamp dominated by a bell tower, a favorite playground for ghosts and mystery enthusiasts.

The three neighborhoods share a highly polished visual identity (lanterns, low mist, twisted trees, reaper and black plumbob iconography) that stands in sharp contrast with the sunny palettes of recent expansions like For Rent or Horse Ranch.

Ravenwood, the pack's new world. Credit: Electronic Arts / Maxis.

The Reaper career, the pack's star feature

The big addition the community was waiting for is the Reaper career. This is an active career, like the doctor or detective careers from Get to Work: you follow your Sim to the office, aka the Department of Death in the Afterlife, where they start out as an apprentice (Grimtern) before climbing the ranks to become a full-fledged Reaper alongside the Grim Reaper themselves.

• Maintaining your own scythe and those of your colleagues.
• Training on dummies, including the unforgettable Kenny.
• Determining the cause of deaths received at the office.
• Heading out on missions "in the field" to collect souls… or, in some cases, save them.

Progressing unlocks new interactions, including the ability to negotiate with Death to extend — or shorten — a Sim's life. This career also grants access to iconic outfits (capes, scythes, masks) and unique decorative objects.

Funeral Home Staff, the other new career path

For players who prefer to handle death from the living side, the pack adds the Funeral Home Staff career, with two branches:

• Mortician: preparing bodies, attending to details, managing coffins.
• Funeral Director: full ceremony organization, pricing, relationships with families.

This career is complemented by an actual playable funeral ceremony mechanic: your grieving Sim (or a professional) plans the expected attire, the eulogy, the music, the arrangement of chairs, and even the buffet. Nothing, of course, stops you from throwing a completely disastrous funeral — guaranteed memories.

Will, bucket list, and Soul Path

The pack's finest systemic idea is probably the will. Every adult Sim can now write out their final wishes: who inherits what, which possessions go to which child, what personalized messages are left for loved ones. In practice, upon death, the family actually receives the intended items and Simoleons, which makes inheritances playable rather than automatic.

Added to this is the bucket list: your Sim lists the big things they want to accomplish before dying (trips, achievements, reconciliations). These goals feed into the new Soul Path system, which unifies aspirations and whims into a cohesive reward system.

A Sim who dies without completing their bucket list leaves unfinished business: they can come back as a ghost to settle it, and that's often where the drama begins.

Ghosts 2.0 and Ghostly Mastery

Ghosts already existed in The Sims 4, but Life and Death rewrites them thoroughly. They get their own progression track, Ghostly Mastery, and unlock ghostly powers ranging from harmless to downright mean:

• Making a living Sim levitate upside down.
• Knocking dishes down to terrorize housemates.
• Helping with chores like a benevolent ghost.
• Causing a deadly chill in an enemy.
• Briefly possessing certain household objects.

A ghost can, if they check the right boxes, go through a rebirth and come back as a baby Sim with the Blazing Soul trait, which retains a trace of its previous life. This is the first time the game has offered a true life → death → life loop without going through a potion or a cheat.

Ghost Historian Aspiration and Thanatology skill

The pack adds only one official aspiration, but it's very well thought out: Ghost Historian, available to both the living and ghosts. It unfolds across four tiers:

1. Motivated Spirit: befriend a ghost, reach level 2 in Thanatology and Writing.
2. Author Among Specters: form a second ghostly friendship, find a rare item in a crypt, progress in Thanatology and Writing.
3. Phantasmal Fantasy: unearth an additional rare item, make contact with the character Edith, reach level 7 in Writing.
4. Spectrally Spectacular: publish a horror novel and earn 2,000 Simoleons in royalties.

The final reward unlocks the Ghost Whisperer trait, which makes your Sim especially happy around ghosts and eases all interactions with the departed. This aspiration builds on the new Thanatology skill, which allows you to study skulls, identify causes of death, and understand rites — essential for the Grim Reaper career as well as for funeral homes.

Ceremonies, grief, and new traits

Life and death doesn't forget the living. Losing a loved one now triggers a genuine grief system with four distinct emotional phases:

• Denial: the Sim carries on as if nothing happened.
• Anger: irritable, more frequent arguments.
• Depression: no motivation, need for comfort.
• Grief Resilience: final phase, calming down and gradual recovery.

These states aren't merely cosmetic: they influence whims, mood, and access to certain interactions. The pack also takes the opportunity to add several lasting traits such as Morbid, Skeptical, Haunted by Death, or even Grim Reaper's Child. On the objects side, Tarot Cards enable group interactions (readings, predictions), and the cute yet formidable Death Frog adds to the game's collection of fascinating creatures.

To go further

Life and Death isn't just a simple Halloween pack: it's one of the most systemic expansions in the game's entire lifespan, filling gaping holes in the original gameplay (automatic inheritance, rushed grieving, throwaway ghosts). It pairs particularly well with packs that focus on family (Growing Together) or the occult (Vampires, Realm of Magic). To read further:

• Our playnews homepage for The Sims news and other expansions.
• The official EA presentation in French.
• The Simpédia FR page for the exhaustive list of objects and interactions.

One open question remains: now that EA has dared to tackle death as a theme to this extent, we wonder which taboo of the game will fall in the next pack. In-depth old age? Illness? In the meantime, Ravenwood is well worth the detour, if only for the pleasure of managing a botched funeral and watching grandpa come back to play the prankster ghost.