Probably Shouldn’t Have Checked On Caramel

“Check on Caramel,” said somebody in popular Twitch comedian Jerma’s chat yesterday, referring to one of his first Sims in his ongoing Sims 1 playthrough. He should not have, as it turns out, checked on Caramel.

Heeding his audience’s wishes, Jerma jumped from the household of his self-insert character — who had just completed his all-consuming quest to romance Princess Peach — to that of the Sweet family, which he created when he first began his save file the day prior. Only one Sweet remained. Caramel, a child, stood in her home’s roach-infested kitchen, flailing and wailing as it burned. Her mother, who had accidentally set the kitchen on fire while making dinner, was a jar of ashes.

Due to the way time works in the original Sims, Caramel was stuck in this purgatorial hell bubble for over eight real-world hours, the result of Jerma panicking and leaping away from the rapidly combusting Sweet household during a stream the day before. This was after he accidentally recreated the plot of the 2009 movie Coraline by sending Caramel down a hole in the ground into a magical alternate world to protect her from the sight of Death Himself taking her mother away (Caramel ended up running face-first into Death in the doorway on the way out — awkward!).

In the end, Caramel got shipped off to military school while pleading with Mario, who was conveniently in the area but either did not seem to understand what she had endured or did not care. Jerma then reloaded his save in an attempt to make Caramel’s life less bleak, but eventually, she just ended up back in military school because, as one person in chat pointed out, “who would’ve thought dead parents and living with the ashes would affect her grades?” Jerma ultimately gave up and evicted her, somehow an even bleaker outcome. Then he bulldozed the accursed Sweet family home.

“No one can know what happened here,” said one viewer in chat.

The Sims, huh! It’s always so nice to relive fun, family-friendly early-2000s-stalgia that definitely had no lasting impact on our psyches whatsoever.