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Whatever your thoughts on it – and I, too, have a lot of thoughts on it – there's no denying that Palworld is the game of the moment. It's always exciting to see a game of this scope find such virality, and 2024's first big hitter has come early. Palworld's record-breaking Steam launch and glowing user reviews make it very clear that people were hungry for a game like this, and for all its many faults, Palworld has found explosive success by giving them what they wanted.
That's the important phrase here: a game like this. Millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions, have fantasized about a game like this. They – and by they I mostly mean Pokemon fans – have been dreaming up a hardcore, multiplayer, open-world creature-collector for years. The idea is up there with 'what I'd do if I won the lottery' on the mental junk food tier list, and Palworld is most of the way there.
Palworld is Ark: Survival Evolved spliced with the Pokemon trainer dream. Its core mechanics and overall presentation are very different to Pokemon – again, it's a survival and management game – but it shamelessly leverages a very similar fantasy of catching and interacting with critters, right down to the balls you use to capture them. It's also come at a time where the owner of Pokemon not only isn't making a game like this, it isn't making good creature-collector games at all.
The mainline Pokemon RPGs have been begging to get dunked on for years. Indie catch-'em-alls like Cassette Beasts and Anode Heart handily outdo them, to say nothing of the likes of Monster Hunter Stories or Temtem. After the hideous and unacceptably buggy duo of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, a game like this was perfectly positioned to bring people in while the bar is on the floor.
Lo and behold, everyone was pleasantly surprised to find that Palworld is more than a dumb meme. It helps that it runs pretty well (on PC, in my experience) and it's only $30. Make hay when the sun shines, and pawn your janky creature-collector when the latest games in the biggest media franchise on the planet look like deep-fried PS3 JRPGs and run like a tractor with refrigerators for wheels. I'm not saying Palworld lucked into its success or doesn't deserve it; I'm saying that it benefited from looming dissatisfaction around one of the biggest games it's borrowing from, and it is batting well above its average as a result.
Palworld isn't exactly an amazing game
I've played a fair bit of Palworld, and I plan to play more because I've generally had fun with it. I find it boring solo, but it's a lot better with friends – which is not high praise, because damn near anything can be fun with friends. Shoveling 2,000 pounds of mulch on a summer Georgia day is a lot better with friends, but I wouldn't give that a sterling review either. Even while playing Palworld, I still find myself pondering how great a game like this could be. Because Palworld is not great. It is fine. If I had to pick one word for it, it really would be slop – not just because it is sloppy on a technical and design level, but because it often feels like a whole bunch of random stuff blended together.
Let's get the big one out of the way: Palworld is not pretty. This game has three disparate art styles and consequently everything looks out of place – fine in isolation, but utterly incongruous together. The bland and mostly empty world could hardly look more like stamped-out default assets. The more realistic buildings and facilities clash with the bright and cartoony (and very endearing) Pals. Your gear, especially the guns, makes you look like a Fortnite version of a Horizon Zero Dawn NPC. Much of the controversy around this game has focused on creature lookalikes – which you can fairly argue are creatively lacking, though I don't yet see enough for actual plagiarism allegations – but I'm far more bothered by the lack of a unified theme or art style. (More on this in our early Palworld review.)
Palworld feels all over the place. One minute I'm riding my giant blue ferret through a field and generally having a nice time. The next minute I'm confronting the feasibility of slavery and the benefits of chopping my beloved Pals into bloody pieces. Palworld's undercurrent of brutality – the guns and butchery and abusive labor and unethical science – feels cheap and, ironically, sillier than the openly silly parts of the game. It's the design equivalent of creepypasta; even the barest shock value wears off quickly. I'd rather Palworld lean into the cute, normal creature fantasy rather than pander to this edgy nonsense, or at least pander to the other side too. Add some explicitly non-lethal options and polish the petting, feeding, and riding animations for starters.
It didn't take me long to assemble a laundry list of complaints, and I realize this is a brand-new Early Access game, but a lot of this stuff runs deeper than bugs (which I've encountered refreshingly few of). For example, the enemy AI is as dumb as a bag of hammers. The soundscape is barely even there, with limited Pal cries and almost no music to speak of, and this makes everything feel oddly unceremonious. Crafting some items takes an absurd amount of time even with upgrades and Pal support. It's frustratingly difficult to actually assign Pals to the task you want them to do. The glider is herky-jerky and the grappling hook feels like it's straight-up missing animations. Any sort of uphill movement on a mounted Pal makes their models bounce around like animal balloons. And on and on.
It's a Pal's world
Palworld has all of these problems, and yet I'm having fun with it. My friends are having fun, too. What is it that makes this game more than the sum of its parts?
It owes a lot of its appeal to the tried-and-true survival crafting formula, which I normally don't even like that much. You start by punching trees and before you know it you're picking out carpet for the bar in the left wing of your mansion. It propels you along with upgrades and objectives and level-ups that expand your options while tickling your brain with ever-rising numbers. It's compelling on a base level. It makes it hard to stop playing, at least until you run out of unlocks. As a bonus, Palworld has an extremely nice feature where crafting automatically pulls items from all nearby chests, which erases a lot of genre-standard tedium.
The game also does a good job of giving you a little private space and encouraging you to make it your own. You can build a brutally efficient camp, settle for the bare necessities arranged in the feng shui equivalent of an open-faced sandwich (couldn't be me), role-play a rancher, splurge on decorations, or something in-between. Another big plus is that multiplayer has worked pretty seamlessly for me so far (playing on a friend's dedicated server). But Palworld's single biggest strength, the reason this game works at all, is simple: it's all about the Pals.
Pals are woven into every aspect of Palworld's survival-craft gameplay loop, and this not only gives it a unique feel over similar games – most notably Ark, where the creatures aren't quite so huggable – it also melds all these complicated systems into the more approachable idea of just hanging out and doing stuff with your Pals. I think one underrated aspect of Palworld's success is that, for a non-trivial amount of players, it was their first major exposure to the often intimidating ways of survival-craft games, and the Pals act as a medium to help get your head around things. Need milk? Get a cow Pal in the ranch. Need to water your crops? Put a water Pal in the fields. Need to forge or cook stuff? Hire a fire Pal. It's cartoon logic, but it's understandable logic, and this adds a bit of a handrail to Palworld's progression system without hurting its depth.
Gathering and transporting resources, automating crafting recipes, farming, stockpiling basic materials, base-building, dungeoneering – it's Pals all the way down, and the more stuff you unlock, the more engrossing Pals become. You want to find new Pals, breed stronger Pals, and make sure your Pals are happy (or at least kept alive, you monster). Pals are friends, food, fighters, workers, loot boxes, vehicles, gadgets, and more, all in one cuddly package. It's a Pal's world; you're just living in it.
You get your own weapons and tools, sure, but your character is really just a conductor to a choir of Pals. That's exactly the point: you aren't playing as a bunch of creatures or as some invisible overseer. You're playing as the person (optionally, the sociopath) manually taming and shepherding a bunch of creatures. Whether you're riding them through a field or guiding them at a factory, you get to interact with these little guys up-close, in a way that many creature-collectors don't allow. You can pet them, pick them up, feed and heal them by hand, coo at them as they snooze, and directly command their elemental powers in battle, all in 3D.
The game is rough and the player-Pal relationship is clunky as hell, but it can also be incredibly fun and gratifying. It's absolute catnip to the inner child of many long-time Pokemon fans, and compelling enough systemically to hook people who are more interested in the resources and base-building mechanics. Its bazillion copies sold is proof of that. The secret ingredient to Palworld's success has been staring everyone in the face for years, and while it's not at all perfect, at least now we finally have a game like this. Now we wait and see how future creature-collectors respond to this now glaringly obvious demand.
