#I'm addicted to palworld

[microbihon]

He's just SO COOL AAAAAAA

[the-sleepy-dreamer]

I'm kinda addicted to Palworld right now. Also I love Quivern, such a big fluffy baby <3

[demonfox38]

Completed (Early Access Content) - Palworld

Look, man. I know I can't call this an official completion, given that the game is still in early access. But I trashed all available bosses and 10/10'ed each of those little Pal bastards, so that has to be indicative of some level of mastery, right?

Or maybe I've got to explain why I disappeared down this hole for the last few months.

I'm not what you'd call a cutting-edge kind of person when it comes to technology. Considering that most of my game consoles are old enough to purchase cigarettes and alcohol, it's safe to say I'm fairly retro. A throwback. Happiest with something made between 1986 and 2005 (or, at the very least, looks and acts like that.) Getting in on an early access for a game is not my thing at all.

So, "Palworld" is a bit of an anomaly. Maybe, in many ways.

"Palworld" is a hybrid crafting, survival, base management, third person shooter, and creature catching game. It stars your customizable character de jour who is forced to survive on an isolated island full of inhospitable terrain, monsters of various levels of aggression, and asshole humans. What's the secret behind the looming towers and massive Yggdrasil-like tree glowing in the distance? I don't know. The tree part of the content isn't out, yet. But, you can at least explore the island and wail on the asses of those that dare to conquer it for their own varied ends. That's at least 100 hours of content right there!

Since its early access release in January of 2024, "Palworld" has garnered a fair amount of attention. Good. Bad. All over the place. Definitely a case of the old phrase "all publicity is good publicity." While not the first in terms of creation when it comes to edgy monster collecting games (with "Megami Tensei" loudly coughing in some dusty old corner), it is unique in its game style mix. Perhaps not visually unique enough, given how certain "Pokémon" fans were sharpening their Honedges after the very first glance they took at this game. Its publisher having a previous game that openly used AI art generation didn't help its credibility, either! (Although, that game also is about rewarding players for detecting art made by an AI opponent a la an elementary-school art class "Among Us", so judge accordingly.)

I get it. I've got some degree of Nintendo brain rot, too. Did you check my avatar and username? But, I also know that Nintendo can and will obliterate anything in its path with Death Star-adjacent precision and power, especially when it comes to any potential IP infringement. Hell, they crumpled two emulators into a black hole mere weeks after this game's early access released. If they had any notion that something was off with this game, they'd have it annihilated—for better or worse.

Like most modern games, my attention was drawn to this title via watching several streamers play. (In particular, PatStaresAt, WoolieVersus, and Vinesauce, if you're wanting names.) Now, I'd like to be coy and pretend that online videos don't influence my interest in games, but I also own a copy of the SNES game "Lagoon" because I loved watching PJDiCesare clown on it. Hell, I only backed "Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night" after watching Liam Allen-Miller replicate "Castlevania"-Metroidvania physics in a YouTube preview! I see a video, my brain makes judgements, I variably engage in commerce. And, to be honest, I like games like this. "Breath of the Wild." "Pokémon Legends: Arceus." "Minecraft." I wanted a game like this, so hell. I was willing to gamble $30.00 USD on this, bugs and unfinished status and all.

I think I may have gotten my money's worth out of this.

Was the game play that addicting, or was I in a depression spiral triggered by bad working conditions at my job and my maternal grandmother's health issues precipitating more labor on my family's behalf? Yes. To which part of that question? Yes. While the game attempts to guide the player via an early game tutorial and tasks for building up your bases, you're mostly left on your own to build both the world and yourself in whatever image you'd like. Want to build a Babylonian tower to offend whatever god created this world? Okay. Want to drop everything on the floor like an agitated toddler and/or "Resident Evil 0" protagonist? Whatever makes you happy! Want to build a rocket launcher and shoot it at a dragon's face? That can be done! It just might take some time.

Because the game consists of different play styles, I found myself alternating often between game loop sets. Usually, it broke into a stack of tasks like this:

Determine nearest threat (monster fighting.)

Gather materials (crafting.)

Return to/establish a base (base management.)

Build what I can (crafting/base management.)

Loop steps 2-4 until items of desire were created (crafting/base management.)

Gather/raise Pals to attack nearest threat (monster fighting.)

Return to Step 2 for final repairs and/or weapon creation (crafting.)

Attack threat (monster fighting.)

Reset to step 2 on failure and step 1 on success.

While catching and raising monsters tends to garner you the most experience points, your character will more or less remain just a nuisance to a bulk of the major threats in the game. At best, you've got a rocket launcher, an automatic rifle, a sword, and shot-deflecting shields and armor. You put out maybe around 600 damage with a weapon that takes a second to reload. The bosses you fight? They can have anywhere from 30,000 to 200,000 HP. When it comes to survival, it isn't about how much damage you can take or give. It's about what you learn and how you deploy your so-called Pals.

If you are planning on taking a shot every time I write the word "Pokémon" in this review, you might want to switch off the liquor now and move to a soda. Do your liver a favor.

A lot of the game's rules can be reduced to "Pokémon - 1" or "Pokémon / 2". This includes:

How many monsters you can take with you (5 instead of 6)

How many moves they have (3 instead of 4)

Your level cap (50 vs. 100, but that may just be an early access limitation)

How many elements are in game (9 vs. 18. Also, don't expect much in the way of complex monster typing line-ups. You may end up overthinking fights.)

Having said that, the complexity here isn't lost. You're obviously doing a lot more home ec to keep your bases up to snuff. Where "Palworld" really succeeds is in its battle speed, scale, and options. Pals will automatically engage based on whatever aggression level you have them set at, performing moves without your instruction. Several different monster types and human factions can be thrust together to duke it out. It can get quick and chaotic, often forcing you to get your ass out of the line of fire. When you do want to get manual? Well, hell. Some Pals can be a ridable mount, and some can act as living artillery for your use. Is it responsible to give a giant panda a grenade launcher? Well, who's gonna stop you? The cops?

Also, it's awesome that you can teach Pals whatever moves exist via fruits. It's nice not to have to look up some table online for move compatibility. (A shame that the same can't be said about its breeding, but more on that in a bit.)

"Palworld" certainly has a different take on its so-called Pals, especially in compared to "Pokémon" titles. Don't expect the first monster you pick up to go on and become some powerhouse fueled by respect and love for you as a caretaker. There are Pals that are great, and there are Pals that suck. (The game is more than happy to tell you which is which in its Paldeck.) You're rewarded for getting at least 10 of them, but you won't have the space to keep 10 of every species. You can slaughter Pals for parts or mush a bunch of them together a la "Shin Megami Tensei" to make the surviving unit stronger. Basically, you're expected to keep updating and consolidating your inventory of friends so that you can cut down on your work loop time and challenge the other assholes vying for territory on Palpagos Island. (Seriously—that is its name!) You're not really supposed to be getting attached to any of them.

And yet…well, the nature of a person eventually reveals itself, doesn't it?

While the game allows you to take many unscrupulous actions, you're rarely rewarded for acting like an inflamed, gaping asshole. Yeah, you can slaughter your Pals, but you're losing out on making others stronger if you do that. You can capture other humans like you would a Pal, but they won't provide much in the way of help on your bases or in battle. (Apparently, you can sell them off, too? Fucked up all around.) Hell, you can even kill NPCs and end up having to bolt off like a "Grand Theft Auto" protagonist when the cops show up to bust your ass! About the only defiance I got away with routinely was ransacking Wildlife Sanctuaries, and even that required me to sneak around at night and keep a low profile.

There is a bit of a conflict going on between the game's tone and appearance. It very much wants to be the edgy "Pokémon" game any average teenager would dream up (again, with certain Atlus RPGs coughing and wheezing for attention in the background.) Supplementary journals and Paldeck texts describe a world full of violence, blood, animal trafficking, suffering, death, and birds with cocaine addictions. (I'm not kidding—it's literally the bastard cop's monster of choice.) But, the monsters look like an average social media artist's attempts at combining Pokémon species together, and the humans all have some degree of generic anime cuteness to them. It's hard to take the leader of a bunch of martyrous pyromaniacs seriously when he looks like the protagonist to some Sega Dreamcast rhythm game. (Also, why he has an electric/dragon type as his Pal of choice when he leads a bunch of fire freaks is beyond me.) 

At this point, I wouldn't say the music is much to write home about, either. It tries to kick up for encounters, letting you know how much danger you are in (from piddly little twinkling music for typical cannon fodder to bombastic choral arrangements for tough sons of bitches.) A lot of times, it can be rather quiet. This didn't bother me with "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," but it does bother me here, especially when I have to take 15-20 minutes to work in my base. I think what the game needs is something like "Minecraft"'s Mice on Venus track. Just a few pieces of music to interrupt the quiet when it's gone on for five or ten minutes.

I'm also not super thrilled with the breeding system in "Palworld." With "Pokémon" games, you generally know what you're getting based on who the mother in the coupling is. (Well, barring the use of specialty items, I suppose. Speaking of things that annoy me…) Here? About the only guarantee you get is if both parents are of the same species. The resulting couplings for other species isn't random, but it is a weird mess. Generally, you can assume the resulting offspring to be of a poorer quality than at least one of the parents, if species of different rarity are mixed. Through on top of that several structural, item, and time-based requirements, and you've got a very expensive and irritating system to work around. Honestly, this was the thing that finally broke me into looking up help guides online. It's just that off-putting.

If you are looking for a breeding calculator: palword.gg has you covered. Mostly. I think I did run into some issues there as well, but I don't know if I read something wrong or was just stupid tired when I set something up.

"How about bugs?", you might be asking.

"There's no Bug type in this game," I would reply.

Maybe you'd start hitting me with a shoe after that.

But, in terms of glitches I encountered? I played from versions 0.1.3.0 to 0.1.5.0, so I saw my fair share of issues that came and went. The biggest problem as of 0.1.5.0 involves terrain clipping and occasionally being shoved beneath the map. (Big Pal bodies + me going all Goemon Ishikawa XIII on them resulted in some unfortunate subterranean exploration.) Generally, I got myself back into the map without too much struggle, but there were times where I did have to respawn myself. I also lost several boss captures to a combination of freezing status + a rocket launcher round blasting them into the horizons beyond, so that was unfortunate. There was also a bug where you could get the game's dungeons to respawn bosses to another Pal type if you didn't like what you got, but I started having issues with the dungeon's barriers failing to drop on the boss's death when I screwed around with that, so maybe just stick with what you get. I also had the occasional text goof-up where my instructions would be in Japanese instead of English. Given the Goemon commentary above, you may surmise that this was not a huge deal for me. Still goofy, though.

If you'd like, the game offers you quite the list of customizable settings to alter your experience. I'd highly recommend playing around with them, particularly when you are vulnerable to taking a one-way trip to the Backrooms via a bad clip. It's one thing to lose your inventory to a fight you lost; it's another to lose your inventory to an issue with collision detection. Do yourself a favor and remove that penalty. I also eventually grew tired of the exponential experience curve and jacked up the multipliers for experience as high as they could go. I put several hundred hours into this game, man. And that was on top of working in a half-staffed job while babysitting my mom's dog for weeks while she got my grandma into an assistant living facility. All of these bitches needed a break.

Also—for the love of your hands, please flip the "Hold to Toggle Interaction" setting to On in your control style of choice. You can recap a shredded controller stick, but you can't recap your fingertips.

While I spent a lot of time on this game, I also spent a lot of time on this game with good reason. Even in its unfinished state, I had a good time. In the midst of building up my first character—a punished tribute to an Abrahamic icon forced to repeat his edict from God once more—I kept thinking about making the next character. Doing it all over again. Honeymooning it. There is a risk that this game doesn't get any further than where it's at now, but I can't say that where it's at is a bad place.

So, you can't get to a giant, sparkly tree. Boo hoo. There's a lot of other good stuff to see. Maybe even conquer, if you're up to it.

[boss-poss]

My buddy who's gotten capital A Addicted to palworld gifted me and three other friends the game to play with him so I've managed to get a few hours in by now and my impression is thus:

The game is by no means groundbreaking, or even that great mechanically but it does scratch that monster collection itch even better than quite a few official pokemon entries. It also scratches some other itches as well, namely survival crafting and exploration. The world is kind of empty but there's resources littered everywhere to hoover up and pals wandering all over to catch and hunt but my favorite part by far has been the roster.

I don't think there's a single pokepal I've come across that I straight up hate. Every one I've seen so far has something to it that I like and I have to applaud that. There are so many goddamn pokemon that look stupid or have lazy designs and I think the point of difference here is that none of the pals are overdesigned. Even the basic dire wolf, simple as it is, is appealing because it looks like a wolf pokemon. No bells or whistles, no stupid colors or weird attachments, it looks like a cartoony creature monster thing representative of real animal. I also adore the combat integration of some of them, namely the fox you can pick and use a flamethrower. These special abilities give each creature an extra niche in addition to their typing which adds value to even the ones you replace later on. It's a kind of an ingenious system and one that I'm sure the big N is already planning to poach.

It's abundantly clear that the devs made the game they wanted to play and you can feel that desire holding it together at the (sometimes poorly stitched) seams of nearly every aspect. It feels like a pokemon game from a parallel universe where their Nintendo was slightly different and it's insane to me that "pokemon knockoff with guns" isn't some thrown together cash grab that garners attention only by way of its sheer audacity.

I've mostly played on someone else's game but I got a little solo time in and even then it still retains nearly all of its integrity. I get why so many people are playing it, I do. I hope that the success allows the devs to polish and add to the game because while it's pretty rough now, it could be one of the best creature collector games ever made with the right balances, changes, and additions. Nintendo should be worried, because a gimmicky early access ripoff just floored their last decade of entries like it was nothing. Imagine an actual triple-A attempt on the throne. I still think $30 is a bit steep for the game as it is now but the multiplayer definitely lessens the sting (as does getting it for free).

[slimescout]

Depresso

So I've become addicted to the new Palworld game and I absolutely love this little grump.

If haven't played Palworld yet I highly recommend it. It's in early access and yet runs way better than Pokémon scarlet and violet.

Also I'm getting way better at free hand now!

[ushioliddell-blog]

Remember one thing : in a reset, there will ALWAYS have person excited and disappointed. Impossible to make everyone happy.

Because there is two types of players : the tryharders, who loves to play hard to grind, who loves to explore and fight and the casual, who want to build things, stay calm at a point and who have big projects.

This reset is a good thing for people who loves to tryhard. It's like when you play Tarkov with his reset of stuff. You're happy to go searching ressources. That's what Tarkov is all about, right ? For the casual..... absolutely not. The casuals are more into stories and building things. They REALLY don't like to begin again and again.

It's like (and i ill take a personal example ) in Palworld. In Palworld, my base was destroyed two or three time in a row. It almost made me quit the game. Why ? Because i spent time on it and to see it being destroyed anger me XD Now it's better because it is in stone (don't worry ) but i don't think i will be good when i will see all the housing i did going into flames again. Why I didn't quit ? Don't know. Maybe too addicted. Probably.

That's exactly the same here. There will be people happy to discover a new world and new adventures and people who will not. And that's perfectly normal.

What can we do ? Wait. To see how it's going. And take a step back. That's what i'm gonna do. And continue to write fanfictions in my corner.

[black-kitties]

Well, I did it.

I've been hopelessly addicted to a new videogame (Palworld) and now I'm making videogame fanfiction 🫠

[divinityunleashed]

Apologies for delayed responses, folks!

I'm growing addicted to Palworld lmao.

Why is it such a good game for such a tiny file size of 5GB's, and it's a game preview, and there's so much you can do without having your hand held 24/7!

[brattysmiley]

Sorry for the lack of activity here, I'm addicted to Palworld and I'm busy as well at my training all of the week.

[koopa-kingdom-and-guests]

Been addicted to palworld recently. Was on a server with a buncha folks but I'm the last one that regularly hangs out lol. This game is very silly

[boss-poss]

I've kinda gotten interested in the pokemon gun slavery game since I learned it was actually a base building survival type deal but $30 seems like a lot to pay to watch someone piss on an established franchise. I'd bite for 15, maybe even 20 for a completed game, but I just feel like I'm getting hustled for the current price. It's funny watching nintendo take knee to the balls after decades of stagnant slop but I won't be overcharged for event, sorry. It's a project made out of spite and designed to fire a few shots in the air to scare a company but it isn't really anything else. I think I'll just wait for like a year and catch it on a sale.

Otherwise I would like to see more contenders in the creature collection ring. I can't go back and play old pokemon games because the level of difficulty is nonexistent I've realized as time has gone on that the combat system is really fucking basic and broken. Give me an actual attempt at making an even semi-original competitor with a decently balanced combat system and some challenge and I'd happily throw money at it, full price even.

I've said for years that the hard part about standing against pokemon isn't about making something better than the original IP, it's about putting in a consistent level of effort and continuing to do so while trying to make a fun video game. Literally just do anything besides rushing out half-baked entries designed to siphon money from recognition and nostalgia. Literally any effort at all it seems.

Palworld, when viewed on it's own, looks like a modded unity game with someone's OCs added in and it still makes the official pokemon releases of the last 5 years look like absolute shit out of a butt. Scarlet and Violet in particular look like cheap copies in comparison and it really sells it to me that pokemon kind of needs to die. When the big name IP is so absolutely dunked on by an early access indie project it shows that the only real staying power it has is monopoly.

Pokemon exists as it does today only really because adults with money get addicted to nostalgia and Nintendo is an extremely litigious company. How many pokemon fan games have met their axe? How many developers have avoided even trying to make a similar game because featuring things even tangentially like a pokemon is just begging for a cease and desist from the hip? There should be multiple fan projects that consist of all regions and pokemon wrapped up together in one package but there aren't because the plumber's heel finds them every time. The greedy giant jealously guards his golden goose.

I don't think I'll even probably buy palworld, in fact I think no one will remember it this time next year, but we do need more games like it. Nintendo won't take this sitting down and if the developers can somehow avoid getting C&D'd into the dirt, I really hope that more people try to make the pokemon game they want, not just eat at the trough and be grateful for anything. If you want good and entertaining pocket monsters you need to say so by being the change you want to see in the world. Realize that collectible creatures aren't exclusive to pokemon and Nintendo's control of that genre only extends so far. They know this and that's why they act so aggressively to keep that the truth.

In fact, if I was a holder of the digimon (or the monster rancher) IP I'd be getting some talks going at least. Players are hungry on a lean diet and they've just gotten a taste of a thicker, more nutritious gruel. How quickly and happily they would run to people serving even cafeteria food? Bring something truly delicious and you could boot the king off his throne.