By Kimari Rennis

Palworld is unironically one of the best games I have ever played. How did a game with little marketing or attention during development suddenly take the gaming world by storm and win over my heart within minutes of playing? Palworld is a clever and expertly crafted amalgamation of the most successful games to hit the market, creating an addictive concoction of ridiculous, unadulterated fun. So the word spread like wildfire, especially because it feels somewhat like Pokémon.

What is Palworld? The better question to ask is, “What ISN’T Palworld?” Released in early access by indie developer Pocket Pair, Palworld is an open-world, action-adventure, survival, monster-collecting game. To put all those ambitious genres into perspective, imagine a game with a seamless go-anywhere vibe so you can explore, one where you collect materials and food to survive, and craft tools, and weapons to defend yourself from Pokémon-like creatures that inhabit the world around you. Palworld doesn’t just stop there – all of the games’ creatures, known as Pals, can be tamed, and most can be ridden. With the base-building element of the game, your Pals can assist with tasks around your home area and protect it from outside raids. With hundreds of items to craft and hundreds of Pals to tame, you can conquer the land, air, and bosses in their dens and towers of ancient tech.

The most jaw-dropping aspect of Palworld is the guns. Not only can you wield them, but so can your cute little companions – be it a leafy squirrel applying suppressing fire on your shoulder with an SMG, a giant panda dual-wielding missile launchers, decimating your foes, or a rotund sheep mounting a turret in your base. Palworld’s combat is one of a kind, although, weapon-wise, there are hints of Ratchet & Clank’s inspiration.

Another aspect that makes Palworld unique is that the Pals you collect can perform tasks and work for you. Each Pal you capture has an assortment of traits that either help or hinder their efficiency in combat, exploration, or jobs you assign them in your base. For example, a Pal may have a ‘Pacifist’ trait which lowers their attack damage by 20 percent, and a ‘Workaholic’ trait which decreases their sanity decay rate by 15 percent. While that Pal may not be the best for crushing bosses or protecting you well in a fight, it can work on tasks for far longer before needing to rest. That trait makes it a valuable helper.

How exactly can Pals help aside from fighting? Depending on the species, body type, and element of the pal you caught, they can fulfill specific types of tasks in the base which is specified by a series of icons when looking at a Pal’s stats. Pals with ‘handiwork,’ who often have hands, can assist with building furniture and speed up the time to make items at crafting stations. Pals with ‘kindling,’ all of which have the fire element, can automatically cook food and light blacksmith forges at their respective stations. Those with ‘planting’ can plant crops, those with ‘watering’ and can water crops, those with ‘harvesting’ can harvest crops – and the list goes on.

You can create a pretty humble and productive base where there’s a steady flow of fresh crops creating an extravagant cornucopia of food to eat and plenty of wood and stone generated to live comfortably. As I suggested with the ‘workoholic’ trait, all Pals have a sanity bar which starts to go down as they work. After a certain amount of time, they will take a break, relax in a hot spring, or take a nap to regain their sanity. If you’re like me and take the work-life balance of your Pals seriously, you would have made comfortable sleeping quarters with cozy beds and hot tub amenities to make sure pals are well taken care of. 

One of the most jarring things about this game is how quickly a player can go from a loving tamer to an uncaring and neglectful foreman because all of the tools and resources to be a kind of psychopath in this game are readily available. There are snares you can craft to suspend creatures and build campfires under them to burn them alive, a cleaver that replaces the ‘pet’ action with ‘butcher,’ and a podium that dictates how hard you want your animals to work in the base. This isn’t a matter of roleplay either, the consequences of neglect are wildly apparent, so if you underfeed or overwork your pals, they will develop ulcers, eating disorders, and fractured bones. The same goes for humans as you can enslave bandits by capturing them in Pal spheres. This is a level of realism that outrages many but makes the game more interesting to me. The player is responsible for the health and well-being of others, meaning player choice matters.

Palworld became so near and dear to me as quickly as it did because it takes the best elements of games I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into and combines them into a fresh and addictive mashup. One of the immediate thoughts I had while playing this game was that Palworld was the Pokémon Legends: Arceus we deserved. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is an open world, where you can roam around the environment and encounter the cute creatures inhabiting the area. Rather than trudge through tall grass for a random encounter, you discovered and caught Pokémon while they were inhabiting the region that best suited them and the world felt alive. Arceus was a fresh take on a series that felt stagnant for years – and that’s coming from someone who has been playing since Red and Blue on the Gameboy. As fresh and fun as that game felt, it is not without its flaws. The performance and resolution are low quality. The graphics are muddied and low-poly. The animations for attacks and characters are lackluster and frequently reused. Interactions with your Pokémon are limited to catching them, staring at them, and battling with them. For a kid walking around for days capturing Pokémon as a job, somehow you and your companions don’t need to eat. There were no active competitors to the likes of Pokémon, so that experience was all we had, and gave it our hesitant praise.

Where Pokémon Legends: Arceus holds itself back, Palworld goes all in, giving us what Pokémon fans like myself have been craving for years; a deeply immersive and breathtaking experience. Each creature is unique and has a purpose be it in having unique combat abilities in turning the tide of battle or its utility in the base. In Pokémon I felt like I caught them just to fill the Pokedex and only stuck to a handful of Pokémon to go through the game, leaving dozens of creatures to collect dust in their Pokeballs. In Palworld, even a creature as weak and adorable as Lamball can physically be carried as a shield because of its combat ability. Its handiwork allows it to build and craft within your base and it’s one of the few pals that can produce wool which is an essential crafting items. The lack of evolution in Palworld is a benefit as I don’t have to force myself to use the Pals I caught in combat to level them up and fill my collection. Each Pal shines on their own and the interactions that you have with them are cute and memorable.

I am a veteran Ark: Survival Evolved player, an open-world survival game where you battle and tame dinosaurs. To see the engram progression system where you use points to unlock the blueprints for equipment, furniture is exciting as it hooks me into a cycle of playing the game to level up and craft new things. I’ll be the first to admit that Palworld’s building mechanics leave Ark in the dust. Palworld removes the clunkiness of Ark’s base-building mechanics so rather than building each component by hand, there’s a menu to build foundations and walls on the fly. I remember in my early days of playing Ark with my friends in high school, and you couldn’t walk too far away from the host of the game, or else an invisible barrier would appear stopping you in your tracks. It felt like an invisible tether was bound to us, halting our exploration of a world rife with dinosaurs. When my friend, also an Ark fanatic, and I learned that we could individually explore the vast terrain Palworld had to offer, we were elated.

My friend and I were so enthralled with the game that we woke up one morning and decided to play until the day’s end. Our session lasted 13 hours and in that time, we created a humble beach home, moved to a bamboo forest, and created a cliffside bungalow, had a few run-ins with the local authorities, enslaved bandits that raided us, did business with a black marketeer, flew around the world collecting massive pal eggs, hatched powerful pal variants, sought out bandits to raid, went cave-dwelling, manufactured steel weapons and pelt armor, and took out the first boss in the game before we called it a night.

I am addicted to Palworld. It is a phenomenal mashup of all the games that have siphoned hundreds of hours out of me, creating a gaming experience I can’t get enough of. Even as an early access product, Palworld is a fantastic and fun game and deserves all of the praise it is receiving. It’s hard to admit, but I have been so spoiled by this game that it’s hard to even think about playing the games that inspired it because Palworld frankly does so many things better.

Senior Intern Kimari Rennis, who has been with the NYVGCC for many years, will graduate from the NYU Game Center this semester.

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