Paleo Pines Preview

Paleo Pines is a colourful and cartoony farming sim developed by Italic Pig and published by Modus Games. In it, you'll play on the titular charming island, where you'll spend time meeting the townfolk, exploring the land, and taming dinosaurs.

I've been following the game for a while now on Twitter, as the colourful and cute graphics caught my attention when I first came across it, but the real hook was the unique idea of using dinosaurs instead of tools. Whilst I was very excited about it and had high hopes for the adventure, I didn't quite expect it to make that much of a difference.

In large part, this is because having them brought so much charm and purpose to the game. I usually get a bit impatient and bored during the early game, possibly because I've done it a million times across many titles, but this time around, I was enthralled. What usually is a long grind of breaking rocks and logs for hours on end was a bonding experience with my dinos. Not only is it exciting to go out and find new ones to tame, but they made the stale and repetitive farming sim beginning of tiling, watering, and harvesting or clearing rubble over and over so much more fun.

The fact that I was levelling them up and gaining trust with them as we did chores together made the experience different but also fun and rewarding. As they gain levels, they gain more stamina, and you get to spend more time with them. Additionally, different dinosaurs have different strengths, and you'll need to spend time with many of them to accomplish all the goals and tasks available. This was great because I ended up bonding with all of the dinosaurs and not just obsessing over Lucky, the one you start off with.

Although I was very excited to try out others and their tool abilities, I was endlessly grateful that I was stuck with only her for a while. Not only did it help me get a grasp of the feature before diving in for another dinosaur, but it also made it so much more rewarding when I got to ride the ones I tamed. It felt like a real upgrade to have gone from watering one tile at a time to just using my Gallimimus and watering a whole lot of them.

Because you only have one dinosaur at the beginning and can't do much due to lack of stamina, the game forces you to go out into the wild and explore. This helps acclimate to everything before running off trying to catch 'em all, and it also stops you for long enough to get to meet the townfolk and understand the other non-dino features.

One small quarrel I did have throughout my experience is that the tutorials and quests were a bit uninformative. Whilst I usually get overwhelmed when being bombarded with walls of text (I have big attention span issues), the lack of hand-holding got me stuck for a long time. I had to learn most mechanics through trial and error, which caused me to feel a bit stagnated and bored at the beginning — a total of about an hour or two. That being said, however, once I broke through the other side and understood how things worked, the game really picked up.

Unlike most farming sims I've played, where you end up spending an enormous amount of time just tilling, watering, and harvesting (at least for a good chunk of the early game), in Paleo Pines, I found that I mostly explored or foraged. Once you get a buddy that helps you water the crops, you're basically free to run out of your farm immediately and go exploring the island. This was really fun, especially once I understood how the journal feature worked: when you equip it and approach any new object, the character jots down a ton of important information that works better than any spam of tutorials will. This can help you with anything from learning about the dinosaurs to finding out what new items do, and I like that you can easily access the information at any time.

Aside from riding across Paleo Pines in search of new dinosaurs and foraging materials, you'll spend your time doing missions for the cast of characters. Although the dialogue and interactions aren't too in-depth, they are enough to keep you occupied with tasks, get to know their personalities, and have a nice break from obsessing over which dinosaur you want to tame next. The more I interacted with them — particularly with Pippin — the more I wished there was more depth in the interactions, however; I grew fond of some of the characters.

Whilst the dinosaur part took a while for me to grasp, once I did, I really liked how smoothly they fit into the game in its entirety. Not only is it easy to tame and interact with them once you get a grip on the system, but there's also a lot of freedom and no violence: you can put them together in a pen without fearing they won't be there in the morning; they won't be as happy, but you won't be grieving the loss of your favourite dinos. This also goes for the exploration, as you can run and walk past them without agitating them at all: everything is very lighthearted and PG, something rare — if not non-existent — in almost every other game with dinosaurs. 

With the little time I got to spend in the game, I am so excited and happy for Paleo Pines' release — perhaps even more so than before. The developer has done a fantastic job with the nuanced idea of dinos instead of tools, and it brought much more freshness to the genre than I anticipated. Although there are some minor issues here and there — such as some glitches, the lack of proper explanations, and cumbersome movement at times — it's obvious there's a lot of love poured into it so far. Check out the game when it releases on the 26th of September!