Palworld Preview

After waking up on the mysterious Palpagos Island, you'll set off on an adventure with just a few cryptic words, "The towers are the key... ...the tree holds the truth". Set out into the open-world setting barely clothed, with nothing but your fists, and build a self-sustaining empire of guns, Pals, and production facilities... or enslave everyone to your rule.

This is the only bit of story you get as you start your journey across the weird world of Palworld, the latest release by the team Pocketpair, who you might recognise for its first release, Craftopia. As you set out to explore Palpagos Island, you'll find the strange amalgamation of genres that await you.

Starting my adventure, I was hesitant, sceptical, doubtful, even contrarian towards Palworld. I entered from the perspective of a person who sincerely doubted it would be the game for them, but I still started my journey.

Palworld incorporates a quest-like system that gives you a bit of a look as to what you'll be doing to find the answer to those first few confusing words. The first order of business is creating shelter by punching trees around the world, gathering wood, and building your first house to survive the cold that'll come with night. You have a couple of basic options to create a home at the start, and shelter is easy to come by once you've mastered the otherwise confusing controls.

Not soon thereafter, however, you'll be tasked with capturing your first Pal, and that's when the game really opens up (and the quintessential piece of the preview that I need to touch on before we move on to anything else). The creature-collecting aspect is pretty much the integral point of the game, the bread and butter of Palworld, and what you'll be incorporating into every aspect thenceforth.

It's not too complicated — to capture a Pal, you'll need to craft a Pal Sphere, beat up the nearest Pal with your state-of-the-art Wooden Club, and then, when it's health is low enough, throw your Pal Sphere at it. At first, you'll start with a 100% success rate after you've dealt some damage, but as you find harder Pals, this diminishes.

This becomes the core of everything you do, and it's what makes the game stand out from every other in the genre. Every Pal you unlock comes with a slew of traits, powers, passives, and Partner Skills that you'll use to make your advancements simpler. Currently, there are 111 Pals that you can find and capture around the world, and they all serve different purposes both in terms of your base and your combat elements.

After you set up a Palbox, you'll have established your first base of operations (likely just off the cliffside). From there, you'll be tasked by the tutorial quests to upgrade your base by building specific technologies — this is where the progression and crafting elements come into play.

Every action takes you one step closer to levelling up. Catching a Pal for the first time, catching a Pal thereafter, and even catching a Pal for the 10th time (that's where you get a special bonus). Chopping trees, mining stone and ores, fighting, crafting... you name it; you gain EXP. As you level up, you unlock items in your Technology — every level unlocks up to six new things for you to craft. At first, levels and technologies come quickly, as you get the essential tools for survival like weapons, workbenches, torches, and even fire. 

The progression focuses around levelling up in order to get more technologies and then using these to advance further. Your base soon becomes a hub for all things materials, where you'll be able to farm an endless supply of wood, stone, and even food and other materials. By capturing the right Pals and setting them to work, you'll eventually get a self-sustaining base — your Chikipis will lay eggs that will help the Gumoss remain fed to plant berries, which Pengullets will water, and the Chikipis will harvest. This begins an automation system where every Pal plays its role in the base; you then start getting the supplies and capacity to incorporate more complex systems.

The Work Suitability will tell you what each Pal can do around your base, of which they can have 12. Every Pal of the same type will do the same things, which means that catching too many Gumoss won't really give you one with Watering capabilities. To ensure your automated base prospers, you'll want to get a variety of Pals, and with each new one you unlock, you get more materials, automation, technologies, and battle options.

It all becomes a self-fulfilling gameplay loop that makes you want to head out to find new types of Pals — not only to fill the Paldeck but also to enrich your base. It also gives a gratifying feeling to the catching, as you won't be getting a bunch of them to store in a box and never seeing them again — every time you return to base, everything is in full swing. You'll see over a dozen pals running around doing their duties, sleeping, and eating, making the world feel alive and capturing more Pals purposeful.

Once you have already finished your base and automation, it's time to get to the meat of the game — going out and finding Pals. Combat is relatively simple — you can have one Pal out of your Party (out of five Pals in the party) out at any given time. They will use one of their three skills to fight against any foe that opposes you, and you can choose whether you leave them out or call them back at the press of a button.

The combat feels surprisingly smooth and layered for a game that's mostly about trying to defeat Pals to capture them. In fact, the highly advertised gun aspect doesn't come in until quite later into the game, as you'll first have to depend on primitive weaponry (like clubs, bows, and spears) and your Pals to defeat your foes. It feels very comfortable to play, as a dodge roll mechanic gives you the survival options you need to endure the incoming hits, and as you and your Pals level up, exploring the world becomes easier.

Everything you do has a purpose, too. You can catch every Pal you encounter to get experience and more hands to work in your base (also because you obtain their items as if you'd killed them), or you can fight them all to accumulate experience through cold-hearted murder. You'll be rewarded for exploring different areas and different times finding new Pals to acquire — going out at nighttime is an entirely different experience than daytime.

You'll spend equal time early in the game between your base and exploring, but as you unlock more technologies and get armed with a lot of Pals, slotting levels into the weight system, and food, you'll explore further out. Spread across the world are two different types of bosses that you'll encounter: the world bosses and towers. The former are enemies that you'll want to go out of your way to face off against, as these are also Pals that you can capture with ever-powerful abilities that you can take into the world. The latter work as your main progression blockers, with egregious amounts of life and criminal amounts of strength that you'll have to take your best equipment and Pals to defeat, especially since you only have 10 minutes to complete the task.

That, then, becomes the ever-gratifying gameplay loop that makes Palworld so enjoyable. It's already a pleasure going out to find 111 Pals to get, but you have so much to do with them, too, that forming a Party of five feels nigh impossible. There are so many goals and things to accomplish that you never feel like you're out of things to do — you'll want to head out to catch Pals to catch them all, improve your automation, get a strong Party to head out to fight stronger Pals and explore the world to find world bosses and towers.

It's so perfectly moulded together you'd think that it's a genre that's been long in the making; it shows that Pocketpair knows what they're doing with something so obscure and unexplored as an open-world creature-collecting survival craft title with automation elements sprinkled in. They play it nonchalantly as if it were the most normal and common thing in the world because they managed it as such, and I — sincerely — cannot wait for more updates to be released to play more of it.