Palworld: First Impressions

With more than six million people playing Palworld, almost two million of them literally playing as I write, I imagine the last thing the world needs right now is a First Impressions piece from someone who hasn't even finished the tutorial. Well, tough, That's what's coming.

I will at least try to keep it brief and to the point. To the bullet point, in fact.

Connectivity, Bugs, Practicalities.

Playing solo with multiplayer not enabled as I have been, the game has performed flawlessly so far. There's been no lag and I've not seen a glitch or a bug in just under five hours. Exiting and re-entering the game is swift, saves are automatic and it all feels very competent and clean, especially for an Early Access title. Of course, I may just have been lucky...

Character Creation

For Early Access, again, there's a very decent amount of choice. Palworld employs the newly-popular, ungendered (Body Type A/B) archetypes, something I always like to see. The default character I got was, almost ironically, I thought, a redhead, but they looked unusually and satisfyingly chunky, which I thought might be making a point of some kind. Then again, maybe the first character you see is random. I haven't tried to make another character yet so I can't say for certain. 

Now I look at the screenshot I took, though, I rather wish I'd stuck with that default option. She looks cheerful and friendly. The character I made looks bad-tempered and a bit sharp-faced. I get the feeling she might not like me all that much. It's lucky I only have to look at the back of her head, most of the time.

For now, I'm stuck with her unless I re-roll and start a new world. There's no cosmetic remodelling available yet. It is on the schedule, though. I think I'll be taking advantage of it, when it arrives. 

Graphics and Animation.

The world and the environments within it, the few I've seen (Meadows, small woods and rivers, a lot of mossy ruins.) look very pretty, if not all that detailed. They've gone for a cartoonish vibe that reminds me of a certain kind of kids TV show; it's a rounded, softened, cartoon-realism that's almost not quite really one thing or the other. I always find the style a bit uncanny valley in a show but it works a lot better in a video game. It certainly works well here. 

The character animations, I like. They're bold, broad and lively with no attempt to mimic real-world practice. You try chopping down a tree by swinging at it left, right, left, right, like the pendulum of a clock. See how far you get. Feels great in a game, though. 

Pals (Every creature you see is a "Pal", as far as I can tell, except maybe the huge, named ones.) are goofy and comic, as expected. Lamballs, for example, are hysterical when you kill them - they just roll and roll like tumbleweed until they hit something that stops them, if it ever does. I haven't watched for long enough to see if Pals exhibit much character beyond the obvious species tropes but I suspect they might. 

UI

I found it both comfortable to use and pleasing to look at. What more can you ask? 

Building uses a radial menu, something I'm generally not pleased to see, but I'm finding this one quite intuitive. 

About the only complaint I have, apart from the almost inevitable one about the lack of screenshot and Hide UI commands, is that I haven't yet found out how to give myself a free cursor. There have been a few moments when there was something on screen I thought I ought to be able to click on (A scroll bar, for example.) but haven't been able to find a way to do it. I suspect I just need to read the Options menus more carefully.

Survival Mechanics

Very simple and familiar, if mildly overtuned for my taste, although there don't seem to be many of them, at least not to begin with. Hunger and cold are the only ones I can remember off-hand and cold just goes away as soon as you make yourself some clothes. Hunger was a nuisance at first but now, at Level 7, it's just slightly annoying. I suspect it will become all but unnoticeable before long.

Pals seem to have more Survival issues than the player, as far as I can see. They need to be fed, kept sane and given somewhere to sleep. You get a running commentary on screen of the various issues they're having but even at this early stage, most of them have fixes that can be handled autonomically, for example by placing a feed dish and filling it with berries so they can go help themselves when they get hungry. 

All the different species have their own strengths and weaknesses, something I assume will form a major part of the gameplay eventually, but so far I've been able to ignore all of that and just let them get on with it. They seem perfectly capable of looking after themselves, most of the time, except for Cativas, who are a right, royal pain in the neck. I only had one and I already regret catching him. I've had to retire him from active service because he wanted more attention than all the others put together. Typical bloody cat.

Difficulty

Just about all of the above, I should stress, is entirely optional. The game comes with three preset difficulty levels - Casual, Normal and Hard -  plus Custom, where you can adjust a wide range of parameters to taste. As I usually do with any new game, I started on "Normal" so I could assess what the developers intentions might have been and I'm finding it very comfortable so far. 

I could happily carry on this way indefinitely. Should I feel like changing anything, though, that option remains permanently available. You can switch difficulties from the main menu at any time, including using the custom settings to tweak things to your precise tastes. I'm curious if you can use that to finesse the difficulty level of Boss fights, without having to create a whole, new, easier world. That would be a very welcome innovation.

I probably will change the death penalty after a while, so I get to keep all my stuff when I die, instead of having to run back and pick it up, a time-wasting process that just seems fatuous in a single-player game. I might also turn off base raids, a feature I'm not mad keen on in any of these survival games, except the starving Pals who keep attacking my food store do drop some very handy keys that open locked chests. Until and unless I discover an alternative source of keys, I suppose I'll have to put up with the raids.

Combat and Capture

Hmm. Mostly it's very easy, until it isn't. You have to reduce a Pal's health to make it easier to catch, which is safe and simple on lower level Pals... until you discover they're social and every other Pal around piles on. They also have a loooong leash, so running them off when you get too many isn't always a successful strategy. 

As for fighting anything above your level, probably don't bother. I did manage to subdue and catch something a level above me but the captured Pal drops down to your level so there's not much point. There are also some aggressive higher-level mobs wandering about, even in the Tutorial area. It reminded me of the zone-sweepers in early EverQuest. When I got killed by some flying mob, it felt highly reminiscent of being killed by a griffin in West Commonlands. 

In fact, the whole thing feels weirdly everquesty at times. Even the supposedly Pokemonesque capture mechanic reminds me just as much of those many, many quests in EQII, where you have to fight something until it hits about 10% health before using a quest item to capture it and take it back to the questgiver. I've never played a Pokemon game and yet I felt right at home with the process.

Pals

I guess I might as well cover them here, now I've talked about catching them. They are weird. Not what they look like, which is exactly as you'd expect, but what they do, which very definitely is not. 

They bustle around my base, turning their paws to everything. They start off mining, logging and gathering but as soon as I start to do anything, like build a crafting station or some furniture, half a dozen Pals come barrelling up and start hammering away alongside me. It's great! The more Pals, the faster things go. Combines that take a minute to make solo take maybe ten seconds with a pack of Pals.

And it does feel surprisingly good. About an hour and a half in yesterday, I was beginning to regret my purchase. Things were going just fine but it was clearly yet another Survival game like too many I've played lately and I was wondering why I'd thought I needed another one... and then my first Pal, a Lamball, joined in and helped me make a bed. 

It felt... well, it felt pally. My mood changed instantly. I no longer questioned my decision to buy the game, which suddenly felt very different to anything else I'd played. My whole sense of ennui just evaporated.

How long that's going to last we'll find out in due course but after five hours the novelty hasn't started to wear off yet. It still seems amazing to see a Pengullet watering my berry patch or a Lamball trot by with a chunk of stone on her back. The AI seems pretty sophisticated. I assumed I'd have to give them all tasks or at least micro-manage the set-up for each new addition to the team but no, they do it all themselves and they seem to be doing it pretty well so far. I'm not sure they really need me there at all.

Building

Needs work. It's not at all bad but the design aesthetic feels a tad unsophisticated, although that could well just be because of the low-level materials and designs I'm seeing. What certainly doesn't get a pass is the positioning of the click-to-fit sections, which is too often fiddly and awkward. There are always moments with systems like these when you can't get a piece to go exactly where you want but I spent far too long trying to get sloping roof sections to slot into places they were clearly meant to go without any success at all. In the end I took down the few sections I'd managed to place and swapped the whole thing out for a boxy flat-roofed design that looks bad but at least goes up and stays up.

Other than that, which I'm sure is something that will get smoothed out as development progresses, I was happy enough with the options and the mechanics. I didn't have much of a problem finding a suitable, permitted area in which to build and the starter base is a very generous size. I didn't find it too difficult to put stations and flooring in the spots where I wanted them, although getting things to go under stairs was, as usual, more of a problem than it would be in real life, where "under the stairs" is the homeowner's version of the TARDIS. 

Progression

One of the big strengths of the Survival genre has to be clarity of intent. Unlike many MMORPGs, there's rarely much doubt in the mind of a new player on what to do next. That's very much the case in Palworld, where after five hours of pretty concerted, concentrated play, I'm still very much in the Tutorial phase, following instructions. 

There's an on-screen Tutorial check-list in the top right corner at all times, as well as a list of the current Missions to upgrade my base. Between the two, I found myself pretty much permanently busy, to the point that I eventually started to feel a little claustrophobic. That, of course, was my fault. There's absolutely nothing to stop you just running off to explore, which is what I did when all the chores started to feel like I had a full-time job.

The important thing is that I always wanted to progress. You can see well ahead down the Technology line to the recipes that are coming, which is motivating in itself, but also to lots of items with nothing more than a big ? indicating a mystery recipe you won't unlock until you catch a certain kind of Pal. If that doesn't make you want to go exploring, Palworld probably isn't the game you're looking for.

Even without having pitted any of my Pals against a Boss yet, or having seen or heard one word of narrative (There is a story, apparently.), both of those things being what passes for a throughline in this game, I can already feel the tidal pull of the nested progression mechanics. I suspect this is yet another Survival title capable of eating several hundred hours of anyone's life, should they be incautious enough to let it get a grip.

It's probably too late for me. Save yourself, while you still can.