Palworld Bravely Asks “What if Pokémon Had to Pay Rent?”

Two years ago one of my friends sent me a trailer for Palworld after being quickly won over by the concept of “Pokémon with guns.” I watched the trailer and assumed it was just going to be another open-world survival craft game with a funny concept built for memes, and quickly forgot about it until earlier this month. Now that I’ve dug more into it, I’m pretty sure there might be something interesting here.

After watching almost every video on developer Pocketpair’s channel, I’ve gone from dismissive to cautiously optimistic. The first trailer starts with a standard Pokémon game set up with running through fields, before transitioning into a third-person shooter and using the titular Pals as cover. It’s all very bizarre, but it’s hilarious watching a cutesy plant monster be forced to work in an arms-making factory. It’s the videogame equivalent of those Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh horror movies that started cropping up after they hit the public domain.

With subsequent trailers it’s become clear that it’s closer to Ark Survival Evolved than a mainline Pokémon game. Where another game may have wiring, Palworld has electric Pals providing energy to generators. Instead of a fishing rod, we have an electric Pal shocking a lake and watching the dead water Pals float up to the surface. You can increase the strength of your Pals by harvesting the souls of other Pals.

Palworld sounds like a parody game, or maybe what PETA earnestly believes the Pokémon franchise is. Over half the comments on the game’s YouTube channel mention Pokémon in some capacity and it’s pretty obvious why. Some of these designs are eerily similar to existing Pokémon. One Pal resembles a fusion between Latias and Salamance. Tocotoco has the same color scheme as Xatu. Robinquil is Decidueye with an actual bow as opposed to shooting with its quills.

It’d be easy to write off Palworld as a joke game carried by the novelty of its premise, but with each trailer and every bit of new info released a meme fanbase turned into legitimate fans. “The Pokémon franchise is a shell of its former self, so I welcome Palworld with open arms,” writes one commenter on the Summer Game Fest 2023 trailer.

The fact that nobody can talk about Palworld without mentioning Pokémon might help spread awareness about the game, but it also might do it a disservice. Yes, that inspiration is obvious and undeniable, but there seems to be more going on in Palworld; dismissing it as “Pokémon with guns” might have some truth to it but isn’t entirely accurate. In an official Q&A with the developers at Pocketpair, they cited Rimworld as a source of inspiration. “We started thinking from the point of how do we get the colony sim aspect of Rimworld a little more interesting in a 3D world,” said Takuro Mizobe, CEO of Pocketpair. “And then we came up with the idea of combining TPS [third-person shooter], colony-sim and survival craft elements.”

The Pals being used for purposes aside from battling already sets itself apart from Pokémon if the complete genre shift somehow doesn’t convince you. Pokémon didn’t allow me to use the Mons for unpaid labor, for instance, but thankfully Palworld lets me live out that fantasy.

Palworld’s ambitious concept and potential burnout from the deluge of open-world survival games have led many people to ask if Palworld is a real game. It’s gotten to the point that in the early access Q&A, the developers had to clarify that the game wasn’t a scam, a subscription-based MMO or a crypto mining game. These concerns are unfounded, considering Pocketpair has another open-world survival craft game in the form of Craftopia. It’s kind of sad that after four trailers and 52 Pal reveals that people may still believe the game is not real, but the sight of a flying pal carpet bombing a group of dinosaurs is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.

Could Palworld be a major Pokémon competitor? Probably not. Even with criticism of Pokémon being relatively common after the most recent generations, it’s still the highest-grossing media franchise ever. The last time we had an almost viable Pokémon competitor was Yo-Kai Watch and that barely made a splash stateside. The idea that Palworld needs to be a Pokémon competitor to justify its existence just because it has cutesy creatures in it diminishes the work the devs put in. At the end of the day, hopefully the game will be able to stand on its own merits—especially when those merits are cute monsters shooting miniguns.

Palworld will enter Early Access on Steam and Xbox Game Pass starting Jan. 19.

Desmond Leake is a former intern for Paste‘s games section.