Palia

The “cozy” MMO Palia arrived last week on PlayStation and Xbox consoles, after a little over a year of steadily increasing popularity on PC and Nintendo Switch. While Palia is a free-to-play MMO, the gameplay feels like a lot of other life simulation games you might have played; you generally gather resources, run tasks for townspeople, build and decorate a house, and shape the general experience to your liking – it’s just that there are a bunch of other people running around doing the same thing.

Palia is very friendly and gentle. There is no combat (though there is a mild hunting aspect for those that just have to shoot something). In general, a Palia session is relaxing and lowkey; I don’t mind playing before bed, as I can usually knock out a couple of quests and it doesn’t get my mind racing and my blood pumping. All of the usual non-murder-y activities are accounted for: gardening, mining, fishing, etc. You know the drill here. Palia feels like a bit of a mix between Disney Dreamlight Valley and Rune Factory 5, with all the crop tending and none of the combat.

In Palia, every act the player undertakes costs energy, which is tracked with a nice, big meter at the top of the screen. Every swing of the pickaxe, cast of the rod, and swipe of the hoe takes a bit of energy off the blob. There is no concept of sleeping in Palia (that would mess up the “everybody on the same timeframe” internal clock), so players can refill their gauge by eating food. This makes the gathering and preparation of meals one of the primary activities in the game – though, to be fair, I always had more than enough food on hand. If you ever get low on anything, you can just wander out into the world and grab it. In this case, fishing refills my food stores in about five minutes.

Food prep is handled at the player’s home base, where most of the other crafting activities take place. Again, this loop will feel mighty familiar to genre vets. Build a stove and a lumbermill and a kiln, then use the materials to build goodies at your workbench to decorate your space. Upgrade your tools to get better materials, upgrade your production facilities to process them, and grind out in the world to raise your individual activity levels. And, while you do all that, keep yourself busy running quests for the townspeople. These quests usually result in a gift of materials, or the unlocking of new crafting recipes to purchase. It is all very slow and deliberate, on the verge of plodding.

After a year or so in early access refining all of this, Palia has arrived on consoles accompanied by a large expansion, known as the Elderwood expansion. This adds a lot of new content, including a new zone to explore, a bunch of new quests, and a few new mechanics and cosmetics. While this is a pretty sizable addition to the base game, it doesn’t fundamentally alter the core game loop.

It’s crazy how different a game can feel depending on the platform you are using to play it. To prepare for the arrival of Palia on PlayStation and Xbox, I found myself grinding through the original release on PC and Switch. As such, I’ve had the opportunity to play Palia on all four platforms over the last couple of weeks, before finally settling on the PlayStation for the remainder of my review time.

I found that the PlayStation offered the most cohesive experience with Palia (and the Xbox version is very similar). Playing on PC, I found myself constantly toggling between the keyboard and a controller, and the less said about the Nintendo Switch version, the better (it is a bug-filled nightmare). The PlayStation version of Palia has all of the controls carefully mapped, allowing players to quickly and easily dip into the simple map and menu screens with a few button taps. And the PlayStation DualSense Controller offers reactive trigger functionality for folks that are into that sort of thing; due to my hand issues, I pretty much turned the tightened triggers off immediately. (I have grown to deeply dislike the DualSense trigger functionality, frankly, feeling that 99% of the time it adds nothing to the experience of playing games while only putting up an accessibility barrier.)

I still haven’t quite figured out why interacting with other players in Palia would be either fun or desirable. I am by nature a solo player, and Palia does very little to push me out of that isolationist space. As best I can figure, the other players are there to look at the cool cosmetics I purchased (and yes, I did purchase some to support the game), and to run around and make the world look more lively.

There are occasional points where you need to gather a group to accomplish small goals, but they are few and far between. The in-game chat is mostly positive and supportive, but was mostly filled with people asking each other questions about where to find stuff, or to gather a gang of strangers to team up for required group resource gathering. And since the combat element is missing, there seems to be little benefit to grouping up for longer than it takes to accomplish the occasional required group goals – you don’t really need a tank or healer when you are chopping down trees.

On the plus side, I really want to draw attention to the above-mentioned map and menu interfaces, because in my experience, these are the UIs that can make or break a free-to-play game. The folks that designed Palia are doing this right. For comparison, let’s consider Infinite Nikki, a recently released free-to-play game with similar levels of complexity. Nikki uses such an indecipherable labyrinth of menus that, as much as I enjoy the gameplay, I am unwilling to dig back into the game. To my eyes, the large text and easy menu navigation in Palia are at least as important as the graphic fidelity and the gameplay loop. If you want to allow your hooks to really sink into my brain, keep this aspect of the game simple.

And Palia does have some pretty good hooks, though they aren’t anything that fans of the genre will find revolutionary. Instead, what we essentially are dealing with is the Fortnite-ification of the life sim genre, both visually and mechanically. Every mechanic has been smoothed out to the point where the game is nearly frictionless. Of course, one gamer’s “soothing and relaxing” game will be another’s “insanely boring” game; Palia is definitely not for everyone.

In fact, after spending nearly 40 hours in Palia, I’m not certain that the game is for me. I can clearly see the amount of effort that has gone into creating a game that hits all of the pillars of the life sim genre in the MMO space. But in creating a game that could live and breath on an ongoing basis for its player base, it seems to me that the creators of Palia have put a lot of artificial barriers in place to slow players down.

For example, fast travel is severely limited. You can warp back to your homestead once every half hour or so, but beyond that, you better get used to running everywhere. This has the impact of teaching the player how to navigate the world, but it also quickly becomes a drag. Until you memorize where everything is, be prepared to toggle the map frequently to orient yourself. The in-game map has a very limited (and somewhat inconsistent) waypoint system, allowing you to tag a quest to see where you might resolve it (sometimes). And there is no minimap at all, keeping the player constantly dipping into the map until they know their way around.

I also didn’t love the way the game’s financials are handled. I’m not speaking about the real-world currency store, which only offers cosmetics and is absolutely inoffensive. I’m talking more about how you have to sell your hard-won materials for incremental amounts of cash, which is needed to buy recipes and upgrades. There is a box outside your homestead plot where you dump stuff to be automatically sold for gold, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that I was selling off stuff that I would eventually need – and more often than not, this feeling was proven correct. The bottom line is that after the first upgrade or two, you’re going to be running all over the map and selling off tons of stuff to keep progressing. This is by design, and that design feels very obvious and somewhat restrictive while playing.

Interactions with the game’s NPCs are also a bit of a slog. While you can interact with any of the townspeople for quest purposes any time you can find them, there is also a friendship dynamic that can only be advanced once every in-game day. There is no way that I’m going to run in circles over and over trying to grind my relationship status with 20 characters, leaving me with a very scattershot approach that was much less successful than it might have been.

More successful is the homestead-building interface. Again, this is all typical stuff for the genre, but placing your home and then decorating it feels great. There is a grid where you can drag and drop items, rearranging as much and as frequently as you want. Gardening is done on your homesteading plot as well, and you upgrade out of the whole “water every plant every day” mechanism pretty early on. But, of course, your other crafting devices are all on timers, so you drop in a stack of wood or minerals, and then check back in a couple of hours to pick up the refined materials you really want. Because slow is good in the games-as-a-service world.

My complaints about the game’s deliberate pacing aren’t dealbreakers. This is, after all, a free-to-play game, and some of this stuff is just par for the course. In general, Palia offers a much friendlier and more pleasant experience than 90% of the other similar products available. I can really see why certain players would be drawn into Palia’s friendly, activity-filled world, as it is a pleasant place to spend some time. I’m just not sure that I am one of them.