Palia

So I came back from a work trip to London with a COVID infection. Luckily, none of my colleagues got infected. So I’ve had a miserable 1.5 weeks — I’ve started work again, but I am still tired and need to carefully manage my energy budget. But as people are winding down for the Christmas holidays, there’s little urgent business anyway.

As I was spending my days vegging out on the couch, Palia wasand the released to the Switch. Playing low-stakes, self-paced ‘cozy’ cooperative MMORPG seems like a good low-energy activity, so I downloaded it and started playing.

Palia is free to play, so I was a bit apprehensive on how the gameplay loops would be monetized, but it turns out that this is not a problem. As usual, crafting or growing crops takes time, but there is no way to speed things up by spending money — so there is no constant nudging to spend money. As far as I can see, you’d only spend money for cosmetics. I like that, because it means that you can play unhindered.

It has all the hallmarks of a ‘cozy’ crafting game: growing crops, mining, hunting, gathering and fishing. All the materials can then be used to create other things. Building your house and decorating it is a big part of the game, and at a certain point you can start cooking. Cooking is essential, because eating food will give you ‘focus’ that will increase your skills faster with use. There are recipes gated behind levels of skills, which will give you access to new possibilities.

The NPCs are fun, and you interact with them regularly: they give you context on the world and the history, but also sell you tools, materials and recipes. They are not static either: rather than being at a station, waiting for a player to interact with them, they move around the maps to go about their business. That could have meant you’d have to chase them around the map if you want to talk to them, but the cool thing is that the location of the NPCs is marked on the map. You can select the NPC and they’ll show up on your radar, making it easy to locate them. I wish more games had that.

There is a plot, and there are ‘dungeons’ that unlock as you progress through the game. Some of these are fun Zelda-like dungeons with puzzles and platforming, but some of them are… not so fun. It’s a bit hit or miss there.

And while you can click on items when you’re playing with a mouse on PC, on a console with a controller, you have to angle the screen just right to interact with some things. That can be frustrating. Another thing where the game lacks polish is when you’re crafting: sometimes the recipes are not shown completely, and you have to exit the crafting menu and re-activate it to get the correct information. This seems like a very basic thing to get wrong, to me. And when you’re hunting the wildlife, they will flee when you get too close or shoot them once. And this is incredibly janky: the beasts will basically teleport around. This is another area where the game seriously lacks polish.

If you don’t take the game too seriously, it’s a fun diversion. But if you are looking for something to spend your hardcore gaming time in, it’s lacking in polish and will frustrate you.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.