Palia Review in Progress

There’s something uniquely satisfying about putting down roots in a sleepy town in games like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, or Disney Dreamlight Valley. Palia evolves this tradition to great effect, injecting large-scale multiplayer into that tried-and-true formula. After 50 hours of chopping down trees, hunting woodland critters, decorating my home, and hanging out with my fellow Palians, I’ve had a fantastic time catching up on all I’ve missed since the early days of the beta. I still have to dive into the new content and loads of updates that arrived today with its console launch and first major expansion, Elderwood, but I am eager to do so ahead of my final review.=

Palia is a cozy life sim with one major tweak: you’re in an online world that occasionally compels you to come out of your shell and interact with other humans – a sometimes Herculean task for the introverts often drawn to this genre. As you explore, you’ll encounter others out in the shared world going about their business, and are encouraged (or sometimes required) to cooperate with them. For example, you’ll get a buff for fishing with others and will find magical trees that can only be chopped down with the help of one or more friends. This has led to a community that’s astoundingly positive and helpful, with the vast majority of the public chat being PSAs from players who have found a valuable resource they’d like to share with strangers, then waiting for minutes on end for everyone to assemble before collecting it as a group. I spend a lot of time playing multiplayer games defined by the community’s potent toxicity and savage greed, so this kind of culture has truly been a shock to my system that I’m still adjusting to.

Although multiplayer is its signature twist, you can still do the vast majority of Palia’s activities by yourself. There’s also just a whole heck of a lot for you to do however you decide to tackle it, all in service of building up your home and improving your relationships with the NPC townsfolk. The usual zen-like staples like cooking and catching bugs are all here and actually quite good – the fishing minigame, for example, is less mindless than you usually find in the genre, having you tug and pull on your rod as the fish leaps into the air and puts up a fight. There’s even a few less common options like hunting, where you’ll pick off poor critters who burrow into the ground and leap into trees as you pepper them with arrows. While an absence of stress is an intentional focus of Palia’s design, it sometimes tries a bit too hard to accomplish that goal, like in how your arrows will magically home in on your target incredibly aggressive, sometimes turning corners to aid your aim. I’m all for a laid back experience, but it can be a bit obnoxious when you’re trying to line up a shot and the magnetism training wheels curve your arrow toward a different creature altogether, frustrating what’s supposed to be a chill activity.

Palia has a surprisingly full-featured main story as well. It has you exploring ancient ruins to uncover the truth about a world which was once populated by humans who are curiously gone now, and the dark history of magic that seemingly caused the collapse of society. This adventure is much more light-hearted than that might sound though, and you’re mostly just given opportunities to learn about the world and hang out with the characters who accompany you on quests while you platform around and solve simple puzzles. Per Palia’s adherence to cozy virtues, none of this is particularly demanding, and the mainline quests can be completed in a matter of hours if you focus on them, but I enjoyed diving just a tad deeper into the world and the break from grinding for iron ore to craft the next piece of furniture I just couldn’t live without. The story was quite incomplete ahead of the Elderwood expansion though, so I’m intrigued to see where it picks up after that abrupt end.

Then there’s other minigames that further mix things up, like a hotpot-themed card game I spent way too much time playing, or a surprisingly intricate platforming puzzle that took me hours to master. Sometimes these experiments exceed Palia’s grasp, like the platforming puzzles in particular, which are held back by clunky controls that don’t seem like they were designed with precision in mind. Climbing can be a quite irritating experience as your character will let go of surfaces inconsistently, sending you plummeting to your death. Thankfully the stakes in taking these spills are always very low, so there’s not much to lose aside from a bit of your time wasted, but it can definitely make some of the quests feel a bit tacked on. Other times, you’ll find yourself doing a sliding picture puzzle and think “y’know, this is pretty nice,” so I mostly found myself happy they took these shots nonetheless.

Of course, the purpose behind all these various undertakings is to gain as much gold as you can to upgrade and decorate your home, and Palia has one of the better home building systems I’ve seen. Rather than giving you no control over the blueprint of your house like in Animal Crossing or Disney Dreamlight Valley, or making you monkey around with a building mode that has you placing individual walls like The Sims, Palia favors a modular system: You unlock schematics for pieces of a home that you can freely snap onto various parts of your building, making it easy to design the general layout without having to get lost in the weeds. Then, once you’ve built your place, you can decorate it down to the most minute detail, dragging furniture, dolls, and cups around on a grid to make it just so. I could probably spend dozens of hours on this part of Palia alone, were it not for my insatiable need for cold hard cash to fund my homestead expansion. But that desire to make your place exactly as awesome as you want it to be is a serious motivator that sent me out in search of lumber and iron ore time and time again.

Those resource grinds each have their own progression systems as well, as you level up by repeatedly going out into the world and bringing back your haul of raw materials and collectibles to sell. I played dozens of hours of Palia as part of an early preview way back before it was even in its current open beta (and had my save file from that time tragically deleted), and the biggest change has been that its progression systems for these activities are much more streamlined and feel less grindy. Now, as you plant trees and craft furniture, you’ll unlock new equipment like a loom for creating fabric or a furnace for creating glass. You’ll also get better tools to perform cozy chores with, like a hoe that lets you till land faster or a bow and arrows that will let you take down prey in fewer shots, each of which feels like a handy upgrade that shows up at exactly the right moment you start feeling a need for it. The timegating that sometimes boxes you out of marathoning through everything in other life sims is mercifully absent here for the most part, so you can move as fast or as slow as you care to.

The other major pursuit in Palia is in getting to know and develop relationships with its 25 NPC residents, most of whom are really well-written and have a lot more to them than meets the eye upon first glance. I quite enjoyed hanging out with the sarcastic and moody daughter of the mayor, Kenyatta, who worked the front desk with all the enthusiasm of April from Parks and Recreation – but after helping her down the extremely chaotic path of discovering what she’s passionate about in life, I grew to appreciate her in a less superficial way. Even characters I really didn’t jive with, like the cryptid-obsessed hippy who annoyed me to no end, Elouisa, was at least entertainingly irritating and I’ve learned to appreciate how much her personality bothers me over time. (We’ve all got a friend like that, don’t we?) Most characters have an arc that takes place over several quests where they let you see a bit more of their personality as you forge a friendship. And, of course, if you’re looking for more than friendship you can partake in Palia’s quite strong dating mechanics to get yourself a girlfriend or boyfriend, or several of them – no judging here.

Unfortunately, this is one area where timegating gets in the way of a good time, and is one of the only places Palia boxes you out. You’re only allowed to chat with each character once per in-game day (a 30-minute period of real time), which improves your social links a very small amount, and you can only give each character a gift once per real world day. So if you’re trying to finish a particular character’s story, you’ll have to log on with regularity and be subjected to the same rotation of brief banter before you’re able to make any real progress. This is especially painful early on when your citizenship in Kilima Village is dependent on having someone in town to vouch for you – a task that’s made impossible to do in a short span of time by timegating. When every other area of Palia lets you play to your heart’s content, it’s pretty annoying to see such an essential part of this slice of life block you from progressing at your own pace.

Palia has come a long way since I played it over a year ago, but one thing that remained true ahead of this latest update is that it’s still missing quite a bit. The two maps I’ve explored are fairly small, and though they’ve got nooks and crannies to run around, you can more-or-less see most of what’s available in a few hours. Social features, though awesome when they happen, still feel quite slim for a game where the killer feature is supposed to be its online functionality, and there aren’t enough activities that encourage group play. And although there are quite a few options for decorating your house, surprisingly little of it can be interacted with once placed. You can’t lie in bed, turn on the sink, or really do much of anything with most objects, which sometimes made me feel like I was building a museum rather than a home. They did add the ability to flick the light switches on and off, which is at least something, but there’s a lot missing. These are all issues likely to be built out in the future, and I’m interested to see if Elderwood helps at all, but I’m a bit surprised that some of these aren’t farther along all the same.

The other major issue with Palia has been its bugs and performance issues on PC, which have gotten remarkably better since I last played, but are still pretty common. I quite frequently see NPCs sink into the floor, sometimes altogether hidden underground to the point where I can’t interact with them, there’s a bunch of very visible pop-in that happens while you’re running around, and loading times when traveling between each section of the map feel far longer than they should. Playing on the Nintendo Switch is especially eyebrow raising, as everything looks pretty awful and runs significantly worse, to the point where I really can’t recommend it on that platform in the same way I enthusiastically would elsewhere.

I’ve put quite a bit of time into Palia over the past week and have had a hard time putting it down, even as I’ve completed all the major activities available before the Elderwood expansion arrives. I’m looking forward to seeing how it runs on the PS5 and Xbox, checking out the new area and quality of life improvements, and continuing my chase for unlimited money to flex on my friends with my meticulously decorated estate.