Palworld immediately found its way onto many gamers’ radars when developer Pocketpair dropped its first trailer. The open-world game takes visual inspiration from Pokémon but adds at least one major change: guns. At Summer Game Fest, we got another look at the game in action, including a shot of a large, blue dinosaur-looking “Pal” using his shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to fight off an opponent. The trailer ended with a big reveal that Palmon is coming to early access on PC sometime during January 2024. This is a short delay from the original plan, but will still be here before we know it.
On the surface, Palworld may look a lot like Pokémon, but there’s actually quite a bit going on here that’s different, and not just the firearms. For starters, there are survival elements to Palworld. The Steam page mentions “food shortages, harsh weather, and illegal poachers.” We assume you’ll need to protect your Pals from the latter, but the first two are going to mean you’ll need to be prepared. Thankfully, the game also lets you build a home base and farm alongside your Pals to help survive the rough conditions. In fact, if you really want to, the game has the option to build a factory where your Pals can work to build those guns that feature so often in the trailers.
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All told, Palworld is shaping up to be a very strange, but very robust game that takes art that looks like it’s ripped straight out of Pokémon, but does something very different with it. On top of all the oddities though, it will support online multiplayer. That’s been something Pokémon fans have wanted for quite a while now and the reason why games like TemTem sold well initially. Palworld might not enjoy a similar level of success, but there are some intriguing pieces here that could inject some new life into the monster-catching genre.
You’ll be able to see for yourself when Palworld hits early access in January 2024. The Steam page doesn’t currently list a timeframe for the full release, but that will probably come as we get closer to the early access launch. We would expect the game will spend at least six months in the early access period, though it could easily stretch much longer.
