Ongoing comments from Palia – IGN

There is something satisfying to take root in a sleepy town in games like this ANIMAL CROSSING,,,,, Star Valleyor Disney Dream Light Valley. Palia has developed this tradition to great effect, injecting large-scale multiplayer games into proven formulas. After 50 hours of cutting down trees, hunting woodland animals, decorating my house, and hanging out with my companion Palians, I had a great time and caught up with everything I missed since the Beta stage. I still have to delve into new content and many updates that have come with the launch of consoles and the first major expansion, Elderwood, but I'm eager to do so before the final review.

Palia is a comfortable life sim with a big tweak: you are in an online world that occasionally forces you to come out of your shell and interact with other humans – sometimes a daunting task that is often attracted to the genre. As you explore, you encounter other people’s business in the shared world and encourage (or sometimes need to) work with them. For example, you will get enthusiasts who fish with others and will find magical trees that can only be cut down with the help of one or more friends. This leads to a surprisingly positive and helpful community, with the vast majority of public chats coming from the players’ PSAs who find valuable resources they want to share with strangers and then wait for everyone for a few minutes to get everyone together and then collect them collectively. I spent a lot of time playing multiplayer games defined by the effective toxicity and savage greed of the community, so this culture really shocked the system I still adapted to.

Although multiplayer is its signature twist, you can still do the vast majority of Palia activities yourself. However, you decide you want to solve the problem, but all of this can solve and improve your relationship with NPC Townsfolk for you. Usually, Zen-like staples like cooking and catching bugs are here, which are actually pretty good – for example, fishing fans are less blind than you usually find in the genre, and you drag and pull the rod as the fish jumps into the air and fights. There are even a few less common options like hunting, where you pick up the poor little animals that dig the ground and jump into the trees when you dip them with arrows. While lack of stress is a deliberate focus of Palia's design, sometimes it can be a little hard to achieve this, like how your arrow magically gets back on the goal, sometimes it can become incredibly aggressive, sometimes turning to help your goal. I go all out, but it can be a little annoying when you try to arrange the lens and magnetic training wheels to bend the arrow to another different creature, and what frusts you is a cold activity.

Palia also has a surprisingly comprehensive story. It allows you to explore ancient ruins to reveal the truth about a world that once was a strangely disappeared human being, and the magical history that seems to have caused the collapse of society. This adventure is much easier than it sounds, and you mostly have the chance to learn the world and hang out with the characters that accompany you while you platform and solve simple puzzles. None of this is particularly required based on Palia's compliance with the virtues of comfort, and if you focus on them you can complete the mainline mission in a few hours, but I like diving deeper into the world, from wearing iron ore to making the next furniture I can't survive. This story was incomplete before the Ellingwood extension, so I was interested to see where it ended abruptly.

Then there are other mini games that can further mix things like hot cake themed solitaire games that I spent too much time playing, or a surprisingly intricate platform puzzle that took me hours to master. Sometimes these experiments go beyond Palia's grasp, especially platform puzzles, where these puzzles are blocked by clumsy controls that don't seem to take into account their accuracy. Climbing can be an annoying experience as your character will unevenly let go of the surface, leaving you in death. Thankfully, the bet on taking these spills is always low, so there isn't much loss other than the time you're wasted, but it can definitely make some tasks feel somewhat resolved. At other times, you find yourself doing a sliding picture puzzle and think “you know, that’s great” so I mostly find myself happy they took these photos.

Of course, the purpose of all these various causes is to get as much gold as possible to upgrade and decorate your home, and Palia has one of the better home building systems I've ever seen. Rather than leaving you uncontrollable blueprints like in animal crossing or Disney Dreamlight Valley The SimsPalia prefers modular systems: you can unlock the schematic as a part of the house, which you can freely capture into parts of the building, making it easy to design the general layout without getting lost in the weeds. Then, once you have built your own position, you can decorate it to the tiniest details, dragging the furniture, dolls and cups onto the grid to make it so. If I’m not satisfied, I might have to spend dozens of hours on this part of Palia, not because of my unsatisfied need for cold cash to fund my homestead expansion. But it is a serious motivation to want to make your position as good as you want, and it searches for wood and iron ore time and time again.

These resources will grind up your own progress system as you repeatedly enter the world and restore the shipping of raw materials and collectibles to improve your upgrade. I played with Palia for dozens of hours, part of an early preview, even in the current open beta (and since then, my save files have been badly deleted), and the biggest change is that its progressive system of these activities is more streamlined and feels less harsh. Now when you plant trees and craft furniture, you will unlock new devices such as looms to create fabrics or stoves for making glass. You will also get better tools to pair with comfortable chores, such as allowing you to land faster or bows, which will allow you to shoot down prey with fewer shots, each feeling like a handy upgrade that comes out at the right moment and you start to feel the need. Sometimes, in other lives, sometimes, there are times when you stand out in other lives, and in most cases there is no time for kindness in other lives, so you can move as fast or slow as you like.

Another major pursuit of Palia is to understand and build relationships with 25 NPC residents, most of whom do write well, and more for them than at first glance. I really enjoy hanging out with Mayor Kenyatta's sarcasm and moody daughter, who works at the front desk with April enthusiasm for parks and recreation – but after helping her discover her extremely chaotic path of passion in her life along the very chaotic path, I appreciate her life in a less superficial way. Even if I really don't have a character I like, like an obsessed with my endless fanatical hippies, Elouisa is at least annoying and I learned to appreciate her personality that bothers me over time. (We all have friends like this, don’t we?) Most characters have arcs that take place on several missions, and they allow you to see more of their personality when building friendships. And, of course, if you're looking for more than friendships, you can engage in Palia's fairly powerful dating mechanisms to make yourself a girlfriend or boyfriend, or some of them – ignore it here.

Unfortunately, this is an area where a timeline is in the way you are getting in the way of having a good time and one of the only boxes in Palia. You only allow you to chat with each character once per game day (30 minutes in real time), which can improve your social links. You can only give each character a gift once in every real world. So if you want to complete the story of a specific character, you have to log in regularly and do the same brief drama ban spin before you can make any real progress. It is especially painful when your citizenship in Kilima Village depends on having someone guarantee you in town – this task is impossible to accomplish by time limits in a short time. It's annoying to see such an important part of this clip's life keeping you from progressing at your own pace when every other area of ​​Palia lets you play your inner content.

Palia has come a long way since I've been in more than a year, but it's still true until the latest update, that's it's still missing a lot. The two maps I explored are small, and although they have corners and gaps to run around, you can see most of the available things in a few hours. While the social features are great when it happens, they are still slim for games where the killer feature should be its online features, and there aren't enough activities to encourage group competitions. While there are many options to decorate your home, it is surprisingly interactive almost once placed. You can't lie in the bed, open the sink, or do a lot with most objects, which sometimes makes me feel like I'm building a museum rather than a home. They do add the ability to turn the light on and off, at least some stuff, but a lot is missing. These are all questions that may be established in the future and I would love to see if Elderwood will help, but to my somewhat surprised that some of them are not out of reach.

Another major issue with Palia is its bugs and performance issues on PCs, which have become very good since I last played, but are still quite common. I often see NPCs sinking into the floor, sometimes completely hidden from the ground to places where I can’t interact with them, a bunch of very obvious pop-ups happening as you run around and get much more loading time when traveling between each part of the map. Play on the Nintendo Switch in particular for eyebrows, because everything looks so bad and runs so much worse that I can't really recommend it on this platform to be as enthusiastic as elsewhere.

I've spent a lot of time getting into Palia over the past week and it's been hard to let it go, even though I've done all the major activities before the Ellingwood extension comes. I look forward to seeing how it works on PS5 and Xbox, checking out new areas and improvements in quality of life, and continuing to chase my unlimited money to bend my friends with well-decorated real estate.