There is something uniquely satisfying about putting roots in sleepy towns with games like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and Disney Dream Light Valley. Palia has evolved this tradition considerably, injecting large multiplayer into its proven formula. After 50 hours of cutting down trees, hunting forest creatures, decorating my homes and spending time with my fellow Parians, I had a great time catching up to everything I missed from the early days of Beta. We’ll have to dive into the new content and lots of updates that arrived today with the console launch and the first major expansion, Elderwood, but we’d like to do so ahead of the final review. =
Palia is a cozy life sim with one big tweak. You are in the online world and sometimes you are forced to get out of your shell and interact with others. As you explore, you are encouraged (or sometimes necessary) to meet others in a shared world where you are working on their business. For example, you will find a magic tree that you can get a buff to fish with others and cut down with the help of one or more friends. This has created an incredibly positive and kind community. The majority of public chats are PSAs of players who have found valuable resources they want to share with strangers, waiting a few minutes for everyone to be assembled before collecting them as a group. This kind of culture was a real shock to my system I’m still tweaking, as I spend a lot of time playing multiplayer games defined by the strong toxicity and savage greed of the community.
Multiplayer is its distinctive twist, but you can do most of Paria’s activities yourself. Also, you have decided to work on it, and you have decided to build your home all and work on improving your relationship with NPC Towns Fork, but there’s a lot to do. All of the usual Zen staple foods like cooking and catch bugs are here and are actually very good. For example, fishing mini-games are less heartless than you usually find in the genre when a fish jumps into the air and fights. There are also some common options like hunting. There, they pick up poor creatures dig holes in the ground and jump into the tree, then jump into the tree with arrows. While stress-free is an intentional focus of Paria’s design, it can be a little too difficult to achieve that goal. Your arrows magically go home to your target, sometimes turning corners to support your goals. I’m for all the leisurely experiences, but trying to line up shots can be a bit uncomfortable, and the magnetic training wheels will bending your arrows towards a completely different creature, annoying what appears to be a cold activity.
Palia also has an incredibly full-featured main story. We explore ancient ruins to reveal the truth about the world that once mysteriously disappeared, and the dark history of the magic that caused the collapse of society. This adventure is much lighter than it sounds, and you’ve just been given the opportunity to learn mostly about the world and hang out with the characters who accompany you in quests while platforming and solving simple puzzles. According to compliance with cozy virtues, this is not particularly harsh and if you focus on them you can complete the mainline quest in a few hours, but I enjoyed diving a bit deeper into the world, crushing iron ore and grinding iron ore to make furniture that I couldn’t live with. The story was so incomplete ahead of the expansion of Elderwood, I’m interested in seeing where to pick up after that sudden end.
Then there are other mini-games that confuse things even more, like hotpot-themed card games I’ve played too much, and the incredibly complicated platform puzzles that took hours to master. These experiments can go beyond Palia’s grasp, especially in platform puzzles. This is suppressed by clunky controls that appear to be precisely designed. Climbing can be a very exciting experience as the character will consistently let go of the surface and let go of the surface as it blows away your death. Thankfully, the interests in taking these spills are always very low, so you don’t often lose a little time except for a bit of wasted time, but that definitely makes you feel like some quests are being tacked a bit. I also realized that I was doing a sliding photo puzzle and thought, “Yeah, this is pretty good,” so I realized that I was still happy that they took these shots.
Of course, the purpose behind all these different businesses is to earn as much money as possible to upgrade and decorate your home. Paria has one of the better home construction systems than I’ve seen. It has a modular system, rather than controlling the blueprint of the house or creating a monkey in a building mode with individual walls like the Sims, like Animal Crossing and Disney Dream Light Valley. After that, once you have your own place, you can decorate it in the finest detail and drag furniture, dolls and cups onto the grid to make it. I could probably have spent dozens of hours on this part of the Palia alone. If it wasn’t bored of cold hard cash to fund my homestead expansion. But the desire to make your place as great as you want is a serious motivation for sending me over and over again for wood and iron ore.
Each of these resource grinds also has its own system of progression to help you level up by going repeatedly around the world and selling the distances of raw materials and collectibles. I played dozens of hours of Paria as part of an early preview, even before the current open beta version (and since then my saved files had been tragically deleted). And the system of progression for these activities is much more streamlined and the biggest change is to feel the grind bones. Now, when you plant trees and crafts, you unlock new equipment, such as looms, for making furnaces for making fabrics and glass. You will also get better tools to perform cozy chores. This feels like a handy upgrade that appears at the exact moment when each needs it, like a bow and arrow that can defeat prey with fewer shots until you land faster. Timegates that sometimes box you out of marathoning everything else in life, are mostly mercilessly lacking here, so you can move as fast or slow as you care about.
Another major pursuit in Palia is to know and develop relationships with 25 NPC residents. It was a lot of fun to meet Kenyatta, the mayor’s sarcasm and grumpy girl. Kenyatta worked the front desk with April enthusiasm from the parks and recreation, but after helping her on the extremely chaotic path of discovering that she has a passion in life, I grew up to appreciate her in an unsuperficial way. Even the characters I didn’t really jump, like a hippie who was obsessed with Cryptied, who was bothering me at the end, El Oisa, at least funny and frustrated, learned to understand how much her personality bothers me over time. (We all have such friends, right?) And of course, if you are looking for more than friendship, you can join Paria’s very strong dating mechanic to get yourself a girlfriend or boyfriend, or some of them – we won’t judge here.
Unfortunately, this is one of the areas where timegating gets in the way of fun times and one of the only places where Palia kicks you out. Because you can only chat once per in-game day (a 30-minute real-time period), there are very few social links, so each character can only be gifted once a real-world day. So, if you are trying to complete the story of a particular character, you should regularly log on and receive the same spin of short jokes before you can make any actual progress. This is especially painful when the citizenship of Kilima village relies on placing someone in the town to assure you. This is a task that cannot be performed in a short amount of time due to time gating. With all the other areas of Palia available to play your mind content, it’s quite annoying to see such a crucial part of this slice of life blocking you from going at your own pace.
Palia has come a long way since playing over a year ago, but one thing that’s true ahead of this latest update is that it’s still quite lacking. The two maps I explored are pretty small, with running corners and crannies, but you can see most of what’s available in a few hours. The social feature is amazing when it happens, but it still feels very slim in games where the killer feature appears to be an online feature and there is not enough activity to encourage group play. And while there are quite a few options to decorate your home, surprisingly you can interact with something once placed. You can’t lie down in the bed, turn on the sink, or do a lot with most objects. They added the ability to flick the light switch on and off, which is at least something, but not much. All of these are issues that are likely to be built in the future, and I’d like to see if Elderwood is helpful at all, but I’m a bit surprised that some of these aren’t too far along the same line.
Another major issue with Palia is bugs and performance issues on PC, which have been very good since I last played it, but it’s still pretty common. NPCS often sink to the floor. Sometimes they are completely hidden underground. There is a bunch of very visible pop-ins that occur while you run around, and when you move between each section of the map it feels longer than you need to. Playing on the Nintendo Switch is to raise your brows, especially to the point where you can’t recommend it on that platform, as you would do so enthusiastically elsewhere.
I spent quite a bit of time with Paria last week, but I struggled to put it on even if I completed all the major activities available before the Elderwood expansion arrived. I look forward to checking out how it runs on PS5 and Xbox, new areas and quality of life improvements, chasing unlimited money, and bending friends with meticulously decorated real estate.
