Palworld – pocket monster hunter (Picture: Pocketpair)

The strangest Pokémon clone ever made is part survival game and part third person shooter, and it’s already the biggest game of the year.

It seems fair to say that Gen IX did not go very well for The Pokémon Company. Although we defended Scarlet and Violet more than most, the fact that the subsequent DLC made the technical problems worse rather than better sums up the terrible position developer Game Freak is currently in, as it’s forced to make new games too quickly, with too few staff.

We don’t know how many people work at Japanese indie developer Pocketpair but even though Palworld is currently only in early access it looks far better than any official Pokémon game ever has. That said, this isn’t a straight clone, in the style of games like Cassette Beasts and Temtem, It’s something far, far stranger than that.

There’s a lot for The Pokémon Company and their developers to learn from Palworld but at the same time this is a flawed and at times disquieting game, not just in terms of its content but how much it borrows from other titles and how much it seems to rely on AI taking from human artists and creators.

Since there are so few high profile examples, we’re assuming it’s very difficult to sue anyone because in-game characters, locations or concepts look too similar to an existing property. Nevertheless, if you’ve played any recent Pokémon game, you’ll spend most of Palworld wondering how Pocketpair has got away with it all.

Palworld is a patchwork of borrowed ideas and features, from a wide range of different games, but in terms of gameplay the most important influence is not Pokémon. Instead, it’s survival games like Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved. You’re not going to die of starvation very quickly, but it can happen and like most survival games there’s very little in the way of specific goals or story.

That means your first priority is to build a base, as both a defensible position and somewhere where you can craft food, weapons, health, armour, and all the other video game necessities. Collecting ‘Pals’ is important but it’s not the be all and end all of the game. There are many human enemies wandering around, from poachers and pro-Pal extremists to the central evil gang, but all of them have the same response to your presence: to try and shoot you dead with high calibre weapons.

After first shooting them, or bludgeoning them into unconsciousness, Pals are caught with a ‘pal sphere’, but rather than this leading to a lot of quaint turn-based battle you instead use captured Pals as allies in third person battles that look like The Division transposed into a cartoonish Pokémon style world. Many Pals can wield weapons themselves, while others are weapons, which you can either leave to do their thing or pick up and wield as a flamethrower or lightning gun.

Whatever else you say about Palworld – and it is a very difficult game to appraise – it barely has a single new idea of its own, borrowing liberally from Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, Monster Hunter, Minecraft, and many others. It doesn’t copy mindlessly though and while its third person combat is generic it’s reasonably competent. Likewise, the dungeon designs are bland and unexciting but they are enlivened by some fun boss battles.

The closest it gets to originality is what happens when you bring Pals back to your base, which is where things get really weird. Pals don’t evolve but you can breed them, with most being immediately press-ganged into servitude, helping to build new structures and crafting regularly needed items so that you don’t have to – while also tending to crops and doing all the other boring jobs around the base.

In gameplay terms that’s perfectly reasonable, as you try not to overwork them and the base-building becomes an impressively complex management sim. But the way it’s portrayed on-screen can be genuinely disturbing, the most obvious example being when you tell a Pal to craft a knife to then use on his fellow slaves to turn them into your food.

Palworld – this game is so weird (Picture: Pocketpair)

If the game was intended as a parody, then that would have worked great – the ethics of actual Pokémon have always been questionable – but while there are some attempts at edgy humour, and something may have been lost in translation, the game never pushes the idea that it’s a satire. You can treat it that way but that’s largely on you.

Breeding edible slaves is not the only morally questionable aspect to the game, with social media alive with talk of whether Pocketpair has used AI image generation to create the Pal designs, by training them on actual pokémon. One of Pocketpair’s previous games was based entirely around creating AI imagery, and a lot of the Pal designs either look almost identical to real pokémon or appear to be made up of disparate body parts from multiple critters.

Ironically, the AI itself is terrible, with Pals and human enemies frequently being confused about what they’re doing or getting stuck in scenery. The visuals might look better than Scarlet and Violet but in its own way Palworld is just as broken, with numerous collision detection issues and missing animations. The user interface is also terrible but the big difference with Palworld is that it has the excuse of currently being early access – and not being part of one of the biggest media franchises in the world.

Palworld – working the floor at the weapon factory is not much fun (Picture: Pocketpair)

Or at least not yet anyway. Believe it or not, Palworld is one of only six games to have ever had more than 1 million people playing it at once on Steam and it sold four million copies in less than three days. That’s sold, not played – so the fact that it’s on Game Pass doesn’t come close to explaining its success.

And this is while it’s only got co-op options, with no competitive play between humans, so there’s every chance that success is only going to build from here. Or perhaps it’ll be another online flash in the pan. Or The Pokémon Company will sue them into oblivion. To be honest it’s future is very hard to guess at.

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Palworld’s success is built upon the shoulders of giants but there’s no denying it is a fun experience, although how much of that is due to the novelty of it all is hard to say at this early stage. We feel almost guilty for praising it but despite the copy/paste approach to game and creature design, and the disturbing way in which Pals are treated, it does hang together as a fun multiplayer game, at least in the short term.

Whatever you think of it, there’s no downplaying the fact that this has been one of the most successful indie launches of all time and one that may go on to have important ramifications for both AI content generation and the Pokémon franchise as a whole.

Formats: Xbox Series X (played), Xbox One, and PC
Price: £24.99*
Publisher: Pocketpair
Developer: Pocketpair
Release Date: 19th January 2024
Age Rating: N/A

*Available on Game Pass at launch as Game Preview

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The strangest Pokémon clone ever made is part survival game and part third person shooter, and it’s already the biggest game of the year.