What is Palworld and why is it so controversial?

Does Palworld look too much like Pokémon?

Indie game Palworld is out now but where can you play it, why is it so talked about, and what does it have to do with Pokémon?

Palworld has taken the gaming world by storm since its early access release this month – for better and worse – as early reviews of the game call it a Pokémon killer.

The third person survival shooter has sold millions of copies in just its first few days, but its similarity to Pokémon has stirred up a lot of drama on social media.

So let’s clarify what the game is all about, why it’s suddenly become so popular, and whether it’s just a flash in the pan or the next big thing.

Where can you play Palworld?

Palworld was released in early access on January 19 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

It’s priced at £24.99 on PC and Xbox but it’s also included in Game Pass, so if you’re a subscriber you can play it via that at no extra cost.

There’s no confirmation yet, as to whether Palworld will come to PlayStation 5 or the Nintendo Switch, but Sony has already hinted that they’re interested in bringing the game to their format.

What is Palworld?

Palworld is an adventure survival game developed by Japanese developer Pocketpair. It’s played from a third person perspective, where you can battle and capture creatures known as Pals.

These Pals can be used for building, traversal, combat, and breeding new Pals, in an offline single-player mode or online multiplayer with up to 32 players on the same server.

You create your own avatar and work your way through the open world of Palpagos Islands, which includes 137 different Pals.

Palworld has 137 Pals, but some looks like pokémon

Why is Palworld controversial?

Palworld is primarily a survival game, similar to games like Ark: Survival Evolved, and capturing Pals is not necessarily the main focus, even if they come in useful for combat and base building.

However the Pals themselves look very similar to pokémon, with many suggesting that Pocketpair are guilty of plagiarism and that they may have used AI image generation to create the designs, based on existing pokémon.

Things have gone so far that developers at Pocketpair received death threats over the similarity to Pokémon, after Palworld’s launch.

Thanks to Cecilia Fae on Twitter, there’s comprehensive side-by-side comparison of most of the Pals and their Pokémon counterparts.

There are also questions about the morality of Palworld, which a lot of children will play, where you breed creatures that then essentially work as slaves to build you stuff and which you can eat when they’re no longer useful to you.