NOT WOKE SHOWS: Palworld

Dan Reilly

+13 clout

Sep 10, 2026

I fired this thing up on a Tuesday that somehow turned into Thursday before I noticed the clock again. Palworld. They call the little beasts Pals and you run around this big open stretch of islands and cliffs catching them, feeding them, putting them to work on your base, and occasionally handing one a rocket launcher because why the hell not. I kept humming that old cartoon whistle from Saturday mornings while the stew was on the stove, the one that always meant something small and fuzzy was about to get in trouble, and this game feels like that memory got a toolbox and a backpack full of ammo. You start soft. Just you and a couple of early Pals that look like they wandered out of a coloring book. You punch trees, you craft a pick, you throw these spheres and suddenly you've got a fluffy thing hauling lumber back to the scrap wood shed you slapped together. The first night I lost half my stuff dying on a ridge I had no business climbing, and I groaned the way I used to groan when the baseball rolled under the porch and I had to dig through spiders to get it. That recovery scramble is pure old-school hassle. You feel the weight of every nail and berry you left behind. Somehow it never quite killed the fun; it just made the next run feel earned. Base building sneaks up on you. One hour you're just trying to keep the rain off your head, next thing the place has assembly lines and a dining hall and a whole crew of Pals running the forges and the farms. Some of them look sweet enough to put on a lunchbox. Then you assign the sheep-looking one to the lumber mill and watch it work twelve-hour shifts without union talk and you laugh because the game never pretends this is a Disney picnic. You're the boss. They work. They fight when you say fight. Sometimes they get turned into cakes. It's messy and a little mean in that kid-memory way where you used to make mud forts and draft the neighborhood mutts into the army whether they liked it or not. I kept catching myself saying "good boy" out loud to a pixelated fire bird that had just roasted three bandits for me. The grind is real. I won't pretend otherwise. You need ore, you need fiber, you need that one rare drop that only spawns when the moon is in the right phase and you already spent forty minutes running back from a death. There were stretches where I felt like I was stuck on a hamster wheel just so I could unlock the next workbench, and my shoulders would ache from the controller the same way they used to ache after raking the whole yard for a buck fifty. But then the fog lifts on a new region and there's a giant bug with a cannon growing out of its back and the sun is coming up over water that actually sparkles and suddenly the hours don't matter. My cousins hopped on one weekend and we spent an entire afternoon just trying to build a ridiculous tower so we could snipe each other's Pals for sport. Multiplayer turns the whole thing into a campfire story with guns. People argue whether it's a rip-off or the thing somebody should have made twenty years ago. I don't care. I grew up on trading cards and Saturday cartoons where the monsters were friends first and tools second. This game flips the second part up front and lets you live in it. You can play soft and breed cute teams, or you can go full war-crime manager and turn your base into a factory that never sleeps. Both paths feel allowed. The story itself is thin sauce—some towers, some bosses, a main quest that sort of rushes you if you let it—but the world is thick enough that I kept coming back just to see what new dumb combination of Pal and weapon I could cook up. One evening I had a team of plant creatures and a rocket-toting penguin clearing a dungeon while I hummed the theme again and burned the garlic bread. Worth it. After seventy or eighty hours the shine dulls a bit. You start seeing the same loops. Optimization still needs work; menus feel like they were designed by a guy who never invented hotkeys. Yet every time I think I'm done, I remember there's a new continent I barely touched or a breeding line I abandoned halfway, and I'm right back in the kitchen at two in the morning listening to the rain on the windows and the soft chitter of whatever I left on night duty. It's not perfect. It's not polished like those big expensive productions that scrub every rough edge. It's the kind of game that leaves sawdust on the floor and still makes you want to build one more shed before bed. I keep thinking about those long afternoons as a kid when the only rule was "don't burn the house down" and everything else was fair game. Palworld bottles that feeling, then hands you a shotgun and a time clock. Some sessions left me frustrated enough to mute the whole PC. Most of them left me grinning like an idiot with crumbs on my shirt. If you've got friends who still answer when you text "hop on," or if you just want a place where cute creatures and honest labor and the occasional explosion all live under one roof, this one delivers. I'll be back for whatever they add next. The theme song's already stuck in my head again.

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A review is on the record even before the verdict. The title still needs 90% of members not labeling it woke before a review can put it in the catalog.

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Dan Reilly
+13 clout
Sep 10, 2026
I fired this thing up on a Tuesday that somehow turned into Thursday before I noticed the clock again. Palworld. They call the little beasts Pals and you run around this big open stretch of islands and cliffs catching them, feeding them, putting them to work on your base, and occasionally handing one a rocket launcher because why the hell not. I kept humming that old cartoon whistle from Saturday mornings while the stew was on the stove, the one that always meant something small and fuzzy was about to get in trouble, and this game feels like that memory got a toolbox and a backpack full of ammo. You start soft. Just you and a couple of early Pals that look like they wandered out of a coloring book. You punch trees, you craft a pick, you throw these spheres and suddenly you've got a fluffy thing hauling lumber back to the scrap wood shed you slapped together. The first night I lost half my stuff dying on a ridge I had no business climbing, and I groaned the way I used to groan when the baseball rolled under the porch and I had to dig through spiders to get it. That recovery scramble is pure old-school hassle. You feel the weight of every nail and berry you left behind. Somehow it never quite killed the fun; it just made the next run feel earned. Base building sneaks up on you. One hour you're just trying to keep the rain off your head, next thing the place has assembly lines and a dining hall and a whole crew of Pals running the forges and the farms. Some of them look sweet enough to put on a lunchbox. Then you assign the sheep-looking one to the lumber mill and watch it work twelve-hour shifts without union talk and you laugh because the game never pretends this is a Disney picnic. You're the boss. They work. They fight when you say fight. Sometimes they get turned into cakes. It's messy and a little mean in that kid-memory way where you used to make mud forts and draft the neighborhood mutts into the army whether they liked it or not. I kept catching myself saying "good boy" out loud to a pixelated fire bird that had just roasted three bandits for me. The grind is real. I won't pretend otherwise. You need ore, you need fiber, you need that one rare drop that only spawns when the moon is in the right phase and you already spent forty minutes running back from a death. There were stretches where I felt like I was stuck on a hamster wheel just so I could unlock the next workbench, and my shoulders would ache from the controller the same way they used to ache after raking the whole yard for a buck fifty. But then the fog lifts on a new region and there's a giant bug with a cannon growing out of its back and the sun is coming up over water that actually sparkles and suddenly the hours don't matter. My cousins hopped on one weekend and we spent an entire afternoon just trying to build a ridiculous tower so we could snipe each other's Pals for sport. Multiplayer turns the whole thing into a campfire story with guns. People argue whether it's a rip-off or the thing somebody should have made twenty years ago. I don't care. I grew up on trading cards and Saturday cartoons where the monsters were friends first and tools second. This game flips the second part up front and lets you live in it. You can play soft and breed cute teams, or you can go full war-crime manager and turn your base into a factory that never sleeps. Both paths feel allowed. The story itself is thin sauce—some towers, some bosses, a main quest that sort of rushes you if you let it—but the world is thick enough that I kept coming back just to see what new dumb combination of Pal and weapon I could cook up. One evening I had a team of plant creatures and a rocket-toting penguin clearing a dungeon while I hummed the theme again and burned the garlic bread. Worth it. After seventy or eighty hours the shine dulls a bit. You start seeing the same loops. Optimization still needs work; menus feel like they were designed by a guy who never invented hotkeys. Yet every time I think I'm done, I remember there's a new continent I barely touched or a breeding line I abandoned halfway, and I'm right back in the kitchen at two in the morning listening to the rain on the windows and the soft chitter of whatever I left on night duty. It's not perfect. It's not polished like those big expensive productions that scrub every rough edge. It's the kind of game that leaves sawdust on the floor and still makes you want to build one more shed before bed. I keep thinking about those long afternoons as a kid when the only rule was "don't burn the house down" and everything else was fair game. Palworld bottles that feeling, then hands you a shotgun and a time clock. Some sessions left me frustrated enough to mute the whole PC. Most of them left me grinning like an idiot with crumbs on my shirt. If you've got friends who still answer when you text "hop on," or if you just want a place where cute creatures and honest labor and the occasional explosion all live under one roof, this one delivers. I'll be back for whatever they add next. The theme song's already stuck in my head again.
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Palworld

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