Being honest - the online aspects of Palia feel completely forced, especially when the chat is almost entirely people calling out objectives like Flow Trees that require multiple people for…some reason. The game feels like a single player one-time-purchase game shoehorned into an online free-to-play format. You’re forced to play online, but removing the online element would change almost nothing. I honestly would prefer if this wasn’t a free to play game and could be played offline.

This is all really a shame, because I feel like there’s a lot of fun ideas here. The character customization is fun, the characters you meet seem interesting so far, and the village itself - while a bit too empty and a headache to navigate at times - is pretty cool. Palia has a lot of potential with how it develops sure, but when the main drawback is the format itself rather than the content it’s going to be hard for me to invest my time in it.

There are other issues I have with the way things are laid out (finding the one villager on the map you need to talk to is hard, the inventory takes too long to open) but I can at least hope it will be more refined in future updates. A heads up as well - the game struggles on the Switch. There’s no some stuttering, the graphics don’t look the best, and the fans do get a bit loud. Personally it didn’t bother me much though.

(Side note - this game is in an open beta, which I only found out after looking at the change log on its wiki. This wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the Switch eShop or in game as far as I saw. But with most early access/beta games, I’ll try to revisit this review once it gets fully released. )

(Also, making it so that pressing the button to open the map while the map is open brings up the freemium shop instead of closing the map is…something. I keep accidentally opening it.)