The World’s Most Popular Video Game Is a Huge Mistake

The first thing you need to know about Palworld, a new video game developed and published by the Japanese studio Pocketpair, is that it is ludicrously popular. According to data scraped from Steam, a digital storefront for PC games, Palworld became the second game ever after 2017’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to breach 2 million concurrent players last week. Palworld arrived on Jan. 19, so that growth laps some of the most commercially solvent franchises in the industry—the server concentrations of Counter-Strike and Grand Theft Auto V can eat their hearts out. All this is to say that Pocketpair has a genuine phenomenon on its hands: Palworld, much like Fortnite or Minecraft before it, is poised to dominate the corridors of elementary schools for the rest of 2024, for better or worse.

This is unfortunate news for me, and, really, anyone else who cares about the virtues of interactive entertainment, because Palworld’s appeal is totally inscrutable. Rarely has a megahit video game been more repellent to good senses. At its basics, Palworld is a blatant looting of Nintendo’s long-running Pokémon series: You take control of a bright-eyed preteen in a verdant wasteland that is home to a whole taxonomy of cute creatures—known as Pals—that can be tamed and subsequently deployed in battle. That is the same formula Pokémon has relied on for more than three decades, but Nintendo has generally treated its fiction with the texture of a warmhearted coming-of-age saga. Each Pokémon game typically focuses on a boy or girl who leaves town to explore an enchanting continent on a yearslong safari, establishing spirit bonds with the wordless Pikachus and Charmanders who join them.

Palworld, meanwhile, discards all of those warm feelings completely. In this game, you essentially enslave these cuddly creatures, condemning them to unpaid labor in the mines or lumber fields to gather resources, or—better yet—arm them with steely, Call of Duty–style machine guns so they can assist in the subjugation of their peers. In other words, Palworld is a Pokémon rip-off where you can shoot poor, defenseless creatures. This is another contrast to the Nintendo property: Pokémon never die, they simply fall into a state of unconsciousness before they’re revived by their goodly owner. In Palworld, however, you can find YouTube compilations of player-hunters on the battlefield, not befriending the roaming wildlife but blowing their heads off.

Not that these indulgences are without all consequences. Players must be consistently monitoring the “sanity” meter of their incarcerated Pals. Work them too hard and you will fray their minds, causing their production to decrease. Once you’ve gathered a large enough legion of serfs, they will dutifully assist in the homestead you’ve crafted for yourself in one of the glorious hillside vistas in the game world—cooking, cleaning, building under your banner, in a project of relentless expansion. You will then conquer bosses, level up your character, and increase your coffers with loot in a quest to achieve total dominion over the land. Never, and I do mean never, will the Pals threaten to seize the means of production.

“It’s a take on Pokémon that truly accepts our brokenness,” wrote Dave Jones, in a remarkably salient PC Gamer essay about Palworld’s cruel resonance. “Its smash success has perhaps proved quite how steeped in sin we all really are.”

Perhaps you can read all of Palworld’s darkness as a sick joke—perhaps some take on “cute aggression,” or the strange phenomenon of wanting to mangle adorable things. Maybe Pocketpair is angling for some crude humor when it allows us to strap an AK-47 to a cartoon bird and send it into battle. (If you want to be extremely charitable, maybe you can also claim that Palworld is a shrewd satire of the cognitive dissonance that afflicts most gamers as they sit slack-jawed on the couch with a controller in hand.) But frankly, there are so many other flagrant issues with Palworld that it’s hard to imagine any of its content was crafted with much intention. For instance, one eagle-eyed Twitter user who goes by @Byofrog noted that some of Palworld’s graphical geometry bears remarkable similarities to the renders you can find in some modern Pokémon games, raising the question of whether or not Pocketpair was cribbing assets from the very franchise the studio hoped to emulate. (Takuro Mizobe, head of development, seemed to deny those accusations, but Nintendo is reportedly “investigating” those potential IP violations.) Others have accused Pocketpair of using generative A.I. in the creation of these Pals—given Pocketpair’s previous dalliance with the controversial technology—though those charges seem to be specious at best.

But the larger problem, speaking as someone who had the misfortune of playing a bit of Palworld to prepare for this story, is that the game simply isn’t very good. Palworld is still in active development, so some of these issues might be patched up in the future, but right now the controls are floaty and imprecise, the on-screen interface is borderline unreadable, and the nuts and bolts of the gameplay are rote, unintuitive, and plainly boring. If you are the sort of person who wishes to hunt down progressively more exotic species of Pals with a variety of awkward combat systems, then you are a much more patient person than I. Palworld instead seems to rely on pure novelty—a meaner, more nihilistic Pokémon, attuned to humanity’s worst impulses—covering up the bereftness of the design. As with other sandbox games, it takes forever to develop your arsenal. You will construct tools out of sticks and stones before unlocking slightly more impactful technologies, spread out through endless tiers. I am certainly not a prude when it comes to low art, but I certainly expected something better than this.

I am far from alone in making these critiques. Eurogamer, forever a bastion of erudite gaming commentary, concluded that Palworld was “primitive and derivative, a game that appears at first glance almost to be completely fake.” A second PC Gamer article added that Pocketpair has delivered a “slog” with a “bad punchline.” And yet, Palworld has already sold more than 8 million copies since mid-January. That likely already exceeds the haul of Baldur’s Gate 3—last year’s consensus game of the year, and a true work of art—which is the sort of thing that confirms what a twisted business the entertainment industry is. And Palworld currently remains in Early Access—gamer jargon for an extended, for-profit beta-testing period—which means we are still quite a ways out from the game’s official release, where some of the bugs will be squashed, and finer polish lacquered on the margins. That means its cult shall only grow larger from here. A generation of young people are currently falling in love with this new incarnation of Pokémon—tuned to the dehumanizing horrors of late capitalism—where these lovable creatures are nothing more than assets from which to extract value, a means to an end. Palworld believes that we are a sick society, and lamentably, the numbers don’t lie.