Highlights
- Palia is a cozy life sim MMO where players can engage in activities like base-building, farming, fishing, hunting, and more. There is no set end goal, and players have freedom to explore and pursue various tasks at their own pace.
- The building mechanics in Palia are seamless and smooth, allowing players to easily redecorate and shift their base. It offers a delightful building experience, with furniture inside buildings moving along when they are relocated.
- The world of Palia is vast and full of resources, secrets, and well-written and humorous NPC dialogue. Players can form relationships with unique characters like fox-people and robots, and engage in quests and stories throughout the game.
This year, I’ve slayed demons in Diablo 4, roleplayed as a battle-hardened medic in BattleBit Remastered, and spent hours traipsing the Halls Of Torment. After all that, it’s quite lovely to settle down in the world of Palia, a cozy life sim MMO where the most savage thing you do is hunt cute foxes - which Hassian the hunter tells me are an invasive species anyway, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.
Singularity6 has produced something lovely here. I’m going to use that word a lot. From the moment you get the grand reveal of the village of Kilma in the game’s opening moments, you know what kind of experience Palia is going to be. A short tutorial takes you through base-building, farming, fishing, hunting, mining, bug-catching, then you’re left to your own devices to mingle with other players and NPCs alike. There is no real end goal - you can spend the next 50 in-game days doing nothing but fishing, and at no point will the game tell you that you're doing something wrong. This is not an MMO you min-max. The grind is only what you make of it.
My personal goal is to turn my virgin plot of beautiful forest into a raging fire of industry. I’ve got two smelters on the go refining copper and iron, and I am chasing after that crafting license, so I can get more smelters for clay and stone bricks. Sawmills churn out planks to help me expand my mansion, an edifice of industry. I hunt everything I see. Every deer, fox, crab, snail, stink bug, fish… it’s all mine. In the future I will have a grand hall full of aquariums and cages, so I can put all of these alien creatures into an eternal prison.
Building is a delight in Palia. You can walk in first-person around your plot, or you can take a bird’s eye view and redecorate and shift your base to your heart’s content - it’s seamless and smooth, one of the best building mechanics I’ve ever seen in a game, let alone an MMO. When you move a building, the furniture inside moves as well. There’s no lag. No stutter. No loading screens. It’s instantaneous. I can only imagine the dozens of hours I will spend on this screen, shifting and tweaking until my virtual mansion is inch-perfect.
Once you leave home, the world unfurls before you, a relatively vast space full of resources, secrets, and NPC dialogue that is well-written, even, and this is not something I say about many games, quite funny. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the stories here, of the relationships I can form with the slightly odd fox-people and robots that live in the village. I bring one lady, Eloisa, a stinkbug, because she asked for one, and she sends me on a quest to lay a trap for what I can only assume is a totally fictional creature, the Flothinger. The trap instead catches a local boy, Auni (who is obsessed with bugs), who Eloisa then assumes is some sort of cryptid in disguise.
Gathering resources is like the “Ooh a piece of candy” Homer Simpson scene over and over again. A pretty flower? I’ll take it. A shiny bug? Well, I’ve got to have that. Some fish splashing over there? Guess I’ve gotta catch them. Your skills slowly tick up, and you get more experience based on your Focus. Focus is a system that works a bit like your sleepiness in Stardew Valley, except even if you run out it doesn’t matter, you can keep on grinding.
You can improve your Focus by cooking delicious food, and man oh man, you can cook some delicious food in Palia. Either grill your fish on a simple campfire, or build a fully functioning kitchen that you and your mates can roleplay The Bear in. It’s a collaborative effort - someone on the prep station, someone else makes bread. It’s intuitive and fun, like an Overcooked mini-game in the middle of your cozy life sim MMO.
Traversing the world completely changes once you get your hands on the Glider, which alongside the Zelda-like climbing mechanics (you can climb basically any wall), means the world feels pretty intricate. There are hidden ledges. Secret chests. There are even temples with puzzles to solve - I will admit I’ve not seen many of these so far, because I’ve been too busy building furniture to decorate my tent. I do wish that there was a mount option earlier in the game, because walking from area to area can feel tedious at times, but that being said, there’s always something to collect along the way, so your time never feels truly wasted.
I’ve played most of the game by myself in a quiet, pre-release world, but there are other players running around, including plenty of Singularity6 staff who always wave back. I’m excited to see how dynamic the world feels when there are other players bustling here and there. I did attend one “deforestation party” on someone else’s plot, which had us strip the majority of trees on the property in ten minutes. This will be the make or break of Palia in the long-run - how social will the game actually be? Will the world feel alive?
Palia stabs in many directions. It is Stardew Valley, The Sims, Zelda, Runescape, and Animal Crossing all in one. This sounds like something that would be a total disaster, but the hash of experiences has been done well here. If you like any of these games, you’ll enjoy Palia.