Palworld Taught Me It’s Okay To Eat Pokemon at Gunpoint

In the brief time since its release, Palworld has become Steam’s bestselling game, incited a debate about plagiarism and AI, and won over a legion of players with its gameplay. The accusations made against the game are grave ones, but how much legitimacy there is to them remains to be seen. Few would deny, however, that Pokemon is the game’s obvious inspiration. Palworld hasn’t so much worn that inspiration on its sleeve as it has tailored a full suit out of it to strut around in. The controversy raises some interesting questions. Why are fans of Pokemon and similar games so comfortable with enslaving, butchering, and outright murdering Palworld‘s cuddly critters?

Pokemon Grows Up, and It’s As Awful as Actual Adulthood

Upon reaching Level 15 in the tech tree, you craft a Meat Cleaver and start eyeing your Lamballs. You caught five of them for the XP bonus during the tutorial, but you’ve since replaced these mediocre mutton lumps with better Pals. You ran a profitable Ranch, but now your crates overflow with Wool, and all those Lamballs are just clogging up space in your Palbox. So you do the thing Pokemon would never let you: take that Meat Cleaver and go to bloody work. Sure, the game censors the butchery with a pixelated bubble. Still, you know what you did, and there’s Lamball Mutton on the ground after as proof.

Butchery is one of several gameplay mechanics that makes perfect sense in the context of a survival game but that Pokemon would never include. “Pokemon with guns” is everyone’s favorite description of Palworld. Fair enough, but that line falls short of what the game actually is. “Pokemon taken to its logical conclusion” is more accurate, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue, so here we are. Butchery and forced Pal labor feel like natural fits for Palworld. That’s not because the game wants to be as edgy as possible but because those are things you’d, unfortunately, expect in a world where humans and Pals live side by side.

Take Aim, Fire

Palworld didn’t add guns the way BMX XXX added nudity to bike-riding, in the desperate hope that edginess would equal attention. It added guns because, in a world beset by firebreathing sky lizards and electric horses, you can bet people would want a little personal protection. Of course, it’s fair to assume that Pocketpair understood the attention these “adult” mechanics would bring to the game. That doesn’t mean these mechanics feel forced. Palworld is surprisingly immersive. Part of the reason is its willingness to abandon the cartoonish training wheels that Pokemon has left on for 28 years.

I’ve been playing Pokemon since Blue, but I don’t feel any particular twinge of guilt when I chop Lamball up and toss it in the pot. In the context of Palworld, it just makes sense. If the next Pokemon game hands me some barbeque tongs and a bottle of steak sauce to go with my Pikachu, I might not feel the same. The odds of that happening are zero, anyway. Palworld isn’t better or worse than Pokemon just because it courts controversy by taking a hard-nosed look at the creature-collection genre. It’s better because it has Depresso.

I rest my case.

Palworld is available for PC in early access.