Palworld Lets You Enslave Humans, and It Gets Even Worse

What’s the worst thing you can do in Palworld? Beat your Pals? Force them to work long hours, even after they’ve broken bones, developed ulcers, and gone mad? How about butchering them for resources when they get weak or you just get bored? No matter how much Palworld looks like Pokemon, there’s no denying it’s a darker experience due to the way the game allows you to mistreat your Pals. Yet, arguably the game’s darkest content doesn’t involve Pals at all. Did you know that if you toss a Pal Sphere at a human and you can capture them? You can even bring them back to your base to work at a crafting station, just like your Tanzee and Depresso. Slavery is alive and well in Palworld, and it gets even worse.

Palworld, Pokemon, and Slavery as a Gaming Mechanic

Humans don’t have special abilities or a Paldeck number, but that doesn’t stop you from hauling them home and planting them in front of a workbench to craft arrows for you. Palworld isn’t the first game to let you enslave people, of course. There’s Rimworld, Kenshi, Stellaris, Mount and Blade, and Conan Exiles, just to name a few. Slavery in gaming is nothing new. Palworld isn’t innovative for including it, but the backlash the game has seen for this mechanic raises some interesting questions. Why is it acceptable to enslave Pals but not people? Aren’t both equally gross? What about Pokemon?

You’re not a bad person for catching a human in Palworld, just like you’re not a bad person for beating up fictional prostitutes in GTA5. It’s a game. It’s not real. The interesting part isn’t so much the morality as the discomfort. Some of the same players who happily put Pengullets to work watering their Wheat Plantations balk at enslaving human characters. It feels like a weird disconnect, especially since few batted an eye at the idea of capturing and battling Pokemon, when the in-game ethics of doing so is, at best, dubious. We’re not going to solve any ethical dilemmas here, but they’re worth examining since they shape the bounds of acceptable content in the games that we love.

Is Palworld Parody?

Is Palworld a Pokemon parody or not? Some have convincingly argued that the game is nihilistic, empty of any actual themes or meaning. If that’s the case, it’s not trying to “say” anything about slavery, animal cruelty, or anything else, despite the mechanics it puts at players’ fingertips. I think that’s the likeliest case. Palworld isn’t particularly sincere, although Pocketpair would probably prefer we consider it a parody if doing so spares the developer any blowback from Game Freak and Nintendo. Its only real interest lies in mashing together creature-collecting, base-building, and survival mechanics to sell games.

Palworld is in early access and things can change, but if the game had some big message it wanted to push it would already be in it, right? That’s one of the most disappointing things about Pocketpair’s creation. Few games have ever been better positioned to lead a conversation about how we treat the living things around us, yet Palworld doesn’t care. During early access, we’ll undoubtedly get new Pals, new weapons, and new technologies. Yet, we’ll receive the same old silence we had before when it comes to things that matter. Games can be about escapism, but they don’t have to be morally numb, and I’m afraid this one is.

Palworld is available for PC in early access.