In our day-to-day hectic lives, we generally want to find some solace in something to break down all the stress that has built up. Sometimes that solace could be with a person who you just want to snuggle up to and breathe their presence in a bit. Sometimes it could be a pet that just wants scratches and rubs and wants to know how your day has been as you scratch and rub them. Whatever the case may be, we all need solace at some point in our days or weeks, or we become a miserable shell of a person. Never be a shell.
Didn’t ever think a review could be this deep and sentimental, did ya? Me neither.
Here we are now with a bit of gaming solace at your disposal with Palia from developer Singularity 6. It’s a world without too much chaos, just the right amount of relaxing design, and it runs on purpose. Not too many games can run on that nowadays. From planting veggies to building structures, and all the way up to solving a long, lost mystery, this relaxing massive multiplayer online sim experience is something to kick back and relax with every day when needed.
For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been kicking back thanks to being privy to a preview of Palia. We are here to tell you that it is legit in its intentions to relax and bring players a fair amount of good fun.
So, sit back. Relax. Take some deep breaths and come on a preview journey into this cool world.
It’s good to be a human
The story of Palia begins with you, a common human, though a rare race amongst the Palian’s, somehow getting teleported into the land of Palia. Your purpose there is undetermined, as is how you got there, but what is certain is that the folks in Palia consider you legendary. As someone of prominence, you are tasked with helping Jina, your first meet and greet in Palia, figure out why humans are making their way to Palia and what mysteries the land holds in its unknown and undiscovered territories.
As standard MMO stories go, this one matches the personality of the game quite well, which is relaxing yet pleasantly pushy for the player to explore. While the mystery of why humans are starting to appear in Palia is the overarching theme of the tale, it’s not completely pressing. There’s no world-destroying cataclysm you must save everyone from before it’s too late, rather it’s a simple mystery that pushes enough to encourage the gamer to start exploring Palia’s vast world. It’s a story that works well with the gameplay design and it never loses that gameplay complementary focus along the way, well, at least from what we have previewed so far.
That’s how the game begins and then you’re immediately thrown into the gameplay scrum. Like, the polite, take your time, you’re doing a good job sort of gameplay scrum.
THE SCRUM
I have purposely used the word ‘scrum’ for my humor. Maybe yours as well. Anyway, the gameplay design in Palia consists of a few odds and ends. The two main points in the overall gameplay are to explore and solve a mystery and to build/collect/keep going. The former is driven solely by the story and the story of why humans keep appearing in Palia. You hop from character to character to piece together the underlying assumption that something terrible happened to humans and how that relates back to them making a return visit. This is akin to some of the adventure games I played as a kid, where there was just enough mystery to keep you pushing forward. One such example from my childhood gaming experiences is LucasFilm Games’ Habitat on the Commodore 64. Considered the first MMO in video game history, even featuring avatars, you were basically dropped on an island in the middle of somewhere and you were charged with exploring and uncovering the island’s mysteries. Much like Palia, uncovering those mysteries wasn’t pressing and never felt like you should hurry or else. Just like Habitat, Palia is a positive and welcoming place, even with its mysterious undertones scattered everywhere in the land. Exploring the land and seeing where you can get to is a driving piece to Palia’s adventure and just an absolutely relaxing time. It’s a simple, fun experience.
To compliment that piece of the gameplay puzzle, Palia has a hefty amount of collecting, building, and completing side quests that also involve collecting and building (repeated for your viewing pleasure). As you progress through the main story, you run into all sorts of people in Palia. They have side quests ready for you and are ready to help you expand your living and surviving arrangements. For example, you might run into a fellow that wants you to mine material/rocks and get to a certain level so that he can give you a brick-making blueprint. Once you reach that level with mining minerals, you gain access to the blueprint reward for a machine to make bricks. Having that machine allows you to take what you collected from mining rocks and make bricks to build your home, or whatever you would like. There are a lot of blueprints you can pick up in this game and build out your human homestead with, which is so much fun…and so relaxing. Mining is not the only attribute you’ll be using during this game, you also have wood chopping, cooking, and growing veggies (gardening? Yeah, probably). Each one of these techniques can work hand in hand with the other to create some massive structure that you can call your own. Gathering, growing, and creating is such an addictive piece to the gameplay, and Singular 6 did a great job of pushing the player towards those purposeful pleasantries.
Aside from side quests, collecting, and creating, there were hunting and fishing elements in the game as well. The hunting elements, at least in the early part of the preview time we had, were bow/arrow and hunting down bugs by gassing and grabbing them. The bow wasn’t too terrible, and the game ‘helped’ out a bit with aiming and contact. The latter of that bunch was loose-y goose-y, but in a good way, as I can see the aim assist and contact area around the animals as a bit friendlier than most games of this type. If younger gamers are trying to get into an MMO gaming arena, having fewer frustrating controls, and more flexible accuracy using the bow and arrow stands only to help them get used to this type of game. The hunting was great overall and proved how multi-generational friendly the game was in its design.
The fishing was equally as good, though a bit more complicated with the controller. The fishing was just a cast, waiting for the bob, and then reeling in the fish. That last part comes with having to guide the fish between two green curved lines to successfully capture it. It took me two fish to figure that last part out, but after I got it down, it was second nature. I spent a good deal of time fishing, as it was fun and less burdensome. Both hunting and fishing allowed me to build my cooking level as well and made me want to keep finding recipes.
As you can probably tell, the gameplay stretches along different paths that include farming, building, hunting, and exploration. Each one of those contains a large amount of work and sometimes very complicated projects. For example, I’m still trying to build out my home in the game, as the building portion has more than a few steps, including creating more refined wood and bricks in massive amounts that are produced in a set amount of time (60 seconds to produce a plank, a minute and a half for brick). It takes a while to get things up and running, but it never feels like a chore. That was a big concern considering most MMOs send you on multiple quests to get one thing. This doesn’t feel like that at all. And to help, you can leave machines on and going while you produce brick and planks, then just go do other quests or gathering. It is built to handle and juggle complicated methods to create and build. The game is complicated at times but relaxing in its execution, which is a big deal because you play games to get away from a burdensome life, not to replicate it.
From the short period of playtime with Palia, I can safely say it is going to be a game I return to quite often. It’s just relaxing, fun, and it’s not too over the top with its story or demands. There’s not a thick layer of drama in its story, rather it is driven by mystery and discovery. The collecting and building are just the icing on the cake throughout the entire process. All the pieces of the gameplay seem to nicely complement each other and work well as they move the player along. Most importantly, the experience is just fun.
The only minor knock to the entire experience
And this knock isn’t loud, rather it’s easily correctable – understanding the map and traveling with it. I had several quests that sent me searching for specific individuals. Some of those individuals were easy to find, and some were nowhere to be found…at least easily. For example, when I had to find the character that was supposed to give me blueprints for the brick-making machine, it took me an hour and some change to realize that he wasn’t on the first big map, rather he was in a different location in Palia – a different land/map. While the younger gamer group out there probably could have realized it immediately, it took me nearly 60 minutes to get my head wrapped around the fact that other people can exist in Palia outside of the first initial map. While I felt like a complete dunce once I found the brick-making fellow, I wished that in the backend menu there was a list of characters that I met and that list could point me to the map they existed on. It would have made life so much easier in the game.
This is a minor complaint and something more related to my cruddy memory than the developers needing to rethink things, but it was a hiccup for me. Not a terrible one. Easily remedied with a small cup of water type of hiccup.
Anyway, let’s wrap this preview up.
Conclusion
Palia from developer Singularity 6 is on track to be one of the more delightful and long-lasting MMO experiences that any age group can enjoy. I can’t wait to see what the final product looks like because right now, it’s quite good.
