HOME  â€˘  GAMES

Palia

This is really a very cute game. It's Animal Crossing with some relationship building stuff thrown in. Run around and catch butterflies, collect copper, talk to people, upgrade your tools, build a house and decorate it. Curently (Aug 2023) playing in the closed beta and its really quite polished. I've had just one glitch worth of the name (Return Home took me to somebody else's Home, not mine), no connection issues and everything has functioned as you'd expect it to.

Character building options felt good, there was a very decent set of starting outfit options to put together. The intro tutorial/meet the townspeople wasn't overly dragged out and pretty soon I was gathering everything, everywhere and trying to figure out how to aim my bow.

The microtransaction costs are ludicrous ($70 for a set of three outfits. really?) but hopefully its just cosmetics and doesn't eventually evolve into egregious time gating or similar.

  • Auni - Bug Collecting
  • Hassian - Hunting
  • Reth - Cooking
  • Tish - Furniture Making
  • Hodari - Miner?
  • Badruu - Gardening
  • Einar - Fishing
  • Jel - Tailor
Sept 2023 -- okay, decided after some weeks of playing that I am not particularly engaged with it, as adorable as it is, and I have better things to do than try to chase down hard to catch wildlife that requires coordinating with five other people. Its a nice idea? But I am long past the point where forced interaction is appealing.

It's not horrible, it's not particularly onerous, I just don't like it and the very fluffy gameloop is too simple to hold my attention right now. This would be perfect as a third tier side game while you're focusing on something else; I just don't have the attention span right now for side games.