Palia Review - Screenshot 1 of 7
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Editor's note: This article was originally published in December 2023 as a review in progress. We had hoped to return to Palia once it hit version 1.0, but it's still not there at the time of writing. Therefore we're revisiting one year on to see how things have changed with some new text up top and a score below.

A full year on from its initial beta launch, now feels like as good a time as any to revisit Palia to see what’s changed. The good and bad news is… well, not that much.

On the good side, a steady drip of performance improvements and quality-of-life updates have made for an overall better play experience, while relatively minor content drops have brought things like two-story houses and the conclusion of the main storyline’s ‘Prologue’. There’s never been more to do in Palia and all the content is that extra bit more enjoyable due to various nips and tucks that have streamlined things.

Palia Review - Screenshot 2 of 7
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

However, version 1.0 still feels like it’s quite a while off. Though the next major explorable area (called the Elderwood) is supposedly due to shake things up when it releases sometime in early 2025, most of the content updates thus far have amounted to baby steps beyond the version we reviewed a year ago. Loading times and performance hiccups are still a pervasive issue—Palia runs on the Switch, but we’d hardly suggest this as the ideal platform to play it on. The underlying gameplay is still essentially the same as it was; the lack of significant expansions or additions makes this current version feel more like what we’d expect out of a month’s progress, rather than a full year.

Now, Palia hasn’t had the titanic resources of a behemoth like Genshin Impact dev Hoyoverse powering development—Singularity 6 was hit by multiple rounds of layoffs in the last year, reducing its staff to just a few dozen before it got acquired by Daybreak Game Company. This in mind, it's apples and oranges to compare its progress to that of other live service games, especially considering that there aren't a whole lot of competitors in the ‘cosy farm-sim MMO’ space at the moment.

Even if its progress this year has felt lacking, Palia is still an all-around decent social farm sim. It’s definitely got its jank and it still very much feels like a game that has yet to reach the vaunted ‘1.0’ status, but people are playing (even if it's not exactly bustling) and there’s some real magic and charm here that makes it an enjoyable experience in its current form. Who knows, maybe another year or two of progress will see this little sprout finally blossom into something fully formed and beautiful. At the very least, it’s still worth a download to see what you think.

Palia Review - Screenshot 3 of 7
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Original text [Wed 20th Dec, 2023 18:00 GMT]: Two years ago, a new developer called Singularity 6—comprised of various ex-Riot, Sony, and Blizzard staff—announced Palia, a “Massively Multiplayer Community Sim” that would aim to bring together the best parts of Stardew Valley and World of Warcraft. Since then, the title has been in early access on PC, and even though it’s still yet to arrive at its 1.0 release, a Switch version has arrived as part of the continued development. After spending some time with it, Palia shows a lot of promise, though it also notably still feels like an unfinished game.

The gameplay loop in Palia feels like it falls neatly between the grindiness of an MMO and the sedate pace of a farm sim. You engage in all the expected homesteading tasks, such as fishing, cooking, and tilling your field, to not just acquire gold to spend on some better furniture for your house, but also to progress an ongoing series of chained questlines from various NPCs that gradually lead you deeper into the world of Palia. You’re encouraged to take things at your own pace and engage in the activities that interest you, though fulfilling quests is usually the quickest way to secure yourself some ‘renown’ currency that can later be spent at a shrine to increase your focus meter. Focus is what you get when you eat food you cook for yourself, and this consumable resource will ensure that your labor will be rewarded with additional experience for as long as it lasts.

Palia Review - Screenshot 4 of 7
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Borrowing a bit from the Rune Factory games, Palia also sells itself as an RPG-lite experience, wherein completing various tasks will fill up an experience bar that will further your effectiveness in that skill. There’s no combat to speak of here—though the bug-catching minigame calls to mind the catching mechanics of Pokémon Legends: Arceus—but it still feels satisfying to build your character according to the tasks that interest you. Most tasks also involve some sort of minigame to change up the gameplay, such as having to keep fish within a narrow zone as you reel them in or having to manually till away the soil on a plot of land.

The nearby village of Kilima is home to several NPC residents you can get to know and eventually romance, and we particularly appreciated the use of branched dialogue trees here. You can pick responses according to air, fire, water, and earth, which will not only shape that NPC’s perception of your personality, but leads to your character generally taking on more traits that align with the element for which you’ve selected the most responses. It’s not the kind of system that pigeonholes you into a specific personality type over time, but we enjoyed how this spruces up conversations by adding a light gameplay element to responses.

Palia Review - Screenshot 5 of 7
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

All of this is well and good for a single-player game, but it bears mentioning that the multiplayer elements feel quite downplayed, to the point that we can’t help but wonder why Palia was pitched as an MMO at all. Sure, you can see a few other players roaming around the map and there’s a shared chat where you can talk with each other. However, you can’t even do something as basic as directly trading materials with other players, though you can make use of a roundabout ‘requests’ system to exchange goods across the server. Meanwhile, shared activities feel a bit like public events in Destiny, wherein anyone who participates in something like mining a specific node for ore will benefit from the drops it gives out.

It would maybe feel odd to have some outlandish farming equivalent to raids to participate in as group content, but it feels like this is a multiplayer game that really struggles to implement its multiplayer features. Why can players visit your home, but only help you with watering crops? Why is there a server item request feature, but no way to directly trade with other players? Perhaps these things are on the roadmap, but Palia is full of weird decisions like this where one can’t help but wonder if development resources would’ve been better spent on making this a more fully featured single-player title.

Palia Review - Screenshot 6 of 7
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

As you might expect from a pre-1.0 release, Palia feels very much like a work in progress. At launch, there are only two explorable zones beyond your instanced housing plot, and neither is particularly sprawling. And though there’s a fair bit to do between the various tasks and quests available to you, it really begins to run out of steam about a dozen or so hours in as you start to get more into the grind of acquiring resources and waiting for various maker machines to finish converting materials after a fixed amount of real-world time has passed. Make no mistake, there are some good farm sim mechanics here and the potential for a great game is certainly there, but the current build feels like an anemic proof-of-concept of some grand experience that may or may not ever materialize.

As for its visuals and performance, Palia is kind of dicey on Switch. The Fortnite-esque art style certainly looks nice, but the resolution gives everything an overly fuzzy appearance in both docked or handheld modes, while muddy textures abound and take an extra few seconds to load no matter where you go. Meanwhile, the frame rate is all over the place, and while this isn’t as much of a bother in a game as slow-paced as this, it can be annoying watching things turn into a slideshow for a few seconds when you try to turn the camera as you’re running across a field. We didn’t note any crashing issues—though returning to the Switch’s home screen for more than a few seconds will boot you and force you to log back in—but Palia overall still feels like a game that’s only just barely holding it together on Switch.

Palia Review - Screenshot 7 of 7
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

As a free-to-play live-service game, microtransactions naturally have got to show up somewhere, and here they manifest in a basic cosmetic shop. You can buy things like outfits and gliders either individually or as part of themed bundles, but it bears mentioning that the prices seem kind of high for what’s being offered. Buying the bundle will knock off a few bucks, but you’re still looking at paying anywhere from $8 to $17 for clothes in a game that isn’t very multiplayer-centric. Fortunately, gameplay-related progress isn’t gated behind paying real money, but we still wish the cosmetics economy were a little better balanced.

Conclusion

Palia isn’t really anything special, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. There’s a fun gameplay loop to engage with here that fans of farm sims will be sure to enjoy, and though the MMO elements feel rather underbaked in this pre-1.0 release, the microtransactions don’t feel overbearing and there’s enough solo-focused content here to make it worth trying out. It would be tough to recommend you pick this one up were it a full-price retail release, but you’re sure to get at least an afternoon or two of good fun if you choose to try it out. At the end of the day, it costs nothing but time and storage space to give Palia a shot; we’d suggest you download it and see if it’s for you—especially if you can’t get enough of farm sims.