When Palworld sold 12 million Steam copies in under two weeks, two things felt like they’d become inevitable: First, that Nintendo’s lawyers would take any opening they could find to punish Pocketpair for daring to release what many had been calling Pokemon: Gun Version well before its launch, and second, that we’d eventually see Palworld prompt its own imitators with hopes of pulling off a similar smash hit.
While Nintendo threw down the lawsuit gauntlet within a year of Palworld’s launch, the nature of videogame development timelines meant that if a new subgenre was spinning up, it’d be a bit longer before we saw the evidence. With the kickoff of the latest Steam Next Fest, however, it seems the time has finally come. The age of the Palworld-like is upon us.
Next Fest has brought a bumper crop of creature-collecting, base-building, open-world-survival-crafting demos. Here are the heaviest hitters among Palworld’s latest competitors.
Palworld, but witches
Of the selection of emerging Palworld-inspired survival games, Witchspire is the one that feels like it has the most cohesive vision. Rather than generic base-building survivalists, you play as a coven of novice witches who can conjure structures, harvest resources with magic, and—for the Little Guy Labor Force factor—defeat magical creatures in battle “and collect their spirits to tame familiars.”
Between conjuring forests when you need more wood to build with, floating in midair to get a better angle to build from, and binding magic sprites as farming familiars, witchcraft feels like it’s gluing together Witchspire’s creature collecting and survival elementspretty seamlessly, and it’s all packaged in a pleasant art aesthetic. Some of the demo’s reviews say it’ll need a healthy amount of polish before launch, though.
Palworld, but with airships
Compared to Witchspire, Guardians of the Wild Sky has a bit more of a generic Unreal Engine look to it. But while it feels a bit like a game you might see running in the background of a police procedural, it does have airships. Everyone loves airships.
Unsurprisingly, Guardians of the Wild Sky is emphasizing verticality with airborne exploration and construction, meaning you can seemingly have creatures helping you grow crops on an airship in the sky. It’s power fantasies on power fantasies—and so far, the demo’s received a pretty warm reception, sitting at a Very Positive rating with 350 reviews at time of writing.
Palworld, but it’s like a charming picturebook
Oddfauna: Secret of the Terrabeast seems like Palworld by way of Where the Wild Things Are. You play as a sort of picturebook gremlin helping to cultivate “a living world called a Terrabeast,” a walking, pleasantly dopey-looking biome that you can build upon as it roams the landscape. And to do so, you’ll need to attract the “oddfauna”—goobery little gremlins that you can befriend, ride, and fight alongside while exploring, farming, and building.
Oddfauna has a lovely textured art style reminiscent of a children’s picturebook illustration. I don’t know how much I’d actually want to inhabit its world alongside a terrabeast, but there’s definitely something I admire about the emptyheaded gaze of its wildlife.
Palworld, but it’s an AI-fueled disaster that’s crying out for a merciful death
Guardians of the Wild Sky might look a little generic, but compared to Layer Land’s visual palette of asset pasghetti, it looks like a masterwork. Layer Land looks like it doesn’t want to exist, but is forced to maintain the barest suspension of disbelief about its promises of AI-powered creature generation and interaction just long enough for its first players to regret spending their time and money.
But the first trailer in its Steam listing shows players fighting a nine foot tall curvy dragon lady, so maybe I’m on the wrong side of history. Hard to say.
Read the full article here
