Why Everyone Can’t Stop Talking About Palworld

The internet can’t get enough of Palworld, a new video game with a surprising hook: Pokémon but with guns. In less than a week, Palworld has sold more than 8 million copies, has dominated Steam, and is currently more popular than Fortnite on Xbox. But there’s both more and less to Palworld than its surface-level resemblance to Pokémon. Here’s why everyone is playing it—and why you might not want to.

Why everyone is obsessed with Palworld

Palworld, available on Steam and Xbox, is full of cartoon creatures that look suspiciously like Pokémon characters, albeit with one major difference: The creatures have weapons. Palworld’s cartoon monsters, called Pals, use mounted machine guns and all sorts of other military-grade artillery. This is weird! But that hasn’t stopped Palworld from becoming what could be the best-selling game of 2024. It’s everywhere, and if you have kids, they’re probably going to play it after seeing it go viral (if they aren’t already).

But Palworld, despite its (legally questionable) appearances, is not a Pokémon-style game. It’s something very different.

Palworld, explained

The similarities between Pokémon and Palworld are mostly surface level. Both games feature cute creatures with magical elemental abilities, and as in Pokémon, you capture the creatures in Palworld by throwing a special ball at them. And yes, some of those Pals look very, very familiar. But that’s about where the direct comparisons end.

Pokémon is a monster-collection role-playing game, with turn-based battles driven by menus and selections, as well as a lot of dialogue. The goal in most Pokémon games is to travel around the world gathering every monster, and challenging other Pokémon trainers to become a Pokémon master.

Palworld, however, is a survival game. As you do in Pokémon titles, you play as a human adventurer in a fantasy world where you battle and capture monsters, which then work and fight for you. But here you spend even more of your time gathering resources such as wood and stone to build tools and structures, which in turn allow you to gather more resources and gain the ability to build even more complicated things. You also fight and capture Pals, and you build defenses at your base against inevitable attacks, but gathering resources and building stuff is the backbone of everything in Palworld.

The more distinctive elements of Palworld unfold from there. You build structures and tools from materials you harvest, make food that you have to cook for yourself and the Pals you gather and “invite” to live with you, and find various things around the world. Those things include Pal Goo (an early contender for the most disturbing video game term of 2024), which is, unsurprisingly, goo dropped by Pals. Where that goo comes from is between the Pals and their deity of choice. You use the items you find, and the Pal Goo, to build yet more things.

The level of technology you have access to ratchets up quickly, going from axes, spears, and bows to a steadily escalating series of guns and explosive weaponry. You can even create saddles and gear to ride bigger Pals, which then use their own guns and weapons to create even more havoc. But first, you have to harvest a lot of materials, build a lot of structures, capture a lot of Pals, and jump through a lot of hoops.

If this sounds like work, you’re not wrong, but much as in work, you can bring in other people to make things easier. Palworld has plenty of systems in place for you to collaborate with your friends to gather, build, and explore, as well as to team up to take on more and more powerful Pals and other enemies. In that way, Palworld has almost as much in common with games like Minecraft or more mature fare such as ARK: Survival Evolved, each of which is really designed to be played with friends. Xbox players and PC players who aren’t playing on a private server can team up with as many as three other people. If you’re playing via Steam on the PC, you can set up dedicated servers that allow up to 32 people to play together.

How to play Palworld

You can play Palworld with either a keyboard and mouse, where you move with the WASD keys on the former and look and attack/harvest with the latter, or a controller. The basics really are pretty simple, much as in any other third-person action game, but Palworld also has a lot of menus and options that it does a surprisingly decent job of teaching you how to use. In that way, Palworld is one of the more approachable survival games out there for new players.

Currently, Palworld is available to buy on Xbox and PC via Steam for $30, or on Game Pass on PC and Xbox. It’s an early-access title, so while the game is fully functional and offers a lot to do, it’s still in active development, with major updates and additions planned over the next year or longer. You can find more to experience here than in many other early-access games, but unless you’re prepared to deal with an incomplete game that might suffer from bugs or crashes, we recommend waiting awhile to try it out.

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry.