Palworld has been a controversial game, with the ability to enslave and slaughter your cuddly new friends. At first I wasn’t sure there was much to parse. It’s easy to play the game and just feel without thinking more deeply about the moral implications. It wasn’t until I started playing with my brothers, building an advanced base, and collecting each friend that some complexities began to emerge.
It all starts with a poor bastard named Greg, who now lives among my friends. Greg is a random guy I caught with a Pal Sphere, and his capture really started to derail the ethics of our playthrough. He was a simple Syndicate agent, but he watched as a Greg, and so I went to his profile and changed his name. Greg is now hanging out, surrounded by friends with names like Sugarplum, Sasha and Choco.
Palworld is a combination of survival games like Ark or Rust and legally distinct Pokémon-style creatures. My brothers and I are part of the same guild and share a small trifecta of bases, each custom built for its own purpose. Our main base is bustling with friends who are highly specialized, able to cut down trees’ worth in seconds, mine ore, or craft dozens of items with the flick of a wrist.
And then there’s poor Greg, a man with basic craft skills. I’m going to be honest and admit that I threw a Pal Sphere at the guy on a whim and was surprised when it actually worked.
Image: Pocket pair via Polygoon
There’s a very good reason not to just catch people en masse: they’re absolutely horrible. Greg sometimes half-heartedly jogs to a work station, only for an Egyptian-clad dog man to walk up to him and do the exact same task 500 times better.
This skill gap is made even wider by the game’s robust breeding system. Once you’ve unlocked a farm and learned to make cake, you can send friends to the farm to breed. There are three reasons to breed Pals. The first is that you can make new friends not available in the open world by combining two unrelated species. The second is the ability to create elemental variations on existing Pals, such as an electric version of the Relaxasaurus.
The third and most powerful is that you can make better, stronger friends by breeding them together. For example, the Anubis is a powerful crafty friend, but selective breeding can create one with positive traits that make it eat less, work harder and cause less fuss. My friend Matt is in charge of the breeding business – or, as he insists we call it, Pal Resources. Every time I embark on a mission to find ore and other valuable resources, I return to find him obsessed with the peculiarities of Pals. Not every combination is a winner, but that’s no problem. Excess Pals can be fed into the dung pile, where they are consumed to make the winners stronger.
Image: Pocket pair via Polygoon
Greg is, perhaps blessedly, immune to this whole process. You can’t breed people in it Palworld, which makes sense for ethical reasons. People are showing up as non-binary, and even if they appreciate cake, you can’t create more Gregs. However, it doesn’t feel right to release him back into the wild, so he’s a man without much purpose. Sometimes we put him in the storage container, where he presumably experiences an eternal limbo until one of his superiors needs a break. We then pull Greg out so he can wander aimlessly around the base.
There are probably optimal ways to play Palworld that my friends and I have yet to discover. Instead of looking up manuals, we play things by ear, experiment and try different things. Some of these work, while others, like poor Greg, are a dead end. Although Greg can’t contribute much to our success, I like having him with us as a kind of keepsake.
Every time I see Greg, I think about man’s inhumanity to man – or, if you think about it, man’s inhumanity to Pals. At the end of the day, the Pals are fattened on cake and forced to create offspring, some of which are doomed to an essence tube. Greg is relatively free. Sure, his original name wasn’t Greg, and he doesn’t have much to do, but isn’t there liberation in being unemployed and sleeping whenever you want in a giant bed built for dinosaurs?
Even with a bunch of cute, cute friends around, I still get a kick out of seeing the poor guy strolling around our base. Whether he likes it or not, he’s along for the ride. Is he helpful? No. Is this wise? Probably not. But the absurdity of his circumstances is part of what I like Palworld – the well-known signposts from other genres combined in strange, unexpected and sometimes extremely unethical ways.