Recent reviews by time to go to bed!!! :D

awesome game for bedtime gaming

Cirno lifted a boulder just like the title said. It happened and no one can say that it didn't, unless they didnt finish the game.
Awesome.

Deadlock if it was good

Didn't think I'd be playing a boomer shooter-esque game where Stealth is not only a viable option, but encouraged and rewarded.

Though it's not really a Doom-like, I found that it is a lot more comparable to a game like Bioshock, just a lot less linear. The leveldesign is really fun judging from the first few levels I played. Generally there are more ways than one to progress if you explore enough of the level. Exploration is also rewarded, weapons tend to either break or run out of ammo, and with your limited inventory space you don't always have a replacement in your pocket.

Optional routes tend to give you basic melee weapons, but also special guns. In the second level you can find a sniper rifle which will come in handy as there is a type of enemy in that level that will cause you a headache if you dont have it.
In that same level however, there is another route which will give you another type of weapon that is similarly effective against a different type of enemy.

When I finished that level I didnt even find half of the secret it had to offer, motivating me to replay the level again to find different routes to beat it. The game also appears to track whether you killed goons or just knocked them out, allowing self-imposed challenge runs like a pacifist run if that is your jam.

It's in early access and seems to come with 5 levels for now, but they are very replayable und for the money I definitely think i's already worth it.


If I had to nitpick, some of my gripes with the game at the moment are that there is no autosave. Sometimes I just forget to hit quicksave for a while and get punished severely for it. I also think the falldamage is a little harsh and I feel like it sort of discourages exploration of verticality.

She is probably the most fun character they have added to this game yet.

The game is decent, but the recent microtransactions are horrible and i wanna add a +1 negative review to further hammer home the message to bandai that this is not okay.
Also very questionable balance changes that affect most of the cast when really only one or two characters were able to abuse these mechanics in a way that felt cheap.

One of those games that I would definitely have recommended a few years ago, but along the way it changed for the worse.
The TL;DR is that due to a lot of the dev team being laid off for one reason or another, it is now unrealistic to expect the promised story mode or even the remaining DLC characters to be released in a finished state, in fact one can expect them to be gamebreaking on launch as there is precedents for that.
Other negative reviews are better informed about the situation than I am, so I suggest having a look through them.

I was so excited for this game.

Knowing how MBTLs launch on PC turned out, it was a huge red flag that the PC didn't get a beta test. And every worry I had got then validated on launch tenfold. The game crashes frequently for various reasons related to netplay, the rollback is very wonky and the port feels generally unfinished.

A shame too, since I hear when you get to play the game on a system where it actually works on, its a blast.

I don't think I'll be buying french bread games on launch from this point forward.

Disclaimer: There's credible rumours of this game having used AI to generate its monsterdesigns. The devs seem to have been pro-AI previously and even made a game with gen-AI as a gimmick. I'm strongly opposed to gen-AI in general, however, from what I can tell all the assets in the game are human-made. What I think probably happened is that AI was used to generate the general shape of the monster, and then the artists took the results and refined them.

Using AI as an inspiration like this, in my personal opinion, is not ideal, but not a bad offense as long as you are working on a limited budget, which this game did up until now.

That said, the game has now sold over a million over the weekend, with more than a million players playing the game at the time of writing this review. The devs have more than enough of a budget to hire designers, and I would hope they use it in such a way.


The game itself is very surprisingly great. When it first surfaced, I assumed it would be shovelware slop, a trashy Pokemon knockoff with guns, like all the gamer comics from the early 2000s. But it's one of the better survival games I've played. Usually survival games have the issue that you can barely play the game without the wiki open on your second monitor, but Palworld has been pretty intuitive 25 hours in.

The progression feels great so far, every bit allowing me to explore more dangerous areas due to better gear being developed. And the exploration is fun, the game doesnt generate a random world, instead you are on the same big map as everyone else. And the map definitely has visually interesting areas to explore, not to mention the Monsters you encounter in their respective biomes.

Levelling up can sometimes feel slow and grindy. In fact, a lot of the game insists on being a slow burn. Baking a cake (a food item required for breeding) takes a good 5 minutes unless you have a Pal on hand that has a very high kindling level, and most representative of this, hatching a Huge Egg will take about a full out-of-game hour. Supposedly there are also Massive eggs which take 2 hours to hatch under optimal conditions. That said, the game is designed for you to not actively babysit these things. It#s like a clicker game, where you use the right pals to automate your camp, and then when you come back, hopefully your pals have done all the busy work.

Something else worth mentioning, despite being marketed as a slaving sim, it is actually optimal to be nice to your monsters. If they are stressed or unhappy, they are more likely to slack off, slowing down your progress. And also ironically, this game has done a better job of making me like my party than Pokémon or any other similar game ever did. The fact that these lads can be called at any time to help me mine iron, craft items or build my base does so much for the connection I feel to the virtual pixels on my computer screen.

The Pal designs, despite being very derivative, are some of the better ones I've seen in Pokémon-like RPGs. My one gripe is that the devs are being obtuse with their inspiration. It feels like a huge charm of the game is that a it directly parodies Pokémon, but the devs do not claim parody, which legally is probably a huge area of attack. I can't help but feel that the reason why the playernumbers are so high are that people are expecting the DMCA to happen any day now, so they play while they can.

The game is difficult to recommend, because it's a great game, but everything around it, morally and legally, feels very, very grey. I do not feel bad for the multibillion company that is being referenced in this game at all, I just worry there may be legal consequences coming, and if not, it might encourage a whole new wave of derivative indie games which may actually be the shovelware slop I was expecting when I saw the first trailer.

This games purpose is to humble everyone who ever claimed that they would survive a horror movie.
It's very obvious that this game was made by one person, but weirdly enough every blemish in the artstyle and every bug or bit of jank that happens just feels right. It's like in universe the company supplied you with equipment that is inadequate but cost effective so weirdly enough it doesnt break immersion.

There is one piece of jank that actually detracts from the game because it allows you to cheese pretty much every enemy that is killable and stall others, but given that this game is early access I feel like this is gonna get patched eventually.