Liberate your Pokémon-like comrades in Palworld

polygon.com:

It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Or at least, that’s the idea we get from the latest and completely bananas trailer for the Pokémon-like RPG Palworld.

In case you didn’t catch it the first time around, Palworld is like if you gave Pokémon a gun (and then some). The open-world survival game from PocketPair takes adorable monsters and completely reimagines the larger world surrounding them. In this game, the creatures, call Pals, are not only exploitable but edible. Its first trailer showed just how strange and unbelievable the game looked, as the creatures wielded guns against each other. Now, a new trailer shared by the developers on Friday shows that they won’t shy away from that original chaos.

The trailer starts out relatively normal. You see the Pals living in harmony with people — they help out with chores like gardening. You can ride larger Pals as you would in some Pokémon games. It looks like, you know, normal stuff you’d expect in an RPG like this. But just stick around for a little bit longer and you won’t be disappointed. The bright, cheery tone quickly shifts as we see Pals forced into factory labor and having testing conducted on them. One Pal even faints on the assembly line. We see Pals eat others. You get the point.

So what is one to do? Well, take up arms, of course. These pastel-colored monsters aren’t going anywhere, and seem like they will blaze into the fight with you — armed with machine guns and all. At one point, we see a giant creature that looks like a yellow version of Totoro wielding a giant six-barrel gun. So somehow, the developers were able to match the weirdness of the first trailer.

Palworld is scheduled to be released this year.