Palworld mixes monster catching, guns, and survival, and it mostly works

destructoid.com:

There are a few games that seem to crop up at random trailer-filled showcases, promising something that looks so strange it’s nigh-unbelievable. Sometimes, the trailers turn out a little too good to be true. Palworld, somehow, is not one of those.

Pocketpair’s Palworld is about living on an island with a variety of mysterious, fantastical creatures called Pals. What you do from there is your choice; train them, use them to fight the evil poaching syndicate, or build an exploitative industry around them. Even sell or eat them, it’s really your call.

To call this “Pokémon with guns” is fairly accurate, sure. Palworld wears its inspirations on its sleeves. It’s also a bit more, and a bit stranger, than that concept would imply. So we here at Destructoid tasked two of our bravest adventurers, Eric and Zoey, with venturing deep into the Early Access build of Palworld to learn more. They are different people now than they were before, but they also know a fair amount about Palworld. Here are their takeaways.

Palworld is not my pal. I don’t mean to say that I think the game is of poor quality or I didn’t enjoy it. What I have played, I’ve certainly enjoyed. Palworld is less Pokémon with guns and more Ark: Survival Evolved with Pokémon. It’s a survival crafting game, and it succeeds in the way it manages to make hours disappear.

But it’s not my pal because it won’t let me play it. Every hour or so, Palworld hard crashes my computer. Straight up. Everything stops, I see a black screen, and I have to turn my PC back on.

I hate flashing my credentials, but I worked in I.T. for nine years. Troubleshooting a video game is a lot easier than remotely fixing a lawyer’s proprietary software. But Palworld didn’t give me a lot to go on. It doesn’t blue screen my PC. It just shuts it down entirely. There’s no minidump log, and the Windows event viewer doesn’t give a stop error. It just says, “The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first.” I have very little data to