Coming from developer Singularity 6, Palia is a free-to-play, community-driven fantasy life sim. If you are tired of constant demands and requirements, and want to put it all aside to have some good, relaxing time, you can’t do wrong with Palia.
Explore, do quests, hunt, fish, gather supplies, grow plants, soar the skies on your glider, grow closer to quirky but charming villagers, create the home of your dreams – all of that and more awaits you in this welcoming game, whether you want to play solo or find like-minded people to game with.
Two weeks ago, Palia was expanded with the biggest content release yet: the Elderwood, introducing an all-new adventure zone, more main story quests, new materials, critters, customization options, and more.
Alongside other newbies, drawn in by the promises of magic and mystery, I spent a couple of weeks checking out Palia and what it has to offer, including the new area. Is there something worth starting a new game or returning to your roots for, hidden in the Elderwood?
Read on to find out, this is our Palia: The Elderwood PC review. Note that it is dedicated to the overall state of the game with the release of Elderwood and how it feels to start from the beginning, rather than focusing on the expansion separately.
Following a short character creation where you can choose your avatar’s sex, features, and outfit, you end up in the world of Palia. Here, humans are a legendary ancient race that disappeared thousands of years ago. However, for reasons equally unknown, humans start reappearing all over the world, yourself included.
In any other game, a creature suddenly appearing out of thin air among the long-forgotten ruins, especially one from an ancient race, would invite suspicion or even aggression, but not in Palia. Despite their initial surprise, the locals warmly welcome you to their community, and help you get settled.
However, before you truly become one of their own, you have to prove that you have what it takes to take care of yourself and add to the community, which means a variety of quests and little errands from everyone around you. It is not as overwhelming as it might initially sound, the quests and tasks are rolled out intermittently, depending on your reputation and relationship with the villagers, on your skills such as Foraging or Fishing, where you are main quest-wise, and more. You can also find quite a few side quests while exploring Kilima Valley, Bahari Bay or the newest addition, the Elderwood.
The majority of side-quests revolve around acquiring certain items (materials, food, insects, fish, etc.), getting to know the locals in Kilima Valley, or helping the villagers… who also require certain items from you. While in general it is quite painless and seamlessly fits into your in-game progression anyway, there are a few quests that involve the usual frustrating RNG: among the very first, capturing blue butterflies until you find the one with the flower you search for, and chopping the trees in Bahari Bay for seeds.
Prepare to grind on your way to success if you want to progress through the story and relationships quickly!
However, the most interesting and unique are the quests involving Jina, the young Majiri woman with a passion for archeology. Armed with her knowledge and curiosity, and accompanied by you and her assistant Hekla, she is set to explore the mystery behind the disappearance of the human race and the legacy they have left behind, and what solutions for the future are there to be found in the past.
There is a surprising amount of lore and worldbuilding in Palia, not something you’d easily expect from a sim-oriented game. If you are willing to spend time to talk to the Majiri villagers, including Jina, you will get to learn their customs and where they came from.
Such as their beliefs in The Dragon and the Flow, the energy source present throughout the world and used by the ancient human civilization. However, due to the many wars waged in its name in the past, the Majiri have outlawed its usage outside The Order. That is, unless you are a human, since they were not initially written into the Treaty. Still, you want to be careful with the magical force that has the potential to trigger mass destruction.
As you grow closer with the villagers by regularly chatting with them, bringing them gifts and fulfilling the little errands they set for you, you will see how truly diverse and unique the NPC cast is. And, yes, quirky. Every single one of them, but still quite lovable (and some of them romance-able, if you are into that). The only drawback of the system is that the game only allows you one real chat a day outside of the quests.
And, if you don’t feel like tackling the story or any pending errands, you can always postpone them for later, there is no penalty for returning to the tasks at hand at a later date. Such is the beauty of Palia, trying to be welcoming and comfortable to the max, no fear of missing out or stress.
The catch is that Palia is a game that is prepared to tell its story over the years, so you have to be prepared to wait to get your answers and deal with the story being cut off at the most interesting point for a prolonged period of time.
So, there you are, with your dilapidated lot that consists of a fence and not much else. How do you go about making it yours and building a grand mansion surrounded by a lush garden?
Palia has 8 skill lines that will help you on the way. Through the introductory quests, the villagers will offer you the starting Makeshift equipment so that you can get started.
- Capturing bugs with the traps you attach to your belt increases your Bug Catching skills, while providing you with bugs (which you can also gift to villagers like Auni and Tamala) to use for fertilizers and, rarely, seeds.
- Mining the stones, clay, and various ore increases the skill while providing you with necessary materials for further crafting: upgrading your equipment, constructing furniture, creating arrows or panes of glass, etc.
- Of course, no sim game can go without Fishing! Playing – and winning – the minigame will net you some fish (and waterlogged chests from time to time) that you can use in cooking and gift to the other villagers.
- Foraging, in short, is harvesting gatherables around the world. Picking up chopped wood, mushrooms, wild plants, and more, all of that increases your Foraging skill and adds into other skill lines.
- Hunting the Sernuk, Chapaa, and Muujin provides you with meat for cooking as well as fur, antlers, manes, plushies, and more.
- Gardening provides a steady supply of vegetables for your cooking, as well as cotton that you can make cloth out from. But first, you need to get some Soil and Seeds from Zeki’s General Store.
- Cooking allows you to use various ingredients from around the world to create dishes that can be consumed to restore Focus, gifted or sold. Initially, you only have the access to the Campfire that lets you grill the meat, mushrooms, fish, etc., but as your skill increases, you will be able to purchase a stove, a prep station, mixing station and even an oven to create more elaborate dishes.
- Finally, Furniture Making, the bread and butter of setting up your dream house. Use materials that you’ve gathered in the world to create decor for your housing plot.
The longer you use the skill, the more opportunities it creates. Hunting in the wilds will impress Hassian, who will teach you how to craft a better bow and stronger arrows, allowing you to hunt more efficiently or go after some more elusive prey. Which, in turn, will provide you with better yield.
Similarly, mining or foraging will unlock the access to better tools (first Standard, then Fine, and finally Exquisite) that will give you a chance to gather more rare materials. You will also be finally able to chop down sturdier trees and pick up bigger nodes of ore that had been taunting you since your arrival.
That way, you don’t have to go out of your way to progress. Simply explore or quest and gather what you see on your way to smoothly level up. You might pick up quests or get recipes that require materials that you can’t gather on your own yet, but as long as you keep at it, you’ll get there.
Prepare to hunt down small copper nodes for a while until you have upgraded your mining pick! Note that once you upgrade your tools, you want to keep an eye on their durability.
Similarly to your skill lines, you will also be able to upgrade your crafting stations. For example, the Basic Smelter or Basic Sawmill can be upgraded to their Heavy versions (and further), speeding up the processing of the raw materials into bars or planks, respectively.
Considering that one Crafter can only process one type of material at the same time, you might even want to build multiples so you can process, say, Stone and Copper simultaneously, instead of waiting until one set of orders is complete – which can take quite a while of the real time, considering how long it takes to craft a single Copper Bar, and how many of them you need to create or upgrade anything of interest.
What might be a bit of a challenge early on is the bag and the storage space. Naturally, you will come across all sorts of things that you want to pick up and use or keep but DENIED. First you need to expand your storage space by building various chests and scattering them around your lot, which, admittedly, is not that hard due to the aforementioned ease of progress. Once you figure out what you need, you will easily build Wooden Storage Chests to keep your hard-earned loot. Later down the line, you can swap them for the Copper Chests for even more space (you are going to need it).
But your character’s inventory space can only be increased by buying backpacks from Zeki’s General Store for gold. The easiest way to earn it is by stuffing all your unneeded resources and materials into the Shipping Bin, and waiting for it to sell. However, the prices for the backpacks go up stiffly, so it will be a while before you can unlock it all. The gold is also required to obtain more writs and unlock more modules for your house as well as different houses altogether. So get collecting and selling!
All in all, if you have played any Survival game out there, the mechanics will be intimately familiar, but with one additional key factor: the full absence of the related stress. With Palia, you don’t have to worry that a mistake will lead you to losing your daily haul, or that not logging in for a day will cause all your crops to die. No, your Cotton will still be there, waiting for your return – but you might want to remove the weeds and water it from time to time.
All of the above together leads to an instinctive, cozy gameplay loop where you can focus on doing – or not doing – any content you want, there is no “punishment” for doing things your way and at your own pace. Hunt, explore, gather, do jumping puzzles, the goal is really to have fun, and no one here will give you the “right” way to do so.
What changed with the addition of Elderwood?
The Elderwood offers something new and previously unseen to the game. Where the Kilima Valley is a homey zone and the Bahari Bay is wild, and filled with ruins but ultimately cozy, the Elderwood is a mysterious dense forest filled with Flow. The color palette, the music, even the critters and objects point out its magical nature.
As a new player, you can enter it almost right away – but your ways of interacting with surroundings will be minimal. Chopping the trees or mining requires at least the Standard tools, so you are better off just playing normally and arriving there naturally when the main story leads you that way. Not to mention, that way you will also learn about the Flow, and what makes this zone so special.
The developers indicate that the perfect time to start with Elderwood’s story would be after finishing the Temples questline up to Rooted in Place. Speaking of the story, it can be finished in just a couple of hours if you commit, leaving you with a cliffhanger that will be there until the next major update.
The Elderwood simply offers more of Palia for you to enjoy: a new Villager (Ulfe), hidden chests, new gatherables including the Flow-Infused Wood, new fish and insects, cooking recipes, and more. You can also visit the Umbraan Shrines and offer Sacred Flowers in return for artifacts and packs of Elderwood materials.
However, while Artifacts and Relics, as well as the drastic change in the surroundings that reminded me of Draenor’s Shadowmoon Valley, Elderwood mostly expands on what had already been offered in the game, lacking an identity of its own, a certain “oomph!”, like a completely new mechanic like swimming or a new skill line – say, creature management of some kind.
In a way, everything about it feels like a filler before the arrival of the real expansion, including the story that builds up but doesn’t come to a conclusion, leaving behind more questions than answers. If you were already playing or considered to play Palia, the release of Elderwood is a great occasion to set out and explore. But if you were waiting for something revolutionary to spice up the cozy but repetitive gameplay loop, it isn’t quite there yet.
