I remember when Palia was announced. I watched the whole time it was in production, I was a part of the limited beta test. I love it's look, it's feel. My favorite game of all time was a MMO that doesn't exist any more, so Palia was kind of like a homecoming to me. And then I remembered, home kinda sucks.
Others have talked about the cosmetics being expensive and I completely agree. I'd rather pay for the game up front than pay $30 for a single outfit. I could be at Denny's for that. But as much as I want certain cosmetics and can't justify the cost, the free outfits are very cute too so I can ignore that. Mostly.
They keep adding new limited time events, adding stress to a cozy relaxing game for some reason, and more importantly, not finishing the game. It is still in early access, but they're not making any effort to make the game run better, be glitch free, or even finished. If you walk into the water you still just walk into the water and then phase out, last I played at least. They add a plethora of items you have to grind for or pay for, but nothing to push the game towards a completed state.
But let's ignore all that. I don't think the game is that good. On the one hand, the many different aspects of life in Kilima Village can appeal to many different kinds of players. On the other hand to live life to the fullest in Kilima Village, you kinda need to be able to do it all, which means learning and mastering a lot of systems all at once. All the while your focus bar runs out making it harder for you to get anything done. I cannot understand the addition of the focus bar. It's like a hunger gauge, in a cozy life sim. But it runs out well before you get set up to make yourself food leaving your character dragging. Why make us constantly scrounge for food just so our avatars can be effective?
On a more specific note, early on there is a quest where you have to prove your "purpose" your purpose being one of the skills you can hone and master in Palia and you prove your purpose by advancing your level in a skill to I think it was 4. Leveling up to 4 wasn't hard. Maybe that was the problem. One of the skills is "foraging" in other words, the act of picking things up. My "purpose" was declared to be foraging simply because it was the easiest and most obvious way to start a game. As I can tell this quest has 0 impact on the rest of the game, but I still find it obnoxious that my actual skill, interest, and effort was disregarded by this quest solely because picking things up was easy enough that I did that more often while trying to acquaint myself with the village. Days also go by very fast, so I am constantly trying to hunt down NPCs who are moving around to feel lifelike, which is great, but bad when I need to catch them before nightfall. And they keep moving while the map is open, but I can't. So I am trying to find them on the map and wasting time I could be walking towards them trying to figure out where they are. It's exhausting. In fact, this was what was so exhausting that I put the game back down not long after the steam release. They never changed it.
The NPCs are charming, but try to initiate romance far too easily for anything to feel natural, leaving me to reject them and feel awkward about it forever. The location is cozy and I care about it very much, but for the majority of the time the game was out, I couldn't access any other areas anyways. Very glitchy. Server issues, glitches, broken tutorials making learning the game difficult, it has all kinds of issues. Again, forgivable but only if they actually ever fix it. I want them to. I doubt they will.
