I will start this off by saying that I absolutely fell in love with Palia when I first found it. It was only after nearly 2 years of nonsense & BS that I’ve come to the conclusion that this game & its community are not worth my time, & I cannot recommend it to others in good faith.
Riddled with bugs & glitches:
The game is absolutely riddled with bugs & glitches. The devs keep releasing broken update on top of broken update. Some of these bugs have been around for multiple years, but there is very little effort being made to improve them. The team has demonstrated that they would rather keep churning out poorly made content & updates than fix what’s already there.
Toxic community & Discord server:
If you say anything to critique the game in the Palia Discord server, prepare for mutes, warnings & ultimately a ban. Other players will jump down your throat for critiquing the game, tell you to just leave if you don’t like the game & will report you to the mods, who almost always take the side of the player who is whiteknighting for the game. You’ll be told that you’re being ‘disrespectful’ & ‘bad-faith’ if you have anything negative to say about the game. This pattern has been established very clearly to me in the couple years that I spent in the server. Even if you don’t receive an official warning, any form of dissent will get you on the mods’ naughty list. As such, this server is not a safe place for constructive conversation about improving the game. Unfortunately the handful of helpful people in that server are overshadowed by the authoritarian attitudes of the mods & their support of players who tell you to just leave if you don’t like something about the game.
Accessibility issues:
The team recognized that the game has accessibility issues a couple of years ago. They promised in May of 2025 that they would team up with Microsoft for an accessibility audit of the game. That audit never happened & the game continues to cause seizures, migraines & other serious health issues in disabled players. I’ve heard multiple times of players being hospitalized due to lack of proper warnings, safety & accessibility options in the game. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were some lawsuits afoot. They don’t even have basic VFX toggles, UI scaling or flash warnings. The game was not built with accessibility in mind & the longer they go without adding it, the worse it will continue to get.
Console issues:
The team doesn’t really seem to care about how the game runs on console. So if you’re a console player, be prepared to be told things like “you just need to buy a new controller/upgrade to a better console” because the team is too busy to investigate the actual sources of the issues that consoles have. & don’t even bother downloading it if you own a Switch or an older computer - it’s essentially unplayable & worsens with each update.
Low quality updates & premium content, plushies being thrown at us to distract:
Updates & premium content continue to disappoint more & more with each patch. Each time it is glaringly obvious just how rushed the patch was & just how many corners were cut. So many of the premium items are either broken or just look like crap. The colorways offered for the premium items are almost always lacking in thought & attention for which colors clash & which colors look harmonious with one another. New plushies are seemingly used as a distraction from how lacking & broken the game is in many areas.
Lackluster story content:
The story content leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t feel enthralling & engaging the majority of the time. It is difficult to really get into the story or the characters due to how shallow & poorly written the majority of it feels.
Ranching is poorly done and yet, it’s the only skill being added to:
They keep adding more & more types of ranch animals (despite not giving us more space for more ranch animals), but the skill is essentially useless because animals don’t really give anything helpful. There are a few exceptions to that, but overall I feel they should be more focused on refining & adding to other existing skills, such as adding more to the gardening & hunting skills, adding more types of processors & machines, improving the loathed fishing skill, working out kinks with the cooking skill, etc.
Community events:
Community events are organized haphazardly & often feel like they only exist to farm engagement, while the custom rewards for community events (like plushies & tints) take many months to become available in game.
Limited decorating possibilities:
People resort to using glitches to organize their decorations & rooms the way they want to and to be able to place furniture on the outer bounds of premium plots. People should not have to use glitches to place decors the way they’d like.
There is a lot more that could be said, but I’m running out of space. Given all the major issues with this game, I will no longer be playing it & I will be telling everyone I know to avoid it.
