For years, survival games have convinced us that chopping down 400 trees is somehow part of the fantasy—Palworld proves them wrong

Survival games are obsessed with the grind. Need a better axe? You've got to spend an hour collecting stone. Want to build a bigger base? Time to manually ferry hundreds of logs from one storage chest to another. Somewhere along the line, the genre started confusing friction with depth.

But there are only so many trees I'm prepared to punch, so when Palworld originally came to Steam's early access platform, I dismissed it as "Pokémon with guns", a novelty that happened to explode, but would undoubtedly fade into obscurity as people looked for the next survival game to dig into.

With the massively successful 1.0 release, it seemed like it was finally time to give it a proper go. After spending some hours with Palworld, I've discovered the thing that makes it special has almost nothing to do with the Pokémon bits, but everything to do with the way its "Pals" hack away at the busywork that's become synonymous with the survival genre.

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Sure, you're catching creatures that look like copyright-infringement claims waiting to happen, in the shape of cats, llamas, and manta rays, and while it is satisfying to pick up a fox and use it like a flamethrower, the best use for these pets is getting them to do all of the hard work for you.

(Image credit: Pocketpair)

It doesn't happen immediately. You'll still spend your first few hours punching trees, mining rocks, and cobbling together a shelter that looks like it'll collapse if someone sneezes too hard. But before long, something changes. You catch a handful of Pals with useful work skills and your little campsite starts looking less like a collection of crafting benches and more like a functioning ecosystem.

One Pal is chopping wood. Another is watering crops. Someone's hauling resources into storage while another plants and harvests. You stop thinking about your base as somewhere you have to constantly maintain, and instead start treating it like a place that works without you.

you have a team of mostly happy helpers to keep things organised without you

When I began to run out of resources building my new beachfront property, I found I could nip back to my first base where my little Pals had been diligently harvesting stone, wood, and berries, and hoover up their hard work, even if it was going towards building a base that would eventually supplant them.

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It's easy to get started, too, you just have to make sure your Pals have a good mix of skills and they'll largely get on with it. This feels like a magic trick, because in most survival games leaving your base is irresponsible at best. If you want to go out and find adventure, your progress back home grinds to a halt as crops don't grow and supplies dwindle.

Here, though, that equation gets flipped upside down, and you have a team of mostly happy helpers to keep things organised without you.

(Image credit: Pocketpair)

The best part is that this changes how you spend your time. Instead of standing around waiting for ore to turn into ingots, you're climbing mountains looking for Alpha Pals. Instead of spending half an hour harvesting, you're trying to sneak into an oil rig that's almost certainly above your level because you spotted it on the horizon.

The world keeps moving while you're out experiencing it, and this means you're spending a lot less time playing with your phone out, holding down the button to mine. It does happen, but automation isn't there so you can do nothing—it's there so you can spend more time doing fun stuff, whatever fun stuff means for you.

It's also one of the smartest uses of creature collecting I've seen. Most monster-catching games ask whether a creature is good in combat, but Palworld also asks you what they're good at around the home. It's about whether they're better at logging than your current workforce, whether they'll keep your production chain ticking over, or whether they're exactly what's missing from the increasingly elaborate Pal pyramid scheme that runs your base while you doss about looking for treasure chests.

(Image credit: Pocketpair)

Of course, Palworld hasn't removed survival mechanics altogether, nor should it. You're still unlocking technologies, expanding your base, and making decisions about how to optimise production. There's still resource gathering, crafting, and all the systems you'd expect from the genre. The difference is that once you've proven you understand those systems, the game doesn't make you perform every repetitive task by hand.

That feels surprisingly rare in modern survival games. Too many titles seem terrified that players will run out of things to do if they aren't constantly feeding another crafting queue or collecting another stack of wood.

Palworld recognises that the reason most people pick up an open-world survival game isn't because they dream of optimising a production chain. Well, unless you're playing Satisfactory. No, it's that the most exciting part has never been the chores—it's everything waiting just beyond the edge of your base.