Steam, lemmy and reddit are currently creaming themselves over a game which devs makes multiple really cringe “jokes” about slavery and exploitation. Read the steam page descriptions.
Those “pals” are clearly antropomorphised creatures being dogwhistle for humans. And if you read the game reviews, even the g*mers are not lost on that fact (just they love that):
When escapism is no longer liberating, the goal of the g*mer is to become the oppressor
I mean, this has always been true about the monster taming genre. This game just kinda leans into it like it’s a joke instead of pretending it isn’t happening. Not saying I’m a fan of that angle. In fact, the original trailer had CG video of pals working in sweat shops and they all looked sad and tired, and it was a huge turnoff for me from the game. But let’s not pretend that the premise of every monster taming game ever isnt that you force them into servitude and almost always into violence.
That said, after seeing actual gameplay, all you do is send your pals out on your ranch and they perform chores. It’s not especially dark or gruesome about it. Sometimes the chore is helping you make food or medicine, and sometimes it’s mining or logging, and yes, sometimes it’s making weapons or ammo. I’m not a fan of the memes about slavery or the people who think it’s funny, but the game marketing doesn’t strike me as all that problematic. I would argue it’s worse that you run around punching and shooting these creatures and making them fight to the death, but again, that’s the whole genre. Did you know there are games where all you do is shoot people? People love that shit
I think the writing is generally on the side of satirizing the monster collection genre rather than, I don’t even know what you’re getting at, trying to advocate for slavery?
Now, is it done well? No, the game design is still fundamentally one of power fantasy, wake me up when there’s a Pal Revolt mechanic, but it’s not even all that ambiguous.
The game itself is fine, it’s a fun, if fairly generic “survival” sort of game with heavy base building mechanics. But the memes about it all became about “edgy pokemon with guns and brutality” so this very PG sort of game is being treated like some R rated gorefest by idiots trying to be funny because their favourite youtuber made a joke about it. So naturally CHUDs love it because they get an excuse to be openly horrible.
It feels so 4chan adjacent that I’m looking at the last few friends in my contact list that I thought were on the level like “how do you not sense this? is your nose broken? Are your eyes sightless?” I don’t like having to actively weigh and question how much my last vestiges of irl social contact are worth/whether it’s worth having that fight over their unnervingly 4channer-adjacent slop.
Even worse is people keep justifying it with ‘well Game Freak doesn’t try/innovate/QA check anymore’ but that… That shouldn’t justify gleeful-slavery frenworld. Cassette Beasts is right fuckin there, as is Tem-Tem. (Neither of which really moved me personally, but that’s beside the point.) The more I mull it over the more it genuinely pisses me off. Absolutely, I’d love an engaging, lore-heavy monster tamer alternative to Pokemon with the way Game Freak’s been handling the franchise lately, but this one should’ve been sniffed out and rejected from the jump, I feel.
I wouldn’t really say this is 4-Chan adjacent though? 4-Chan made a knock off pokemon game in the past, and it’s about as bad as you’d expect. I’m seriously starting to think I’m playing an entirely different game to everyone else here, I just haven’t seen the stuff people are upset about. The text of the game is very edgy, but the gameplay is just fairly generic. It could maybe be a statement about video games and pokemon in general maybe, but I wouldn’t even give them that much credit. The writing just feels lazy, to try and be edgy for edgy’s sake, but the gameplay doesn’t at all, it feels more tacked on than anything else. It’s barely in the game.
But again, maybe I’m not seeing the same thing other people are and I’m not entirely sure why I’m missing these things if they’re so obvious to other people who have played it. This isn’t me saying “everyone else is wrong” rather, it’s me asking “Why am I not seeing this thing other people are seeing?”
I wouldn’t even given a second for this kind of borefest, and not even chuds posturing is remarkable, but what the devs wrote on the steam page immediately risen red flags, and the fact that was perfectly understood and enthusiastically accepted in the reviews also blared horns.
So it’s not as if the chuds abuse the game to do horrible things, this game IS about horrible things with cutesy graphic as excuse for the people who wont.
It’s more strange than anything else to me. Feels like I downloaded an entirely different game to everyone else. There is edgy text on some loading screens and descriptions in the game, and that’s about it really. It’s like the person writing the game and steam description and the people actually designing the gameplay never actually interacted at all. The game just says “Wow, this is so horrible, aren’t we so cool and edgy?” but the gameplay isn’t really like that at all. As I said somewhere else, this isn’t subtext, it’s just text, and if I didn’t know what the advertising was like I’d assume it’s a bad translation before assuming the guy doing the writing was just an edgy loser. Feels more like a marketing gimmick more than anything else, as if they just had the cutesy discount pokemon and the text was just fairly generic, it wouldn’t have gotten nearly the attention it did. It’s controversy for controversy’s sake more than anything else.
It’s basically a glorified asset flip except the assets are stolen and the game goes out of its way to be as immoral as possible.
Which sadly puts it just so slightly above what the game’s industry has been shitting out for the last couple decades.
Honestly, mixed feelings on this TBH. There’s a lot of appeal that I 100% get for games that allow you to do anything, games that allow you to be a crapsack person in a crapsack world, etc. If I hadn’t seen this thread I don’t think I’d have seen any problem with it at all.
I’ve enjoyed Conan: Exiles (not that I did anything with the slavery mechanics in-game as I mainly went around singleplayer cheating my ass off, but I also didn’t care), Rimworld and Tyranny have been in my library with intent to getting around to playing for a long while now, slavery gets whittled down to either numbers or actually pretty neat roleplaying/lore mechanics in games like Humankind, Endless Legend, and maybe in some Civ games, and I’ve not batted an eye at any of it. Such things can exist, there can even be a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor about it particularly when it’s all fictional and not representing real life humans and events, and the truth is slavery did and does exist, and is a large part of human history- and its inclusion can add a lot of character to a game or setting if done right (and not in a glorified, whitewashing way- that’s definitely icky)
On the other hand, I have actually cared when I saw slavery and such topics being represented incorrectly in games. At least, I didn’t like the pleasant whitewashing slavery got in one quest in AC Odyssey, for instance.
Honestly, I had the game wishlisted already and had been planning to get it- even now, hell if I know if I will. Enslaving Pals or humans IG doesn’t appeal to me, but what I’ve seen of the game (not the slavery bits, the gameplay, the Pals, the artstyle, etc) absolutely does. And what I’ve seen so far even in this thread doesn’t quite sell me on the “Pals are dogwhistle for humans” (quite a stretch IMO) and “Palworld is a dogwhistle for Frenworld” (far less of a stretch, but the devs are Japanese) bits.
There will always be plenty of g*mer chuds even, but I’m not sure I read the comments (the English ones anyways, I don’t understand Polish) as chuds, or particularly bad or glorifying the subject rather than that similar blend of humor which honestly seems pretty tame and acceptable given the context (fictional Pokemon, and if you do so and like the game advertises, you’re playing a cartoonishly evil shitlord- but even that doesn’t mean either being a shitlord, condoning shitlordism, or anything other than making a light joke of it in a fictional, non-human context).
Same here. I played a lot of Pokémon as a teen and for what I have seen there is an undeniable tie between the concept of Pals and the one of Pokémon, and most of what this game seems to offer is a version where all things that are implicit possibilities in the Pokémon world become an explicit reality - Because, who hasn’t thought about what would happen if you threw a pokéball to another trainer? Or about where does their meat come from? Or about why they seem to use Pokémons as manual labor, and if they pay them at all? The concept of throwing a 10yo out of their houses with an electric rat to travel the world competing in animal fights is a very long-lived meme too.
The message of this parody-game seems to be clear: all those hidden, shady bits in Pokémon are now real, and you are as free to be as much of a shithead as you wish with that. Again, not so strange, since the appeal for fictional cruelty has been a thing since you could remove stairs from pools in The Sims and even before.
Agreed, and the possibility of being a shithead adds to the meme factor, but not quite in a way that I feel would be considered problematic or actually glorifying the issue.
If I get the game I’m not likely to abuse my Pals at all, rather the opposite. I’m not generally the kind to engage in wanton or unprovoked cruelty (though I’ll admit in-game- vidya, DnD, etc I do tend to be very… “justice oriented” and entirely willing to indulge in that, which is pretty much just how I tend to be as a person anyways).
