It's a very specific type of game. If you don't like Rust, Ark, Raft, or any of those games like it Palworld probably isn't for you. At least not until mods come out.

Survival crafting games have always been extemely bare minimum effort by most studios. Look how well Ark did despite it being buggy garbage with dlcs. Palworld has almost everything you'd want from a survival crafting game and is 10x more polished than its competition. Dunkey highlights the bugs, which are definitely there, but for day 1 it is actually very well done and includes a lot of polish and QoL features that I would normally expect an early access game to add months after launch. I don't know if he made a video from day 1 of ark or rust but it would be orders of magnitude worse than this. Also keep in mind this is the opposite of the type of game he usually plays.

Besides all that, it's multiplayer and the core gameplay is simply fun.

It’s a very fun, silly, well-made game with a very addictive loop where you’re given a lot of small, easily achievable tasks that have you going: “one more and I’m done”.

On Sunday I played for 13 hours. I don’t know if they have a team of psychologists that found out how to make the game addictive, but the results speak for themselves.

It’s a fun and beautiful place to explore, full of vibrant colors and cute pals. Your base building is not boring because the boring resource gathering is automated by your pal slaves. It scratches optimization itches, and you also get raided which can result in hilarious outcomes that give you an opportunity to rebuild and organize your base more efficiently.

It's a survival crafting game. It's functional, but yeah, I think overhyped. Most people play for the novelty, and that covers for the boring gameplay.

It's really good in a "this has no business being good" kind of way, I really like it.

It's incredible for early access and will be the game of the decade if the devs continue to polish and refine it. And if it doesn't get sued for its similarities to Nintendo IPs, which I doubt will happen but is still possible.

It's a game that should be terrible but is actually fun as hell.

It hits the sweet spot in different areas. You can tell it’s a bunch of ideas from other games stitched together. Its Ark but more accessible, with pokemon flavor, elden ring’s tough enemy in the newbie area, deep rock galactic pick your friend up off the ground, automation lightly inspired by factio. If you look closely it’s got dark humour in all of the Pal descriptions. It’s just broadly appealing and enjoyable If you don’t take things too seriously, or if you can find the humour in the fact that everything is extremely familiar and just slightly altered to avoid being sued into extinction. If you read the developer interview it’s pretty funny too, new daily flash drives as version control, he couldn’t get hired at a big studio and was super surprised that steam would let Just anyone publish anything. It feels like it shouldn’t exist

I'm also curious.

Everything about it looks like it copied a bunch of elements from other games and just seems very mediocre.

Not sure why people are so hyped about it.

I think it's overhyped, but it's not as if there's nothing good there.

It's goofy, it's got those building and travel mechanics people like from other games, you can capture a cute/funny team of animals that people love from pokemon, it's a good stream game with multiplayer which means lots of free publicity

I think it could be way better than it is, but it's easy to see how it got to where it is.

It's overhyped, but it is a fairly good Breath of the Wild mixed with Pokémon with light survival game elements and base building. It's nothing particularly new or special, but it is pretty good at being what it is, which is a weird combination of a bunch of existing things.

It's not game of the year or anything, but it's fine. I got bored after a while because there's no real challenge to the game. It needs to have something pushing you to progress, and that really isn't there at the moment.

Good is subjective. I don't think I would like the game very much now, but me ten years ago probably would have put thousands of hours into it.

Its enjoyable and I think it struck a right mixture of things got get popular

It's good for a $30 survival game.

Huge world map to explore, a variety of different monsters to capture, bosses to work up to, automation that allows the more annoying parts of survival games to happen in the background as you explore, space to fiddle with the monster capture stuff through breeding and condensing.

A lot of people I know enjoy it for the shock value of pokemon-with-guns that you put into a sweatshop and then butcher, but you don't have to do it that way and it can just be a not-pokemon game where your gardevoir helps you craft stuff.

I've been enjoying it. I'm midway through the game right now and I will admit the mechanics are getting rather repetitive and I feel like I've seen most of what it has to offer, other than new technologies to unlock at higher levels.

If the devs add some more content for the leveling and endgame stages of the game, I would say it absolutely lives up to the hype. It's still early access so anything is possible, but I know better than to get my hopes up