Last September, I wrote about the end of a tabletop gaming group and, in the last paragraph, mentioned that I regretfully couldn’t get into a game, Palia, as much as my two friends were. Oh, how the times have changed. Mostly for me, since my two friends are just as into Palia as ever, but I’ve been getting into it more and more over the past month and finally hit the point where I was playing it by myself, even when they weren’t online, which is the sign that I’ve stopped playing a game because my friends are playing (which is a perfectly fine reason to play any number of games and the main reason I’ve played pretty much every single massive multiplayer online game I’ve ever played) and started playing it because I enjoy it. Not much of the game itself has changed, aside from various quality-of-life improvements, additional story elements, and some expansions to the core aspects of the game (it is still in pre-release development), but I’m currently enjoying it more than I have before. It took me a couple weeks to figure out why, but as I finally locked into the gameplay loop over the past few days, I was able to figure out what about this game has caught me this time around.

First of all, Palia is basically a 3D, anime-aesthetic version of early Stardew Valley. You’re farming, collecting minerals, doing some hunting, foraging, and developing relationships with the local villagers. The game’s pacing is much slower than Stardew Valley since you’re tired to a realtime clock where one day passes for every hour that passes in the real world, which means you either need to check back in regularly or, as the game encourages, find other ways to fill your time as you wait for mail to be delivered, for your crops to grow (which happens every day you’re around to witness at 6 in the morning game-time and then once after the first proc following you logging out), or for another day to arrive so you can deepen your relationship with the NPCs. At its most basic, the gameplay loop isn’t complicated. Start farming to earn money, gather resources to supply yourself and earn money, build things to improve your home or your ability to process resources (which take real-world time but that continue constantly even when you’re logged out), and make friends with the villagers in order to get quests, learn about the world, gain access to rare goods or crafting recipes, and become an entrenched member of the community.

The resource and progression grind isn’t terribly different from most similar games. You need to gather resources that require real time to process into something useful to upgrade your tools so you can gather resources faster or gain access to resources you couldn’t gather before which take even more real time to process. Hunt to feed yourself and stockpile things so you’ve got the items you need for quests as they come up, build furniture to decorate your exanding house, and don’t stay logged out for too long so you can continue processing things in the background so they’re ready for you to use when you come back to the game. Where it differs from every other game I’ve ever played is that there’s almost no competition for resources and the community actively tries to help each other gather rare resources since there’s no reason to hoard them for yourself. As long as you get a hit in on each resource node (lumps of stone and ore, trees, rare beasts, rare bugs, etc), you get a copy of whatever that resource node would have dropped.

This means that, whenever someone finds a cluster of rare resources, they’ll ping the local map with a notification of what’s available and wait a few minutes to see how many people respond. Not everyone does this, of course, and not everyone waits for other people to show up when they arrive at a location that has been called out, but I’ve never felt this much solidarity and comradery with a bunch of randos before. On top of that, people are always happy to respond to questions in the server chat and people making reasonable requests for items on the server will usually get those things given to them. There’s no market to buy and sell between players, so everyone’s usually pretty happy to share their excess with each other rather than hoard it in order to make a lot of money selling it when they’ve caused a local scarcity. There’s a lot of incentive to do so, since everyone hopes their requests will be met and because the limited storage space (dictated by the tier of chests you can build) means that you probably don’t want to hold onto too much of any one thing so you’ve got space for rare items and things you need to temporarily stockpile.

Aside from the strong sense of community, the game’s character writing stands out compared to any similar game I’ve ever played. There’s little in the way of overall plot so far, other than exploring ruined temples as a member of the human race who, after vanishing eons ago, has suddenly reappeared in drips and drabs as a result of some strange magic that nobody understands. Beyond this and the desire to solve this mystery, the only plot I’ve found is in attempting to learn more about the people who live around the place your character has emerged. While most of the characters can fall into some pretty bland tropes initially, investing the time and energy into getting to know them, deepening your bonds with them, and going on their personal quests causes them to open up and broaded in unexpected ways. Every character I’ve disliked initially I’ve eventually grown to appreciate and every character I enjoyed from the minute I met them has had hidden depths that have challenged my understand of them. While they might not have a ton of interesting and novel things to say (they have a few dialogues they’ll cycle through in your daily conversations), they occasionally have longer conversations with you where they solicit your thoughts about something happening in their lives or make reference to quests you’ve done for them or for other NPCs that they’re close to.

In a world that is still mostly empty, aside from creature to hunt and natural resources to collect, having such deep and interesting NPCs makes the game feel more polished and engaging that it has any right to feel. Yes, it took me some time to glimpse this depth and then to fully see it for myself, but this is definitely the sort of situation where I’d urge someone to push through the first few difficult episodes of a show I loved because I know that there’s solid gold just around the corner. While it might be a bit too early in this game’s life to say it will be golden, I definitely enjoy what parts of Palia I’ve got to play and I look forward to seeing the game continue to grow.