Game Theory: Why is everyone playing this Pokémon rip-off that lets you eat your Pokémon?

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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The thing you have to understand about Palworld—the “Pokémon but there’s guns” video game sensation that has, very suddenly, sold 7 million copies over the last week, making it the first real gaming success story of 2024—is that it’s not just a Pokémon game where you can give the Pokémon guns.

You can also eat them.

Which is to say that, when we talk about why Japanese developer Pocket Pair’s little game has sparked with people (and especially, we imagine, with kids) at something approaching forest fire levels, it’s hard to undersell the value of … let’s call it “naughtiness.” Palworld is shot through with a breed of playground subversiveness that’s catnip for a certain class of kid, with its ad copy promising that “There are no labor laws for Pals,” that you can work your colorful friends to death whenever you’re so inclined, and, yes, that you’re perfectly welcome to hack them up with a meat cleaver and eat them. It’s a breed of giggling, “Mom’s not looking” rebelliousness that has earned the game eyerolls from critics for its juvenile nature … but also made it an immediate smash hit.

Meanwhile, the game—which sees you playing as a survivor eking out an existence in a strange, mostly barren world full of creatures that are so actionably Pokémon that the actual Pokémon Company is still wrestling with what to do about it—operates as like four different Trojan horses for better, smarter games all at once; much like Fortnite became a business juggernaut by laundering the hardcore genius of the battle royale genre through a kid-friendly lens, Palworld offers to be Baby’s First Rust, Baby’s First Factorio, Baby’s First Valheim, and more. (And even though the gameplay, especially early on, can be a little slow, it does tap into that deep satisfaction from those other games of building engines to produce the parts to help you make more engines—even if the literal wheels of industry are being turned, in this case, by a cheerful cartoon penguin.) Sure, there’s very little actually new in its DNA, but that’s the trick: If your target audience is people who’ve never played those more intense, less deliberately meme-ified games, then you don’t need to worry about creativity: You just need to be the first one to get to them.

At the same time, it’s also hard not to see Palworld’s success at least partially in terms of being an indictment of Nintendo’s handling of Pokémon proper. Although the (non-counterfeit) series has made strong steps in recent years to get away from what’s become a stultified “catch monster, fight 400 battles with monster, win video game” formula, they’ve almost always been fairly conservative moves. Say what you like about its framing of your Pals as indentured servants who live, die, or become brunch at your pleasure, but Palworld does frequently go much further than its obvious source material in letting you live in a world with the monsters, rather than just around them. There’s something genuinely cool about standing in your factory/farm/factory farm and seeing the monsters trundle along around you on their various chores; cool, too, to go wandering out into the world, take a wrong turn, and find yourself facing down a giant grass-covered mammoth that could crush you in a single hit. Beyond just its prodding of taboos, Palworld has a general embrace of freedom that Pokémon tends to keep at arm’s length; if it’d be kind of neat to see something happen in this kind of world, the game defaults toward say “Screw it, go for it.”

All that being said, we will note that, in our (admittedly brief) time with Palworld, it felt like we ran through most of the fun on hand pretty quickly; if the basic premise of “Pokémon but it’s a lil’ nasty” doesn’t do it for you, the game is unlikely to grip you in ways that the various games it’s stealing from don’t do with considerably more thought and polish. But it does do an interesting job of mashing those different concepts together—and of finding a premise that was practically guaranteed to get the playgrounds howling. There are harder ways to print money.