The greatest compliment I can give to Palworld is that it lights up my brain in the same way a modern Assassin's Creed game does. It taps into the same checklist clearing compulsion that saw me spend over 100 hours in both Odyssey's Ancient Greek archipelago and the Viking open world of Valhalla - only instead of chasing map icons that take you down weird sidequest rabbit holes that riff on Fenton the (sheep)dog, or gobbling up story events just so you can make googly eyes at every warm-blooded human in a ten mile radius, Palworld hooks you in with its enormous catalogue of base building tasks. Not catching the 100+ Pal monsters roaming around its mysterious islands, but crafting the perfect sweatshop to put them to work in. It's one of those, "I'll just add this furnace so I can craft some ingots that will let me make a cooking pot to level up my base, but wait, now I need some ore to make those ingots, and oh god, I've just spent seven hours doing not very much at all, have I?"
