Creature collecting game wants you to shoot 'em all, catch 'em all, work 'em all to death, dispose of 'em all in a huge corpse pile

Every fresh look we get at Palworld makes it appear more fun and yet more disturbing than it did before. Palworld is a cartoony open world creature-collecting and battling game that is heavily inspired by Pokémon, but it's also filled with machine guns and rocket launchers.

And you're not the only one spitting lead: guns aren't just used by you against the monsters you're trying to defeat and capture, but by the cute and fluffy creatures themselves. Yes, sheep can operate machine guns and a creature that looks suspiciously like Pikachu on steroids does wield a massive minigun.

We've already heard a lot of the unseemly things you can do with your Pals besides pit them in battle against each other. For instance, you can slaughter them and use them for meat. That's pretty darn grim—though I do have to admit it's also potentially delicious. But there's more to do with your Pals, as shown in the new Palworld video above.

There's a base-building system, and as long as you have some Pals you don't have to do the building by yourself. We see that giant offbrand Pikachu get captured by an orb, then released and commanded to build a furnace at the player's base. And the creature seems quite happy to help out by whanging on the furnace with a large hammer. At least at first.

But as the base grows and more and more Pals are captured and put to work, it does start feeling a bit exploitative of cuddly creature labor. Soon the base has sprawled to include farming plots, storage crates, workbenches, and manufacturing machinery and conveyor belts, all being built by colorful creatures against their will. And once they've finished building those machines, they have to start operating them. It's hard not to find the enterprise a bit unseemly.

Person standing near pile of dead creatures — (Image credit: Pocketpair)

While the base does look pretty impressive near the end of the video, the cost of expansion becomes clear when we're shown the huge pile of dead Pals stacked up, having been apparently worked to death. We're spared from whatever happens to all those corpses, but I suspect more Pals will be forced to turn the dead Pals into meals. Possibly to feed the next wave of Pals.

Horrifying! But also weirdly fun? You can be the judge next year: Palworld is set to release in January 2024.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.