It’s wild that a free-to-play game with no combat, no meaningful group activities, and a limited number of maps to explore has managed to keep me hooked for over 150+ hours. But Palia has done just that. It completely surpassed my expectations, drawing me back again and again to build up my homestead, gather resources, plant crops, and cozy up with my virtual neighbors.
With the launch of the Elderwood expansion, developer Singularity 6 has added a brand-new zone with its own narrative arc and quests, alongside some new progression systems and gameplay mechanics. The release also marks the game’s debut on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, making it a major milestone.
Not everything Elderwood brings to the table works perfectly, with some mechanics adding unnecessary tedium, but, overall, it’s a welcome addition that builds on the game’s strongest elements. Palia thrives when you’re willing to slow down, be patient, and become one with the cozy.
Palia in 2025
Palia is a cozy life-sim MMO-lite that often feels more like a single-player experience than a full-fledged MMO. There’s no PvE or PvP combat, and progression isn’t about leveling up by slaying monsters. Instead, you improve individual gathering and crafting skills, including hunting, foraging, furniture-making, gardening, cooking, and bug catching. As you level up each skill, new tools and items unlock at the respective shops. There are no complex skill trees, just steady linear progression. While the real benefits to skill progression cap at level 10, you can continue to level beyond that to earn special currency for unique rewards.
Before I started playing, I couldn’t wrap my head around what the “gameplay” of Palia actually was, even after reading several articles over the years. So here’s the deal: you’ll spend your time running around the game’s three regions, gathering resources, completing quests for villagers, deepening relationships, and designing your home. That’s it. It sounds mundane and repetitive on paper, but it works. It’s addicting in a slow-burn, feel-good kind of way.
The game is packed with villager quests, and the characters are charming, well-written, and worth getting to know. Even after my 150+ hours, I’ve only scratched the surface of the relationship system.
But Palia’s real core loop is building out your homestead. Watching your lot transform from an overgrown patch of grass into a personalized home is deeply rewarding. It taps into the same creative energy that makes games like Animal Crossing or The Sims so fun. You also have the ability to tour other players’ homes and give kudos for their designs, which is a simple but fun window into the creativity of the community. I hope Singularity 6 expands it into something more, with things like themed contests and more rewards for engaging with others’ plots.
There is a huge amount of furniture and styles to experiment with, from unreasonably large plushies to tiny cups and trinkets that allow you to dial in your home to the smallest detail. By the time my home started to take shape, it felt so distinctly mine that I had a hard time putting the game down. I wanted to continue to build, refine, and polish all the little details.
Palia does a great job of ensuring every activity you’ll engage in contributes meaningfully to further expanding and personalizing your homestead. You can also own multiple plots of land, which each have their own decoration placement cap, so the progression here almost feels endless. There’s no “winning” Palia, and nothing of what I would call a traditional end game. To get the most from Palia, you need to embrace the journey rather than rush toward a completionist goal.
Unfortunately, it does seem like the game struggles with what I assume are server load issues at times, with characters on screen jumping around, but it was nothing that seriously hindered my enjoyment. This really only becomes an issue when you are aiming with your bow while hunting, but it never prevented me from making a well-timed shot.
There and Back Again (And Then Back Home Again to Decorate)
The world of Palia includes three explorable regions: Kilima Village, Bahari Bay, and, now, Elderwood. The environments are vibrant and lush, with a surprising amount of verticality thanks to the glider and climbing mechanics that remind me a bit of Tears of the Kingdom. They’re not massive zones, but that actually works in the game’s favor. Familiarity brings a kind of meditative rhythm. Knowing exactly where to find what you need makes gathering seamless rather than a chore.
Palia is also story-rich. The main questline in the base game starts strong, dripping with mystery and lore, but many of the loose ends feel like they end mid-sentence once you hit Elderwood. Just as things begin to build toward something meaningful, the story pivots and leaves lots of loose ends. While it does feel like the base game’s narrative was designed to lay the groundwork for the Elderwood story, it leaves more questions unanswered in the base game than I would like. I spent around 80 hours getting to the end of the original story, partly because I kept getting sidetracked by house-building and villager relationships. You could reach Elderwood quicker if you laser-focus on it, but I wouldn’t recommend it. This is a game best played slowly.
A New Chapter Begins: Enter Elderwood
The Elderwood expansion introduces a brand-new zone with a distinct, moody aesthetic. Think glowing mushrooms, oversized flora, and corrupted wildlife. It’s visually striking and a major improvement over the original regions, which, while pleasant, lacked variety. Elderwood adds much-needed environmental diversity, and it feels more expansive thanks to its mixture of twisting tunnels and open fields.
It also brings a new storyline, one that establishes a clear conflict and sense of threat early on. This is something the base game lacked. The lore and world building Singularity 6 has achieved is impressive, and I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve.
The story and setting are undeniably stronger, but the major change to the game is the introduction of a new relic crafting system which adds craftable gear that provide passive bonuses to gathering. Unfortunately, crafting those relics requires a grind that I started to find more obtrusive than a fun design choice.
When Cozy Meets Corrupted
The expansion’s defining mechanic is the introduction of corrupted resources. Nearly every material you try to gather in the Elderwood region can be “corrupted,” requiring special ammo, tools, or potions to harvest. It’s an interesting idea at first, but it quickly becomes a slog. The tedium is exacerbated if you’re playing on a controller as switching tools feel clunky and unreliable. This is especially frustrating given that this update marks the game’s console launch. To be fair, the game warns that controller support is still in progress, but it’s still a rough first impression. Playing with a keyboard is much easier but was not my preferred way of playing.
The grind centers around a new resource: Infected Essence. It’s required for just about everything in Elderwood, from quest progression to crafting relics. Gathering enough of it becomes a pain, and while you can find it passively scattered around the map, you’ll need to actively harvest corrupted materials to make any real progress.
Artifact Hunting 101
Elderwood also introduces a new relic system. These relics offer passive buffs, which can also apply to friends in your party. There are four relics to collect, each with multiple upgrade tiers. It sounds great in theory, but the system is poorly explained and overly complex. Here’s the breakdown of how to acquire a relic:
- You can collect up to 2 artifact fragments per real-life day by digging in the Elderwood zone.
- Alternatively, you can buy a pouch containing random artifact fragments using Infected Essence, but this is quite costly.
- Once you collect all the specific fragments for an artifact, you can craft it, which rewards you with tickets. Each artifact can only be completed once.
- Tickets are used to buy blueprints for relics or upgrades to relics you own.
- Each relic blueprint requires the player to complete a quest to unlock the ability to craft it.
- Once complete, you can craft the relic at a special table near Elderwood stables.
The four relics provide a range of passive bonuses, but you can only have one equipped at a time. An example of one of the relics is the Bag of Illusions, which allows you to collect corrupted resources without needing special ammo or potions. You can level each artifact up 2 more times, increasing its potency.
The artifact fragments you can dig up per day are random, and duplicates are largely worthless. You can trade with other players, but it’s not very effective due to Palia’s map instancing with a limited number of players, and it will be especially painful on console where typing is harder. Fortunately, the community is generous, and many players will simply give away duplicates through the zone chat. Still, this system feels more like a mobile-style progression gate than a satisfying gameplay loop.
Creature Comforts of Elderwood
Not all of Elderwood’s additions are so cumbersome or clunky as artifacts and relics. In fact, one of the best improvements to the entire Palia experience comes in the form of a craftable stable board for your home. This handy structure can be added to your home plot, and it lets you fast-travel to any zone, massively cutting down on tedious running and zone-hopping. While you have always been able to fast travel back to your home plot by using either stable boards scattered around zones or through your map by using a time-gated teleport feature, you were not able to then teleport back to your original position. This meant walking back to wherever it is you came from, which felt like a waste of the player’s time. I also found it too easy to accidentally hit the time-gated fast travel home button while playing with a controller and viewing my map, which was incredibly frustrating and happened more often than I’d like to admit.
Other notable improvements include plenty of new recipes and blueprints, a new villager with romance options, and an increased decoration limit at your home, raising the cap from 3,000 to 3,500. At the time of writing this review, I have spent 150+ hours in the game and was nowhere near the 3,000 limit, so, to me, this increased cap has really raised the bar for how creative late game players can get with their home designs.
Who Needs Friends?
While Palia is technically an MMO, the game has incredibly limited multiplayer activities. 95% of my playtime was solo, and nothing I did felt like it required another player or rewarded me for grouping with other players. This is an area Singularity 6 should invest in to push Palia forward to true greatness. You can gather resources with other players, which slightly speeds up how fast you can farm, or invite a friend to your plot to help decorate by granting them special visitor permissions. The visitor is limited to only moving furniture you have placed, however, and cannot place anything new themselves. There is no way currently to share a plot with another player, sadly.
I hope future updates find ways to bring players together and reward group play.
I had way more fun with Palia than expected. It greedily gobbled up 150 hours of my life in the blink of an eye, and I wouldn’t change a thing. The really surprising thing is that I feel like I am just getting started. I have so much more space to decorate my base plot, tons of villager relationships to max out, and a journal full of uncompleted side quests. Even if (once?) I max out my plot of land, I can buy a brand new plot so I can continue to collect and design to my heart’s content.
It is also worth flagging that monetization is handled with care, and I find it refreshingly in the player’s favor. There’s a cash shop, but it’s mostly cosmetics with nothing pay-to-win. The Elderwood expansion added the option to buy a pet that can carry extra resources, which is a nice touch but not essential. Honestly, while playing, I was worried about the game’s financial model, especially after Singularity 6’s recent layoffs, so I purchased a few items from the store just to show support. They’ve earned it.
While Elderwood has some mechanics I found to be a bit clunky and cumbersome, it is a welcome addition to the overall experience, and I am certain some of the rough edges can be smoothed out with some balancing and patches in the months ahead.
If you are someone who likes cozy games, particularly Animal Crossing, then I am sure you will find lots to like in Palia. Even if you think Palia doesn’t sound like something you’d enjoy, I encourage you to give it a download and try it out. It is free, so what do you have to lose? Well, except for possibly 150 hours of your life.
Thank you to our PR partners and Singularity 6 for the review code for Palia and Elderwood. You can find our review policy here.
