While Nintendo might’ve found a way to bring Pocketpair to court over patents it arguably shouldn’t have been awarded in the first place, it’s telling that even its military-grade legal hit squad didn’t try to nail Palworld for its Pokemon knockoffery. But while I’ll defend Palworld’s legal right to pretend Dinossom isn’t just Lilligant’s flower and Meganium’s face stapled to a green Goodra body, that doesn’t make it any less grimy.
This week, however, Palworld has found itself on the other side of the sincerest form of flattery: Allow me to introduce Palland, a shameless attempt to fool anyone who only has the patience to read the first three letters of a game title and a particularly egregious example of the kind of slop Nintendo is content to let fester on the Switch store (via Kotaku).
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I might find Palworld distasteful, but Palland is aesthetically demonic. For only $4, it claims to offer “a captivating survival, building, and exploration game” in “a vast and dangerous environment” where “you decide how to gather resources, expand your shelter, and deal with wild creatures that can be both threats and valuable sources of power.”
In reality, it’s a dire, shambling morass of pasghetti creatures and generic assets where the trees look like tonsil stones and every sound is horrible. Watching Palland gameplay videos on YouTube is like rotating in a microwave of apathetic contempt. But you can shoot the monsters with a gun if you want. You know, like Palworld.
Notably, however, it doesn’t look like you can capture any creatures in ball-shaped objects, which spares Palland from entering the same legal hot water that Palworld was dunk-tanked into in Nintendo’s patent suit. And for what it’s worth, its monsters don’t really look like Pokemon underneath the bleary AI vaseline of its store banner. They don’t really look like anything. Except bad.
While I wouldn’t put it past Nintendo to leave Palland’s listing up out of pettiness, it certainly hasn’t been in any rush to flush the rest of the knockoff sludge from the Switch store. To be fair, Steam has no shortage of blatant ripoffs, though in cases like Light of Motiram—which Sony has called a “slavish clone” egregious enough to take Tencent to court—they can sometimes be shamed into straightening out their act.