Palia & The Elderwood Expansion Review

Game: Palia & The Elderwood Expansion
Genre: Adventure, Life Sim, MMO
System: Steam (Windows) (also available on Nintendo Switch, PS5, & XBOX One)
Developers & Publishers: Singularity 6
Controller Support: Yes
Steam Deck: Playable
Price: Base Game Free-To-Play in all Regions
Release Date: August 10th, 2023, The Elderwood Expansion: May 13th, 2025

A review code was provided with thanks to Forty Seven PR.

Palia is a free-to-play MMO, but we thank Singularity 6 for their tips and assistance. Please see the review for further details.

Launched with a public beta in late 2023 and immediately up against Disney Dreamlight Valley, Palia had some hard farmland to hoe in its fight to become the welcoming, always online, open-world champion of the adventure-tinged life sim. Dreamlight Valley has an obvious and tantalizing gimmick for fans who grew up on Kingdom Hearts and really want to hang with their animated pals from across that Mouse-ruled multiverse. But Palia has something interesting in its own right: a chance for both its world and its players to make a fresh start in a land they could shape for themselves.

Since launch, Palia’s worked on shaping that unique world, offering up an intriguing story that takes the usual gloom of the post-apocalypse and instead creates a colorful, joy-filled land overseen by the Majiri, elf-like folk working with others to learn what actually happened to their world’s lost precursors: humanity. Imagine their surprise when real, living humans start arriving as if out of nowhere! That’s the premise we, those human players, get to dive into straight from character creation. Now Palia has its first major expansion in The Elderwood, and it’s time to ask the big question: is this a journey worth taking?

Palia’s Ever-Expanding World

Don’t be leery of that far-from-1.0 version number. Palia already had plenty to do before last week’s big update, offering two large spaces to explore (Kilima Village and Bahari Bay), several puzzle-filled temples, and private housing plots for each player to gussy up as they see fit. The Elderwood adds a new, expansive zone with mini-biomes that flow naturally into each other. It’s big enough that it makes an expansion quest to find all the stables (fast travel spots) in the new zone into a priority one alpha job, if you’re the type to get easily turned around.

an example of a home in Palia, with a farming plot and an expanded blue roofed home — An example plot shows what my home would look like if I were not some weird hallway-loving goblin.

But exploring all these nooks and crannies is just part of the fun on offer in Palia. New players will be eased into their options with a series of low-pressure quests that’ll introduce you to the colorful locals and the job skills they’ve mastered. It’s a life sim best-of. Mining escalates through the types of ore. Gathering and woodchopping are all in one, so you’ll collect rarer ‘shrooms and take on tougher trees. Fishing, bug catching, and hunting are all a little more active and will teach you the value of improving your tools. Add in gardening, and how cooking and crafting feed off all these other quests, and you simply won’t run out of errands to set for yourself.

Yet it’s rarely overwhelming, and, short of accidentally selling off some of the rarer finds (do not sell pebbles!! Don’t sell anything rare until you know what the words Vault Bundle mean!) there’s no major way to set yourself back. Even those parenthesized issues can be recovered with time. Your plants won’t wither, they’ll just chill till you get to watering them.

Meanwhile, Palia will keep giving you reasons to get to know its charming, well-written locals. Through the gameplay, you’ll learn more about the history of the land, the mysterious disappearance of your human predecessors, and a lot more.

Your Role in It All

It’s easy to simply sink into the life-sim aspects of Palia, ignoring story quests until you’ve processed enough wood and gold to expand and decorate your house to your desires with all the collectable goodies you’ll find stashed around the world. Collectable plushies lurk everywhere, as lucky bag rewards for being a loyal customer to the sassy alien cat that runs the village market (that’s my main man, Zeki), or hiding in fishing zones, and lots of other places.

A ruined doorway flanked by purple plantlife in Palia — All exploration is about puzzles and platforming — never combat.

But Palia offers a darn good story about magitek gone amok and sentient robots wondering what to do with themselves in a world without their makers. Magic, for all that it feels natural to Palia’s fantastical world, is carefully regulated and for reasons that will be discussed with you by people with varying and often intriguing viewpoints. Your call to adventure will see you noodling around ancient human ruins while getting a handle on easy to moderate levels of platforming, pathfinding, and treasure seeking. The rewards are more answers, and more tantalizing ways forward, eventually leading new players towards the Elderwood — and, it suggests, even farther than that, in time.

Those NPCs and their story provide the strongest backbone for the world of Palia; I’m still trying to befriend someone enough to make them my town sponsor, and I’m so in love with the Galdurian robots that it’s probably going to be the affable Einur. He’s a fisherman robot who reminds me vaguely of the ancient robot in Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky. And yet, for all the whispering and worrying, my real favorite NPC is a spoilery woman you won’t meet until several hours into the game. This competent investigator is wry, funny, and always on the ball when it comes to Palian mysteries.

The Always Online World

There’s a bit of trepidation for the cozy gamer when it comes to online experiences, trebly so if you’re a woman. Fortunately, Palia may always be an online game, but its MMO experiences are light and heavily encouraged towards the positive. Player to player interactions mostly revolve around trading those hard to find plushies or playing the incredibly addictive game of hotpot down in Zeki’s other house of business (Zeki and the Ferengi of Star Trek would get on like a house on fire, and we’d all be dead broke in their wake. But we’d have a good time). Otherwise, players are there for us to admire their choices in wardrobe and how they’ve built their homes.

a closeup of Einur, a fisherman robot who likes a straw hat — Einur is the fishing mentor every grandfather should aspire to be.

Servers are kept smallish, and you’re encouraged to block and report unsavoury sorts. But it’s useful to keep the chat on, because your other collective activity is keeping an eye out for certain rare spawns that players can share. Watch for someone that sounds like they’re playing Battleship: L tree at C4 means that, if you look at your map and wander over to that marked grid, someone’s standing by a big, purple-tainted tree with axe in hand. Give it a smack, wait, and the person that called it out will give some sort of signal to go hog. Congrats! You’ve got rare planks to build with.

This can also apply to rare collectable fungi and other items, so keep an eye out. Muddling around and doing things in a quiet party, which is an entirely optional choice, also has shared material-collecting benefits. All of it makes the world feel lively and lived in without the stress of excess social interaction.

On Techs and Transactions

I began my journey to Palia on the Steam Deck, which plays excellently even if it’s not yet perfectly optimized. The only controller issue I had was smooth interaction with chat, and even that can be handled with a couple of extra clicks. Here, it’s a beautiful, colorful game with mild loading times between zones and a little bit of amusing NPC pop-in as you approach your target.

An escalatingly large series of plush frogs in palia — Frogs. Frogs. Frogs. Frogs. Join me. Frogs. Frogs. Frogs. FROGS.

I was enthused about the game enough to my partner that he fired it up on the Switch, and here are a few caveats that have more to do with the hardware than the game: Switch loads are long, and the FPS can take some severe hits outside of your housing plot. Nonetheless, it IS playable, and a lot of Palians have been enjoying it there. My personal advice is to see how Switch 2 steps up if you intend to upgrade.

With the release of the Elderwood, Palia is now available on the PS5 and XBOX consoles, where performance is on par with my Deck experience. These consoles may need a little more individual chat curation for a while to weed out young men with disreputable authority figures who tell them that cozy games are Woke and Bad and that trolling is their duty. I expect these sorts will be gone very shortly (Singularity Six doesn’t seem inclined to allow these fellas to linger), and there’s not a lot they can do to salt your day.

As noted, Palia is a free-to-play game, with all of the tools you need and housewares you want available to collect and build in-game. The normal in-game currency is gold, and once you’ve gotten a handle on the situation, you won’t find it hard to earn. In full transparency, the developers were hoping I, as a reviewer, would be able to get up to par with people ready to explore the new expansion in order to include it in my assessment.

A woman with a farming tool stands among her crops in Palia — You can plant as much or as little as you like, and it’s actually relaxing to do.

That would mean some investment, as pack and tool upgrades become reasonably more expensive. I was offered a bundle of gold to help me afford early resources so that I could speed up my prep for Temple quests and craft fine-level equipment. I ended up using only a portion of it to hit the floor running, mostly because I quickly realized I was really enjoying myself and could put a lot of time in, and I received no goodies an ordinary player couldn’t gather for themselves.

There is a premium currency for Palia, and it is presently the only source of income for the game. Palia Coins are offered at varying price points, with the $5 Zeki’s Club option giving you 1325 coins if you remember to visit the game every day. With the expansion comes two extra value bundles that offer a boodle of coins and exclusive cosmetics. While all your home goods encourage investing your skills and time, cool costumes and pets are cosmetic choices paid for by those coins. At this time, one premium pet offers, functionally, four extra spaces of storage, but some variant of this pet will be available for free as part of a quest in an upcoming patch.

It’s an individual’s opinion on how much value you are willing to attach to the cosmetics; some players do the math and see the more elegant clothing options as too expensive. Some see grabbing at least the Zeki’s Club membership as an easy way of supporting the game, eventually buying whatever swanky goodies they want. I cannot debate the ethicality of micro transactions at length here. I will say that for a free game that has rarely intruded its premium options, I have had a ton of fun, and I intend to pay back with a little cold cash of my own after I’ve logged this review. I like cute video game pets. I’m not made of stone.

Conclusion

Devoted to a cozy, play at your pace style and supported by a well-planned and executed story featuring some great characters, Palia enters its first major expansion with the strength necessary to give it a long-term boost. The ever-expanding world is a joy to explore, and the new Elderwood region is large, intricate, and full of neat little nooks where one can find platforms for goodies and shortcuts, all to further the understanding of the world of Palia’s lost history.

There are plenty of skills to master, but it never feels overwhelming. Improving your toolkit is up to you, naturally paced by how much you’re willing to putter around with the skill to do some other thing you decided you wanted. The social aspect is no afterthought, walking a careful line of interactivity that allows the world to feel alive without stressing the less social of us into situations that absolutely require us to be outgoing (aaaaaaaugh).

Palia hits a blend of tone and style I didn’t realize I was looking for, adding the home customization of Animal Crossing and Disney Dreamlight Valley to a story I found both fresh and comfortingly familiar at regular intervals. In a time of heavy stress, it’s soft, it’s pleasant, and it offers nifty mysteries to think about. It’s a world that’s going to continue to earn regular visits from me as it continues to grow, and I truly hope I’ll see you there.

Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up