Palworld combines adorable collectable creatures with extremely dark themes like gun violence, enslavement, and the slaughtering of humans and Pals alike, and today players have learned even the very cutest Pals have dark sides.
At first glance, Palworld looks like an adorable game about collecting and training your favorite Pals and building a cozy home for them. But things take a dark turn as soon as you defeat a wild Pal for the first time. Rather than simply making the Pal faint like in Pokémon, it will instead die. You’ll know it’s dead too, because its body will stay on the ground as a limp corpse. Kick it all you want or roll it off a cliff, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’ve taken the life of a Pal. The corpses are there to remind you of that.
The same thing happens when you kill humans. As you can imagine, it’s quite unsettling to see the aftermath of a raid at your base with the corpses of humans and Pals lying right next to your cozy beds and food supply. Eventually, the map will be cleansed of the bloodshed, and you might not have given it a second thought of where all the corpses went. However, some players have seen Pals walk up to corpses and eat them.
One Palworld player mentioned they saw a Gorirat eating three corpses off the ground, and other players chimed in with similar, eerie experiences with Pals like Cawgnito and Vanwyrm, who have darker appearances than, say, Lamball or Chikipi. Even the adorable Relaxaurus was caught chomping on a human.
While it might be surprising to witness this happening, there are multiple warning signs to give players a heads-up. For example, Relaxaurus’ Paldeck entry states, “It perceives everything in its sight as prey and will stop at nothing to devour it.” This makes it clear that you shouldn’t be fooled by the innocent appearance of Relaxaurus or any other Pal.
The biggest warning, however, comes right at the start of the game. While setting up your first base and playing the Palworld tutorial, you probably came across an NPC. This Expedition Survivor tells you all of their comrades were eaten by Pals. Maybe you didn’t believe them at the time, or maybe you missed this conversation altogether, but it’s hard to deny this dark truth now that players have witnessed it firsthand.
This is just another dark element in a game where players kill humans for gold and butcher their Pals for rare items—but it hasn’t stopped anyone playing just yet.
