Palworld is weird, it is crazy, it is janky, and brutal. The brutality clashes in a weird way with the cute pal creatures. And that clash seems intentional: For example there is a function in the game where you can equip a butcher's meat cleaver and butcher one of your pals, which results in an animation which is pixelated as if censored. You can butcher a lamb, get lamb meat, turn that into lamb kebab, and feed the lamb kebab to your other lambs. The game doesn't try to be safe for small children, like Pokemon does. But the Pokemon brand is approaching it's 28th anniversary, and the people who grew up with it don't necessarily need "safe" anymore (although judging by some game journalist commentaries, a few snowflakes definitively still do). And while Palworld is frequently accused of copying Pokemon, that accusation is only based on visual similarities between Pals and Pokemon; the gameplay of Palworld is distinctively different from everything the Pokemon brand has produced over the years, and it adds a lot of new twists to the gameplay of survival crafting games. Palworld is a game where many people thought it was an elaborate joke on seeing the trailer, and then were flabbergasted when the features shown in the trailer were actually in the game. The comment I heard most often of Palworld was that it was "better than it should be", and that is in spite of it being still very much "early access".

Compared to that, Enshrouded is marketed as brutal soulslike, but then looks and plays extremely safe. There is nothing in the graphical style that surprises you. The gameplay is exactly what you'd expect from a standard survival crafting game, so much that the game doesn't bother much with a tutorial. There are limits on how independently players can act when playing together. Multiplayer not working on release didn't help, although two hotfixes fixed most of the problems quickly. Quality of life features are either missing, or way down the tech tree, for example building with materials from chests needs a late game "magic chest". Enshrouded was "highly anticipated", but fell a bit flat on release. That might be a bit unfair, but to some extent is due to bad timing, right when every survival crafting game fan is playing something else. And it suffers from the direct comparison: What do you mean, I have to hack every tree manually myself in Enshrouded? Why isn't there a pal that can do that for me? Enshrouded certainly has much better freestyle building features than Palworld, but the base in Palworld seems so much more functional.

In a way I get a "Starfield all over again" deja vu experience. Of course that is highly speculative, I can't travel to an alternate universe where these games would have released *not* right after a more innovative game in the same genre and see how they would have fared against less competition. But I do think that we now live in a world that is highly connected via social media, and innovative games can become a viral runaway success. The safe, business as usual games struggle in that environment. It isn't that you couldn't have fun with them, but they don't produce the same hype and viral success. They would be news only in the absence of other news. These days that just doesn't cut it anymore.