Palworld

I have heard it runs on steam deck, but nothing about Mac yet.

Palworld is a really interesting fusion of genres - creature collecting, FPS, and base / factory building.

The creature collecting elements are strong even this early in the game - obviously you want to collect as many unique species of pals as possible, but there is also heavy incentive to collect individuals of species you already have. Each pal has unique traits that impact its work speed, work preferences, or combat strength, so you can spend some time collecting ideal pals. You also get extra exp for your first ten captures of a species, which is extremely important for progression. Finally, Palworld pulls some inspiration from Pokemon Legends: Arceus and has what it calls "Lucky Pals" - effectively alpha pokemon. These have boosted work capacity and battle capability.

I am not a huge fan of FPS games, so I can't speak as to how good the FPS elements are compared to other games. The combat generally feels very good - the hitboxes are on point, attacks are fast enough to be scary to dodge without feeling impossible. The first boss felt like a bit of a health sponge. I ended up dealing the majority of my damage myself rather than relying on my pals, which felt a bit sad, but I might just not be using the right pals.

Base building is extremely fun! Picking which pals work is a complex and meaningful choice, and watching them run around and go about their day is lovely. There are some bugs in this arena, which is to be expected - sometimes pals that are collecting items will get stuck in a loop of picking the item up, dropping it, picking it up again, forever. Sometimes pals get stuck on terrain and have to be reset using the palbox. Sometimes pals ignore jobs - this seems to largely affect heating jobs and handiwork jobs.

At this point in the game, I'm heavily dependent on my pals picking the right thing to work on, or else losing a lot of time assigning them to stations that are only active sometimes. I hope to see some refinement in these systems - a way to prioritize work would be extremely helpful. It would also be great to be able to set resource levels - something like "Keep 200 berries". Pals would work berry farms until you hit 200 berries in storage, then stop. I'm hoping for the complexity of factory building to continue to increase.

All in all I am loving the game so far - it's a lot of fun even in its current early access state, and shows a lot of promise going into the future.