Let’s get straight to the point. In early 2024, the strongest dark horse game in the game industry appeared - "Phantom Beast Parlu". Two days ago, you may not have heard of this name, but two days later, even if you haven't tried it yet, when this game appears in the gaming news again and again, it is indeed difficult for you to ignore this name. As a work of a small and medium-sized game studio, "Phantom Parlu" is really a bit too popular.
After its release on January 19 this year, "Phantom Parlu" sold one million copies in just eight hours, and Pocketpair Studio quickly started the P-picture celebration. But soon they discovered that they had opened the champagne too early...or rather, too little.
Within 24 hours of its release, sales of "Phantom Parlu" doubled from one million in eight hours, with total sales reaching two million units. The studio quickly released a new celebration picture.
But two million sales in one day is not the high point of the sales of "Phantom Parlu" - one day after its release, the studio of "Phantom Parlu" beat gongs and drums and released the latest three million sales congratulatory picture.
When I searched for "Eidolon Parlu" on SteamDB, I unexpectedly discovered that this game is so popular now that there is no need to search for it at all. In almost every list on SteamDB, "Phantom Beast Palu" occupies the most eye-catching first place, far ahead.
According to this momentum, the sales figure will obviously not stop at 3 million, and may even hit more records. But on second thought, it seems that there are not many records left for "Eidolon Parlu" to hit the charts, because it has almost maxed out the charts.
It’s not difficult to understand what attracts players to “Pokémon Pallu” – the adult version of Pokémon.
Of course, the "adult" here is different from the adult in LSP's understanding. It can be understood as some kind of "dark and disabled", not LSP.
The army of the "Pokémon" world view
In the public's mind, Pokémon and trainers are usually positioned as partners, similar to the protagonist and "Kuripa" of "Yu-Gi-Oh!", and "using Pokémon as a means of production" is generally the ambitious goal of the villain group.
However, "Phantom Pallu" does not set any "Palutism" restrictions for players - therefore, even if it is such and such things, the cute Pallu can do it.
In "Phantom Pallu", the pallu can become a vehicle for players to travel. Whether you want to slide on the water, run on the ground or fly in the sky, there are different pallu to help you.
You can also ask Palu, who has the ability to make water and sow seeds, to help water vegetables and plant fields. When the crops mature, the porter Palu will deliver them to the storage box. Players only need to plan "plant a field here" and all the work will be completed by Palu.
However, becoming a tool and working as a long-term worker in the vegetable garden are not the limits of the Pallu. As a fantasy beast, the Pallu has no limits. Therefore, players can also directly build a power generation equipment and arrange for the electric Pallu to generate electricity on its own, completing the big step from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization.
"Volt Meow, use the 100,000 pickup truck quickly" "Volt Volt"
If you feel that the work of the Palu is not saturated, you can also increase the intensity of the work of the Palu through the monitoring station. Although their sanity will continue to decrease, as long as you arrange a free spa treatment center, the Palu after taking a bath will forget the hard work in the past and work as a small screw on the production line.
A real production line can also be arranged - even with limited intelligence, the Parlu can still complete mechanical tasks repeatedly, such as producing arms on the assembly line, consuming only a few berries per day.
In addition, the Paloos are also very good food. When the player catches a Paloo that is unmotivated, neither loves work, nor has combat or support abilities, he can choose to give the Paloos a knife, so that they can accompany the "trainer" and the Paloo partners in another way.
You can even study cross-racial breeding while continuously purifying the bloodline of the Palu's descendants, until the eugenics produces the Palu with the most outstanding work/combat capabilities, and cultivate the best partner fighting/production tools.
You can even give up on catching "Palu" and instead turn around to catch humans, put humans into the Palu ball and perform many operations such as "Come back", "Attack" or even "Human Trade".
Shocked "Pi X Qiu" for a whole year
Seeing this, I know what you probably want to say - "Has GF already called the police?"
We all know that the current success of "Pokémon Parlu" is obviously not because of the quality of the game itself, which is so unprecedented, but because of an IP with global popularity and decades of development, which has laid the foundation for players' curiosity - Pokémon.
It seems a bit inappropriate to raise the banner of "Fantasy copied our Treasure" here. After all, the previous work of Pocketpair, the development studio of "Phantom Parlu", was the famous "Ultimate Stitch Monster" "Utopia" a few years ago. Considering that "Utopia" is still being sold normally on the Steam store, "Utopia" has obviously spent a lot of effort on how to avoid "plagiarism" and "borrowing".
Regarding "Phantom Parlu", which may even surpass the highest online player record of "Cyberpunk 2077", there is a view that players have been unhappy with GF for a long time.
As we all know, GF's reputation has not been very good in recent years. When the previous work in the "Pokémon" series, "Pokémon Crimson/Purple", was launched, the endless stream of outrageous bugs are indeed still fresh in the minds of players.
But if players have negative emotions about GF's inaction and want to find some kind of "replacement" or "meal replacement" in this very popular "Pokémon Parlu"... Unfortunately, although "Pokémon Parlu" is indeed popular enough, this game is fundamentally different from "Pokémon-like" games such as "Tape Yokai" and "Monster Sanctuary".
The core gameplay of "Pokémon Parlu" is the survival simulation experience of "Ark: Survival Evolved" and "Corruption". Although it currently provides some gameplay similar to "Palu Teaming", even compared with the early "Pokémon", the battle experience is indeed too simple and rough, and essentially still focuses on "stronghold management".
Full of déjà vu
Of course, the 3D "Palu" is indeed attractive enough, but after actually entering the game play experience, players can realize how rough the current "Eidolon Palu" is and how many possibilities there are for subsequent development and improvement.
Three days before the release, the president of the "Phantom Parlu" studio introduced the studio's "six miracles" in advance, including "finding a otaku programmer who can do anything on the Internet", "finding a female college student who can draw five or six times faster than ordinary people", "finding a master of unreal programming who can C the entire audience", expressing his determination that "the rise and fall of his career will depend on this battle."
However, there are already doubters who believe that "Pokémon Palu" has obviously taken the "AI+" plagiarism shortcut - after all, Pocketpair Studio once produced a game "AI: ArtImposter" with AI generation as the core, and there are also "Pokémon" players on the Internet who have analyzed and compared the similarities between "Pokémon Palu" and "Pokémon" in detail.
At the same time, Pocketpair Studio's previous game, "Utopia", which has not been updated for two months, has received a large number of negative reviews in the Steam store because it is "suspected to be abandoned." Taking into account the many factors mentioned above, it is indeed difficult for us to give a "promising future" evaluation to the sudden popularity of "Phantom Parlu".
There is a higher probability that "Phantom Parlu" may be one of those "hot" games, just like "Genesis Gensokyo". The studio deleted the game system through "addition, subtraction, multiplication and division", and attracted curious players through the gimmick of "stitching monsters". Then, after the game was gradually repaired to a "playable" state, the update of the game came to an end.
Of course, this is just an irresponsible conjecture. Maybe after achieving such a huge success, Pocketpair Studio will start to expand its staff and gradually advance the game from the current "0.1" "early access" stage, just like our short video platform often says "seize the wealth of the sky"?
Forget it, let’s take a look at GF in the distance. I believe that after seeing the success of “Pokémon Palu”, GF also knows how attractive a current-scale open world 3D “Pokémon” will be to players.
In the final analysis, "meal replacement" is just "meal replacement". If it is not a "meal replacement", who would want to eat "meal replacement".
Picture source: Station B @Victor Characteristics are the Star of Victory