There may be no shortage of cozy games on the market, but that hasn’t stopped Singularity 6’sPaliafrom making a name for itself. Since its launch in 2023,Paliahas had over 6,000,000 players and has even amassed over 15,000,000 hours of content watched on Twitch alone. With its deep lore and fascinating story, as well as its cozy activities like fishing, crafting, and especially home design,Paliahas solidified its place in the cozy genre, regardless of how packed it may be. Now, it may grow even more as it enlarges its territory to thePS5 and Xbox Series X|Son May 13, alongside the release of its biggest update yet — Elderwood.
Game Rant recently attended a virtual preview ofPalia’s upcoming Elderwood map, after which we interviewed senior game designer Richie Berry about the expansion and what players can expect from it. During the interview, Berry went into detail about Elderwood’s story, darker tone, increased emphasis on verticality in exploration, progression system, and more.
Palia’s Elderwood Map and Its ‘Beautiful Spooky’ Approach
Q: First, can you tell us aboutPalia’s Elderwood expansion and what players can expect from it?
A: This is the first adventure zone we’ve launched since we releasedPalia. We launched with Kilima and Bahari, and now we’ve got Elderwood as our third zone. It’s by far the largest release we’ve done post-launch by an order of magnitude. This whole zone is filled out with new content for players, like quests, collectibles,huntable creatures, and new gameplay systems. As far as the story goes, an unknown essence has spread throughout Elderwood, and players will join forces with Subira to uncover the mystery and stop the catastrophe.
The Elderwood itself is a dense magical forest filled with surprises around every corner. We tried to make it significantly more intricate and surprising than anything we’ve done previously. It will allow you to get new artifacts, creatures, insects, plushies, etc. Then, a major new system we have is artifacts and Relics. Artifact hunting allows you to explore the ruins of ancient civilizations and get Relics, which will be new equipment that lets you buff yourself and your whole party so you can explore and collect more efficiently, and you can level them up and work together with your friends to have multiple buffs at once.
Q: What inspired the shift toward a darker theme with Elderwood? Because it is a lot different from what the game currently has going on.
A: I think there are a few answers to that question. One is that if you played through some of theTemple quests inPalia, you’ve probably seen that there’s always been a little bit of a dichotomy in the game. Humans went extinct a thousand years ago and are now coming back, right? It’s clear that something pretty bad happened a while ago, but I think that, to be cozy, nothing negative ever happening can leave the world feeling a little empty. Maybe “stakes” isn’t quite the right word, but if everything’s always incredibly easy and happy, it can feel a little hollow.
Baked intoPaliais a little bit of a deep backstory, and in this zone, we’ve always wanted to dig a little bit more into it so that players can come to understand what has happened and make things better — take whatever it is that happened and improve things. We’re starting to dig a little bit more into the things that have always been there, but maybe a little bit more subtle or maybe a little bit more inside quests, or that one log in the corner that you could read, or maybe miss.
I think you also see this in a fair amount of media,things likeNightmare Before ChristmasorLittle Nightmares,and we’re not even going as far as that. That cute, creepy kind of stuff has a lot of popularity. There is a little bit of chocolate and peanut butteriness to it, so something that’s a little bit spookier but still kind of cozy.
Q: You mentioned different elements like Subira — an NPC brought in to make sure players still feel at home in Elderwood — that you’re incorporating to maintain that cozy feel. How else are you ensuring a balance between the darker themes and the cozy essence ofPalia?
A: It’s a line that we have to walk pretty carefully. It’s something I’ve thought about really carefully, with things like the Ogopuu. The Ogopuu is the firsthunting creature inPaliathat fights back a little bit, and that’s a little bit scarier, in a certain way. We’ve made sure there’s no health inPalia; you can’t die, you can’t get a game over, and you can’t even respawn. When the world fights back, it slows you down a little. It’s like, maybe you’ve got this goop that makes it so that you can’t run as fast, and as a result, the Ogopuu escapes.
There are some bright lines there that we try never to cross. Even in something likeStardew Valley’s mines, you may get mauled by a slime, and then you’re dragged out by a guy. We don’t even want to go that far. We’ve got the purple aesthetic, and we’re in these spooky caves, but we made sure that they’ve got the mood lighting, where it’s not just dark and spooky. Instead, it’s kind of like this cool mood, but you can always see, and it’s always still bright.
It’s more “beautiful spooky” than “I’m actually in danger” spooky. We never want the player to feel like they’re in any kind of danger. They might be like, “This is a little bit scary. I’m worried about this kid, or I’m worried about this or that. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here.” But there will always be that warmth. We attempt to suffuse everything with an element of that warmth.
Elderwood’s Gameplay and Story
Q: Another big characteristic of Elderwood is its emphasis on verticality in exploration. So, what was your intention behind that and your philosophy behind incorporating more verticality into Elderwood than we’ve seen inPaliabefore?
A: Traversal is something I really care about. Something that we learned from some of our past zones is that we wanted to make something that was smaller. Bahari has its caves, and it has its geysers, which I think were great. But large sections of bothBahari and Kilimaare just open plains. When you’re in a wide open plain, if you’re opportunistically grabbing all these things, you probably chart a bit more of a zigzaggy path. But in some cases, you might just press the W key forward or hold up on the stick for a while and just sort of not have to think at all about movement.
Something that we wanted to try here is adding a lot of “micro-decisions” around traversal, where it’s like, “Oh, there are two paths to this. That one, I can climb, and that one has a bouncy mushroom.” Or there’s one cave in the northeastern part of the map where there’s just this little creek below, and then you can see stuff on the other side, and the path splits and comes back together. And one side’s a little lower and one’s a little higher. The higher one, it’s a little easier to climb up this little cliffside, and the lower one it’s a little easier to reach the river. So, it’s a moment-to-moment,great traversal experienceand a little bit more interesting.
We also have this climbing system and a gliding system that we thought we could take better advantage of. When you have a wide-open field, if you get to a high point, you want to glide off and go a long distance, and that can be a little bit faster, and you can see a little bit farther. But when you have all thisverticality in the world, you can bounce off that mushroom, land on that platform sticking out of a tree, climb up to the higher platform, bounce up one more, and now you’re really high. You can glide over that other tree and see what’s over there. Then you can see a little bit further — there’s a stable sign here, there’s an interesting path over there. We’re hoping it’ll add more interest to the experience of traversing this map.
Q: I don’t know if you may say anything about this, but if you can, how is Elderwood going to expand onPalia’s overarching story, particularly with the Flow and the Magiri?
A: So far, we have been to Kilima and Bahari, so we’ve experienced the Majiri there, and Subira came from a distant place. We’re going to encounter a little bit more of the world of Majiri with the Umbraan. The Umbraan are native to the Elderwood, as well as some other parts of the world, and they’re a little bit different from the Majiri we’ve already met. Even the way they sense is a little bit different. And we’re going to see how they relate to Flow inPaliaa little bit differently than those who’ve come before.
In that way, we’re expanding the world a little bit. These humans have dropped in to Kilima and, so far, it’s kind of been their whole world. But we’re starting to learn more now. Some things in this will start to shed a bit more light on the past as we go bit by bit. We have this main storyline that started — the “Ancient Battery,” I would say — where we started exploring these Temples. We’re continuingPalia’s main storyline and taking it a little bit further, and we’ll be continuing to grow this story for years to come. So, we’ll be going deeper on that, as well as opening up a little bit more about the world and what all is in it.
Q: How is Elderwood going to fit intoPalia’s progression system? You’re wanting this to be a good access point for new players, so what is it going to take for them to get to Elderwood?
A:NewPaliaplayerscan just walk in if they want to, but there are two pieces there. We’ve actually been looking at this very carefully and making sure that the questline isn’t too demanding to get to Elderwood, but to do the Elderwood questline, you will have to progress the main story quest — which is talking with Gina and the Battery, going through the Water Temple and then the Fire, Air, and Earth Temples, and the prologue with Subira and doing the Subira quests, and then the most recent updates we did where you return to the Temples. Once you’ve done all that, you’ll immediately see the Elderwood cutscene. That said, you’re able to hop right in there if you want.
One of the things we’re trying to do, from a gameplay perspective, is not make it linearly gated. There’s a little bit of progression gating, as in, you need an Iron Pickaxe to chop Palium nodes. So, you have to level up from the Makeshift Pickaxe to the Copper Pickaxe, and then the Iron Pickaxe before you can do Palium. Then, you can use Palium to make aPalium Pickaxe.
We’re trying not to limit players to where they can’t set foot in Elderwood until they’ve played a billion hours or something. We’re trying not to do that. Players can walk right in at any point, but to do the Elderwood quests, they’ll have to do everything prior to those. We definitely recommend going through the main story quest first, but players can play it however they want to play it.
The new items will follow a horizontalprogression system. For example, the Echo will have its own. to hunt infected creatures, hunting creatures, you’ll need Echo arrows, which aren’t exactly a higher tier of arrows than the ones we’ve had before, but more of a horizontal tier. It’s something that you can get in Elderwood and use in Elderwood.
Q: Apart from regular updates, what is post-launch for Elderwood going to look like? Do you have any unique plans for it?
A: Definitely have plans to announce very soon, but the super short answer is that we will continue our monthly update of the game following Elderwood’s launch. We’ve got lots of ideas and plans for what we want to do, and we’ll attempt to go into more detail about that as soon as we can. The main thing is that we just need to nail down what order we’re going to do these things in.
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