Palworld Dating Sim Returns, Could Be Real This Time

Last year, Palworld established itself by doing things that Nintendo would never do with Pokemon, including arming pals with lethal weapons. Now, Palworld developer Pocketpair has revisited its 2024 April Fool's Day joke with a new look at Palworld: More Than Just Pals, which lets players romantically court pals and even date them. And what started out as a joke could be real this time.

Even if this new update is just a continuation of the original joke, some of the Pocketpair devs clearly put a a lot of work into this one. Palworld: More Than Just Pals has a page on Steam with multiple screenshots, and a detailed breakdown of some the characters that the players can supposedly pursue. Most of the romantic options are for pals, but there's one adult, Nurse Saya, that players can also flirt with. Most of the main characters are showcased in the announcement trailer that was created for the game and published a year ago.

The newly released second trailer continues the flirtations as Nurse Saya and the pals practically throw themselves at the players-character.

Palworld's social media accounts have also announced a contest for a More Than Just Pals Lovander body pillow. Lovander is a character in the game who is described as "A senior who makes a love approach to new students every year. She calls her love approach 'hunting.'"

Although Palworld's communications director, John "Bucky" Buckley, insists that the game is real, our bet remains that this is just an elaborate April Fool's Day joke. But there probably would be an audience for this game.

Despite the ongoing lawsuit with Nintendo, Bucky recently hinted that Palworld could come to Switch 2 if the system is powerful enough. Earlier this month, Palworld also received a big new update with cross-play, photo mode and more additions to the game.