Their earlier game Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge is also worth a play. It runs on the Oblivion engine so it’s a little dated graphically, but story- and gameplay-wise it holds up fine.
It’s Ark, but with all the terrible mechanics and blatant playtime stretching removed. The longest anything takes in Palworld with default settings is hatching a large egg, which is entirely passive and caps at 2 hours on Normal (according to the settings page, but I’ve yet to see a hatch timer longer than 30 minutes), and even that can be greatly sped up by matching the egg’s preferred climate with a heater or cooler next to the incubator. Most things that require player intervention take minutes at most. After Ark’s “this basic task takes hours, you have to be there for the whole process, and any mistake means you might as well start over”, this game is a breath of fresh air.
Definitely room for growth though, especially on the automation and AI side of things. Even in its current state it’s still one of the best survival games I’ve played in years. Between it and Enshrouded, 2024 has already spoiled me.
It’s weird. It’s terrible as music - just random strings with almost no recognizable tune outside of the first few seconds - but it sets a mood better than any other. It’s distilled melancholy in music form.
Most space used by games is taken up by textures and audio. Textures can be downscaled (halving texture resolution reduces the size by 75%) and audio can be resampled at a lower bitrate without the quality drop being too noticeable on tiny phone screens/speakers.