I’ve been casually playing Palia on my Switch for the past couple months. I’d heard it described as a “cozy” game, and I’m all about the cozy. You are a human in a fantasy realm, and you build a little house and farm. You hunt; you craft things; you cook food; you go fishing. There are some quests and puzzles along the way, but you don’t have to do those if you don’t want to. Nothing attacks you, and if you do manage to kill yourself (like by falling into deep water) it just resets you right nearby with no damage. I’m enjoying it.

Playing on the Switch has some downsides though. Eventually I noticed that in the chat, other players were sharing where special items could be found. But typing messages with a game controller is painful. It seemed like most other people were probably playing on their PCs. But I don’t have a PC. I have a Mac mini, and Palia doesn’t have a Mac client yet.

BUT! Apparently this is no longer a problem these days? I found some Reddit posts where people mentioned getting it to work on Mac using Whisky, which seemed doable. Then I found this Palia on Mac launcher that handles a lot of the setup for you. I kicked it off and installed Whisky, and followed the steps to setup a “bottle.” First problem: my bottle disappeared. I’m not sure what the issue was, but I tried it several times and they’d just vanish (but I could see the folders in the Finder). Eventually I reinstalled Whisky directly (rather than going through the launcher), and I went into the Finder and deleted the extra bottles. Suddenly my original one appeared. Yay! Then I went back to the launcher to finish the setup and download the game files. Second problem: the downloads would seem to hang with, like, no visual feedback what was happening. It looked like other folks on Reddit had similar issues, and that the key was just to keep restarting the launcher and it would continue where it left off. After leaving it alone for an hour or so today, it managed to get everything and the “Run” button appeared!

The game looks fantastic compared to the Switch. Mac mini is a lot more powerful, obviously! I was prepared for some glitchiness, but it was really minimal. I had one crash, but otherwise everything worked really smoothly. Rodd suggested I change it to play in a window rather than full screen, as on my wide monitor it was actually making me motion sick. But I’m going to just try to get used to it, because it looks so gorgeous.

At first I tried playing with keyboard and mouse, which took some getting used to. I just don’t have the muscle memory yet. I could see that it was really great for some things – choosing stuff from your inventory, moving around the map, chatting to other players – but for other things it felt a bit awkward. And fishing sucked – there was so much lag that I lost every fish I hooked. Eventually I hooked up a Bluetooth controller, and that gives the best of both worlds. I can run around and catch fish, but also easily switch over to the keyboard for tasks that need it.

Anyway, if you want to try it out, you can use my “Refer a friend” code and I might get some in-game swag for it. The game is free to play, but apparently you can use real money to buy, like, funky outfits and stuff. (You don’t need to though; I haven’t paid a cent!) Let me know if you start and I’ll friend you in there!