Steam, lemmy and reddit are currently creaming themselves over a game which devs makes multiple really cringe "jokes" about slavery and exploitation. Read the steam page descriptions.
Those "pals" are clearly antropomorphised creatures being dogwhistle for humans. And if you read the game reviews, even the g*mers are not lost on that fact (just they love that):
It feels so 4chan adjacent that I'm looking at the last few friends in my contact list that I thought were on the level like "how do you not sense this? is your nose broken? Are your eyes sightless?" I don't like having to actively weigh and question how much my last vestiges of irl social contact are worth/whether it's worth having that fight over their unnervingly 4channer-adjacent slop.
Even worse is people keep justifying it with 'well Game Freak doesn't try/innovate/QA check anymore' but that... That shouldn't justify gleeful-slavery frenworld. Cassette Beasts is right fuckin there, as is Tem-Tem. (Neither of which really moved me personally, but that's beside the point.) The more I mull it over the more it genuinely pisses me off. Absolutely, I'd love an engaging, lore-heavy monster tamer alternative to Pokemon with the way Game Freak's been handling the franchise lately, but this one should've been sniffed out and rejected from the jump, I feel.