If I wait until I beat the game I will forget to write a review, so here is my review 24 hours of playtime in, absolutely nowhere near done/complete! If I change my stance later I will write a review version 1.0 and link to it here.
Short Version: Paleo Pines is an absolutely wonderful Cute Dinosaur Game that is also extremely a farmsim. The dinosaurs are enchanting and a great addition (note: addition, not remix) to the genre staples! The combination works VERY well and I think this is a great game. Just, if you loathe thinking about digital crops, this is probably not the game for you.
OVERVIEW: the whole premise, point, promise of Paleo Pines is that you get to get to befriend and pet the dinosaurs. This simple but impeccable idea is executed very well with an adorable, bright visual direction, lovely sound design, and some game design ideas just clever enough to make it fun to play. It is also embedded in a farmsim which is about as farmsim as farmsim genre games know how to get, all the way down to stamina systems and NPCs to raise your friendship with.
I myself am a farmsim casual who tends to prefer games and systems that don't feel like I'm being hunted down by agricultural midterm tests– farming is okay to me, but I've skipped a lot of big-name games like Stardew Valley. However, all people have their price, and my price is dinosaurs so cute my overjoyed squeaks hit octaves normally reserved for annoying electronics. The demo several months before launch left me a little nervous about whether the farming would get in the way of the dinosaurs but now that the full version is in my claws: phew, it's fine! There IS quite a lot of farming and they didn't make those systems shallow, but the dinosaurs are integrated well enough that I've actually warmed up to tending my crops every morning before I blast out for DINO ADVENTURES.
i. Early Game is one of the weaker parts
As comical as passing judgement is when I'm still newbie enough that some days I run out of potatoes... it's a problem/feature/whatever of all farmsims that you start at 0 and your first few hours are defined by clawing for every single scrap you can get. Paleo Pines is no different, but the addition of dinosaurs increases the number of things you lack, and this does not help it shine. You are scrambling for money/seeds/produce, like usual, but you're also scrambling for Legally Distinct Poké Puffs and doubly straining your produce supplies because you need those to persuade dinos to come home with you. Exploration feels relatively strong and offsets this a bit: wandering around the world will get you as many goodies as you can fit in your pockets, which eases the squeeze somewhat.
But fundamentally you start with a small stamina bar, a single dino with her own unimpressive stamina bar, and multiple in-game days in between you and your next helper. And those helpers matter. Even if you're not motivated by love of cute dinos, each animal gets some skills to help out around the farm: Lucky your Parasaurolophus stomps debris away so you can make use of the land underneath, while a Gallimimus can be instructed to dispense water across your crops. And so on. Importantly, asking your helper dinos to do you favors does not use your stamina bar: it uses theirs. And each dino's stamina bar increases with their level, which itself goes up from hanging out with you in Follow Me/riding mode as well as whenever they use their skills to help you. A small patch of crops will drain you dry if you work by yourself, but a trusty dino friend who helps out every day will soon have the might to handle half a field! Or more! That's where your progression/power scaling lies, and it's satisfying once you get going, but with the benefit of hindsight it makes the start that much more "finish your homework before you can play the fun game."
ii. Dinos: THEY ARE SO GOOD
Oh my great gripping green beans the dinos are so good. I love them so muuuuuuch!!
What, I need to say something coherent? Fine.
The wide variety of prehistoric megafauna, which includes non-dinosaurs like archaeosaurs & non-mammalian synapsids, have been sculpted in one of the cutest possible art directions/styles I've seen in a minute and given appropriately adorable animations & visual personalities. Tucked away in one of the Steam FAQs is my favorite trivia: all the dinos are voice-acted by humans, because the other approaches they tried didn't produce cute enough results. (And it's really good!)
You can pet the dinosaur. If you're me and your muscle memory is particularly slow to get with the program, you will pet the dinosaurs a lot when you keep hitting the wrong button. This is a good thing. The dinos love the pettings and will dance, prance and sing while heart effects pop out to show it. Mechanically speaking you don't have to pet them a lot, but it sure is enjoyable to hop off my log-clearer and thank him for his service with a big firm snoot-boop while he joyfully rumbles.
Each dino has roughly two bars to make go up: level and friendliness. Level goes up with experience points, which as mentioned are gained by having them hang out with you & having them use their skills, and easy to check in several places in the UI. Friendliness is not so openly detailed, but the broad strokes of whether they're a Resident (not thrilled with you but they haven't ditched yet) Friend (friend!) or Helper (does favors for you!) is easy to check. Every dino starts at Friend when you bring it home. From there, just meet their needs (food, space, the right number of friends, a Dreamstone) and check in with them every day (scoop poop, refill their food, etc) and they'll warm up to you over time until they become a Helper whose skills you can use! Err, if you have a saddle. Or in the case of small dinos, once you make it to about mid Jurassos (the second month) and hang out with the guy who's come to town for the season until he lets you in on some secrets technology.
(If you are like me, you will probably wonder, so I'll just tell you now: not every dino is equally quick to grant you saddle privileges. You're probably not doing something wrong/missing something, it's just that some species start off less enthusiastic about you and some want you to really go the distance before they're convinced you're Cool Enough.)
There are quite a number of dinos, and all of them come in different colors that are different rarities. Some of them even migrate over time, hanging out in different places as seasons change! Furthermore the terrain itself holds a few surprises you might not stumble into on your first or twentieth visit. My daily roaming is still delightful even though I've played enough that I recognize this hill and that culvert.
Oh yeah ps. the "Sprinter" skill dinos? Those are the ones you can hold down Shift while riding (/controller equivalent) and they will go VERY FAST. It ticks down 1 stamina per second but see above about leveling dinos up so they have a ton of stamina! This is your fast travel: literally traveling quite fast, on dinosaur-back. Don't be me and spend your first month walking everywhere with your own feet.
iii. Farmsim: ah right I need to talk about the farming
You can find plenty of good stuff while foraging but once you've got more than two or three dinos you proably can't pick up enough salad per day to keep your squad fed, and you can't forage carnivore kibble at all, so you need money to feed your dinos. Farming gets you money.
This is no Tractor Simulator 2016 but the devs came down on the side of making you think about crop rotations and possibly even a bit of planning ahead. There are dirt types, which plants care about; they also want fertilizer, and they have opinions about growing seasons. This is on top of the regular "buy seeds, hoe dirt, plant seeds, water every day, weed if needed" loop and gives all produce a star rating: 0-3 stars based on how satisfied the plants were with your service. 0-star crops are fine, always at least half the sell value of 3-star produce, which is good because that's much of what you'll get to start. But it's more money if you get the fertilizer right and so on, and seeds are NOT cheap, so you'll feel the financial incentives to stockpile dino poop and rotate seeds in the right order. For example carrots leave behind Soft dirt when harvested, but want Sticky dirt to grow in, so get out the green onion seeds because green onions love Soft dirt and leave behind Sticky dirt when you harvest them! And so on for the other 16 ground crops.
There's also fruiting bushes, fruit trees, and twelve things you can only find by wandering around the world picking stuff up.
Besides Opinions™ about growing conditions, everything a dinosaur can eat (which is all of it) has two Tastes. Every dinosaur you befriend likes one taste best and it's up to experimentation or Google to get that right so they'll come hang. You will quickly come to curse your tiny inventory, then finish some more tutorials and curse it even harder. Hoarding a variety of different produce is mandatory; luckily the ranch storage (accessed at your front door or at the barrel-shaped storage furniture) appears infinite. Yay.
And then you find out there's cooking and a lot of the recipes require guessing and/or paleo.gg again and I'll be frank I have NOT dug into that because the game-day is only so long and I care about hanging out with my dinos, not wasting my hard-won 60 potatoes failing to make a bowl of soup!!
There's a reasonable number of NPCs. As this is a farmsim, there is Bar Go Up to make them like you more. Unlike a number of farmsims this is purely friendly with no romance anywhere in sight, which feels like a favor to me personally after what I've been subjected to in other games. (Also the friendliness gets you shop discounts. Nice.) The NPCs are pretty solidly written from what I've seen: I haven't wanted to shove any into a puddle, which is again an upgrade from some other non-Paleo Pines games. Not the kind of video game writing that leaves a mark on your soul, but it's perfectly enjoyable to play through and according to the wider video games industry my standards are too high so that's pretty darn good if you ask me.
iv. Closing thoughts
If you really like the dinos but lack the time/inclination to play, I recommend tricking a friend or stranger into playing Paleo Pines for you to watch. Peak performance involves taking 1-4 dinos along when you leave your ranch every day, which means there's gonna be at least that many dinos around whenever someone is playing. The dino delivery even to an audience is pretty good, is what I'm saying, and that's obviously the best part of the game. Embrace it, enjoy it, make someone else worry about the carrot yield this Cretumnus if you just wanna go OMG WHAT WAS THAT PINK ONE WAS IT A COMPY?!
And if you ARE amenable to farming, I hope you delight in having your dinosaur pals working and playing alongside you as much as I've enjoyed it.
