Paleo Pines

I adore this game. It's a nice quiet game with farming, peace, and Dinosaurs. I couldn't ask for more.

its like animal crossing but with dinos and they help out on the ranch

I bought this game a long while ago. i was so hyped for it and it did more then disappoint me. by far the worse ranch game ive played. now the graphics are cute and i enjoy the animations and the game has a solid foundation but there is so little filling its hard to play for more then half an hour. the befriending is painful the economy is tough and there is next to no reason for wanting to collect all the different dinos since there's only four or five types/traits a Dino is useful for meaning that getting an anky when i have a trike that does the same is just making more work for me with no reward. the village is just a market and the villagers serve no real purpose. what makes me write this now instead of before is the dev's are grappling for more money. my advice dont buy the game its bland and boring with annoying energy restraints. poorly made game and money hungry devs.

If you love creature collector games, this one really scratched an itch for me reminiscent of Viva Piñata, a game with really no successor out there. But between their adorable noises and animations, variety of species, and color variants, these Paleo Pines dinos really gave me that Piñata personality and sentimental attachment I have truly missed in other animal farming/critter-catching games. I've sunk 47 hours into this game at the time of review and I've had it for one week; I have really explored this game and love it!

I look forward to the future of this game as it does deserve a bit more polish as I can agree with some other reviews that tools/actions could feel more responsive. But there is a great core here with ranch building, farming, and discovering dinos, and I'd love to see even more ways to make the dino ranch of my dreams!

Let me start by saying I genuinely LOVE this game. It's a farming sim featuring adorable dinos with great potential. But that's exactly the issue: great POTENTIAL. Right now, it feels like the game offers only the bare minimum content required at release. It’s disappointing and frustrating that they're charging extra for small updates to seasons—updates that honestly should have been included from the start.

As someone who enjoys the game, I’d recommend holding off until more updates arrive, so you can see whether they're planning to charge separately for every little addition.

I really love this game -- it's cute, I love learning about dinosaurs, the designs are fantastic, and it's such a nice, cosy farming sim. It's really a great game, but as it is, it feels a bit unfinished. There isn't enough to do in the story, there could definitely be more dinosaurs, and the camera/controls are a little bit janky and not very smooth. The festivals are incredibly simple and past the first year or two, there's really no point in participating unless you're looking to collect every single item. That being said, this game has so much promise and is so sweet that, despite feeling unfinished, I'm happy to run around checking on all my dinos and trying to collect them all.

Very cute game. Cosy, and non-violent. I can't describe the excitement and joy it brings me when I find a new dinosaur species (and then again when I find a rarer colour)!

It is such a cute game, perfect cozy game for dino lovers.

Mismatched aesthetics, overly enthousiastic side characters, bad dialogue, next to no customization options in the character creator... I love dinosaurs and enjoy farming games. This is just not it for me.

I really enjoy this sweet and simple game. I'm not always a huge fan of farming simulators like this as they can become very repetitive with little payoff once you reach late game. But I really enjoy the dinosaur companions and befriending mechanics of the game. I think the option of rare coat colors spawning encourages me to leave the farm often and add to my playtime by just "one more day" to check for certain color spawns.
My biggest issue with the game is finding dreamstones in late game & the limitation of dreamstones total. I do understand why that limit exists, however to me the primary draw is the collection of dinosaurs. Despite being still a couple of dreamstones shy of the supposedly max number and looking up maps online I cannot find any dreamstones I'm missing despite only having a few dupe little dinos and not yet 1 of every species on my ranch. I wish there was markers for dreamstones you've already encountered in some capacity on the map (like areas I've already cleared/harvested and explored) to help as I've tried to scour for the last two or so that I'm missing.
Overall I have more than gotten my money's worth on this game, (a total of 137 between the demo and then buying the full game) and I'm excited to see where the devs take it next.

Very fun, adorable dinos, and peaceful to play.

Playing it on the Steam Deck with my 6-yo son beside me is one of the best experiences, we get to fulfill quests or just goofing around and tending to our garden, petting the dinos and feeding them snacks… It’s surprisingly deep in systems, with the dinos preferences, the farming, the cooking, restoring and upgrading buildings etc.
A solid game overall, I wish the abilities of the dinos were better explained, and the first time user experience is a bit overwhelming, but nothing major. Kudos to the team!

I love dinosaurs, I love farming....I love this game.

amazing game fun and silly

The most absolutely adorable Dino game I have ever played! Very Cozy and kid friendly

Calm and cozy. A no rush game. Sometimes frustrating with how long it feels like to wait for a dino to be my helper instead of friend tho. Had to do a lot of googling for many things.

I feel pretty in the middle about this game? Let me break it into pros/cons

Pros:
- it's a cute game with dinosaurs, very pleasing to look at with bright, happy colors
- relaxing, low stakes (think animal crossing vibes instead of stardew valley)
- easy to pick up and play, a good game for all ages

Cons:
- I feel like I have to be glued to a search engine to figure out what to do next, like the game is asking me to do stuff but not giving me all the information I need to do said task
- npcs are very bland, my parasaur is the most interesting character so far and it can't even talk
- controls feel slow/unresponsive
- not a lot to do each day? then again idk, it's hard to tell what the game even wants me to do and my dino runs out of energy so fast I can't really clean up my farm

Overall, I do like it as an accessible, cute style of game that lets you befriend dinos - there's not a lot of choices out there for games that let you be buddies with dinosaurs. But if there were more competition in this niche market, I don't think I would honestly rank Paleo Pines that highly just for being so bad at letting the player know what to do. This game genuinely makes me feel stupid sometimes for not getting the most basic things, but then I have to remember that the game just refuses to explain much of anything.

I would especially recommend this game for small kids who just wanna hang out with cute dinos. I'm sure they would get a kick out of this. For me personally, I'll keep playing but I really do wish the game company would work on the game some more and do better at conveying tutorials to the players.

I had a lot of fun with this game on first release, though thought it would have more to it as a farming/ ranching sim. I finished it very quickly it felt, though it did bring me a lot of joy in the process.

This is a very simplistic game, with very frustrating controls. Everything from planting to removing debris is made overly complicated by super slow commands. I probably can't describe it well, but for instance the act of planting for instance should be simple click to hoe, click to plant, click to water, click to harvest. Instead each click is actually a press and hold of several seconds. Agonizingly slow. And that's true of every single action you need to do. What I thought would be a cute, cozy little dino themed farming sim is beyond aggravating from how tedious doing absolutely anything in the game is. Would not recommend, and I'm annoyed I kept playing it as long as I did because now I can't return it and I highly doubt I'll ever try playing it again.

dino + farm = perfect

Paleo Pines is a cute dinosaur farming sim where you move to an island filled with dinosaurs in a quest to find a companion for your Parasaurolophus. This game is often unclear about what to do or how to complete tasks, making some parts a frustrating task of Googling around to progress. The pacing is awful: through some kind of glitch, I was able to finish the main quest before my quest marker meant for me to, but I was still able to complete quests in that quest line after finishing the final one. All of the non-main quests progress glacially slowly so that I was barely started on any of them by the time I completed the story. The dinosaur designs in this game are delightful, and it was always exciting finding rare colors for them in the wild. Taking care of the dinosaurs was sometimes frustrating, though, especially because they need constant attention and there are not many options for automation. I loved how the different dinosaur abilities helped with farm tasks, though the game fails to explain how some of them work. The NPCs are bland and horribly frustrating, and the tasks they give you are unrewarding (here's yet another bag of potato seeds). Cooking in this game is the worst I've ever seen, with missing prompts and about a 40% success rate, which is infuriating when the cooking achievement requires hundreds of successful recipes. This was a soul-sucking achievement hunt I wouldn't recommend to anybody, but even beyond the achievements, though I enjoyed this game, its severe lack of direction and unfinished feel taint the adorable experience I had with it.

I think it's a nice game, although not sure if I could reccomend it or not? There is a lot things to do, but feels like there's nothing to do in the game. Most NPCs are kinda bland and I feel like there's not enough tutorials or push from the game to actually progress after the first few days. The controls are a bit wonky sometimes too. The artstyle and the dinos are very cute though!

Paleo Pines really is just a lighthearted game.
The graphics are simple, the Gameplay is straight forward.

All the issues in the game can be fixed easily with a third-party program.
Perfect soil, gemstones, etc.

Autism type beat: The Video Game

its a very cute game. the sesitivity could be lower, and there could be more to do. over all, i adore the design, the music, and of course the dinos.

a cute and enjoyable game

I love the game so much but I have some wishes
I wish there was a minimap, crafting (like stardew), more farm decor & I wish we could decorate our house!! We can't even enter it:( but still, am addicted. great game!

Dinosaurs, cuddly dino farming sim. 10/10

So fun and cute! As someone who loves stardew and harvest moon and also dinosaurs, the concept of this game is perfect to me. I highly recommend it.

A COOL GAME I WOULD CHECK OUT THE PALEO PINE WIKI

a calm and cute game is great relaxeing and even if you are a collector or a disscover. they is something for you. is fully worth the money

A very cute cozy game. Low to no pressure.

Great for kids or big kids who want a break from high intensity games.

love it

The main quests are vague and confusing and I had to look up guides over and over again. There's a bit of jank, especially when reorganizing pens on the farm. Once I built one new pen and two other unconnected pens stopped registering and unhoused the dinosaurs in them. Always very stressful building or moving pens around. Dinosaurs on the farm will run away while you're trying to get their attention making you chase them down. In late game, the tiny dinosaurs would just not help on certain farm squares that they should have been able to help with. BUT - the rest of the game was fun. There's charm and the dinosaurs are cute. The gameplay is very repetitive. I often put on an audiobook while going through the motions of the game.

This recommendation comes with a couple pretty massive IFs.

Paleo Pines is a game where you move to a ranch with your parasaurolophus Lucky, clean up the farm and farm crops while befriending the townsfolk and exploring a world with a ton of different dinos. The main quest revolves around finding other parasaurolophuses, since Lucky has been alone for some time and they are rumoured to have lived around Paleo Pines.
On the way, you will befriend dinosaurs, which will come to live on the farm with you. After some time, each will help you in some way: each type has a farm skill and a wild skill. All small dinosaurs that can't be ridden can discover forageables in the world, and assigned to a water bowl/seed pot/harvesting basket to help you automate farming. Larger dinos can harvest in big sweeps, sprint (very useful for travel) or destroy fallen logs or big stones to unlock new areas or remove debris from the farm.

Let me get this straight right off the bat: if you're expecting a Stardew Valley or Sun Haven or something of the sort, don't play this game. It's not comparable to that. I have 80+ hours in this game and there are some of problems I feel it has. But let me start with the positives:

1) The dinosaurs. They are fun, expressive, unique and useful (largely). Each dinosaur type/breed has a very unique body type and appearance, and none of them feel very similar except maybe Coelophysis and Compsognathus (but there's a size and habitat difference). All types have their own animations which vary from extremely cute to wacky, but all feel well made and fitting for the body type. It also seems pretty anatomically and dietarily accurate (as far as possible for a cartoony game). The color variations are also expansive and not just the "normal" colors dinosaurs are usually depicted in (browns, greens, etc), although I'm not a huge fan of the very bright patterns.

1b) The befriending mechanic and bringing dinos back to your farm is also new, unique and well done. Each type has a favorite flavor, and you can grow crops or forage for items of that flavor. Upon encountering a dinosaur that you'd like to befriend, you can figure out which flavor is its favorite by trying out various options. Befriending a dino requires a meter to be filled to certain point, and then feeding it a Poppin in its preferred flavor. Overfeeding or oversoothing ends the befriending minigame, and you'll have to try again. But there is something magical about that first dinosaur you befriend and bring back to the farm.

When returning to the farm, you'll need to supply it with a pen. These are built with fences and can be as large or small as you want, there's really no limit. This allows creativity in farm setup. Each dinosaur type has a couple traits (diet, habitat, pen size and number of penmates) that decide what you'll need to provide it with the best pen possible. Herbivores and carnivores don't mix (because it's "uncomfortable", not because the carnivores will eat the herbivores), but omnivores can share with either. Additionally, each dinosaur needs a "dreamstone" of a specific size. I'll come back to these. Overall, the dinosaurs are varied enough to make them a big selling point of this game.

2) Visually, this game looks pretty nice. The world is bright and colorful and the dinosaurs and NPCs fit in this visual package. The three habitats are distinct and well done. Change of the seasons affects plantlife and dinosaur spawns, although minorly. Pen biomes are also unique and distinct. I didn't encounter any visual glitches, though some of the effects (rain puddles) seemed to not stay at their apparent size and grow or shrink with distance between the puddle and the player character.

Unfortunately, that's all the good I have to say. There are some pretty major cons instead:

1) Most importantly, the world feels empty and dead. There are 3 major areas (excluding the farm and the town) and there are maybe 20 NPCs in the entire world that are named. Of those, you can befriend 9 (some of which you can't reach until you've made decent progress towards the main quest). Their personalities are not really expanded further than maybe one general trait and a flaw. However, you're expected by the game to put in work befriending them, since it's required for the main quest at several points. Granted, I don't think friendship is reduced by time, so you're not required to talk to them daily, but I never felt actively motivated towards getting to know these people. I'm halfway through the 4th year and most of the NPCs are still in the early levels of friendship.

Throughout the 3-month, 63-day year, there are 3 festivals. Only one of these affects anything about the game and even then, I never spent more than a few minutes on each of these. I stopped going to the two that don't have any effect, since it doesn't feel like I'm rewarded in any meaningful way by interacting with these events.

2) The gameplay is serviceable, though not very interesting, and some of the mechanics or controls are clunky. The game also doesn't explain anything beyond the bare basics. It took me almost half a year to learn that to sprint, I had to press Shift. Maybe I'm stupid, but this wasn't communicated clearly. Your character has 50 stamina at the start of the day, which can be replenished by sitting down and doing nothing. I don't believe eating your own crops affect your stamina, which is really weird since that seems to be a staple of farming games that implement a stamina mechanic. This is also the first game I've played that requires stamina for harvesting. I'm not sure what it adds, but it definitely detracts from my enjoyment to be out of stamina all the time. Sitting down isn’t a fun mechanic to replenish it. And you will never have more than 50 stamina.

The player character only has 20 inventory slots. You can expand this once to 24. That's it. Different qualities of crops will take up multiple slots. Your tools will take up multiple slots.

3) The dinosaurs. Yes, they also have major downsides. Mucking out their pens every day is extremely tedious for very little reward. If you don't do this, however, eventually they will lose their "helper" status, meaning they won't help you on the farm anymore, and beyond that, they can even leave completely. Maybe my dinosaurs have intestinal problems, but there's pretty much dino crap in every pen every day.

The dreamstones required to keep them on the farm are also finite.

The functionality to have small dinos tend to your crops is locked behind a character that doesn't appear until the end of the first year, and it required multiple quests to fully unlock.

4) General problems. Some parts of the main quest are locked behind crops that require friendship with particular NPCs. The game doesn't tell you about this or how to obtain these items.

You're a farmer, but you can't grow herbivore food. You can only ever buy it at the store or pick maybe 10 a day up from the overworld. Herbivore dinos can't live off cauliflowers and other vegetables for some reason.

Seeds are extremely expensive in the early game.

There's a bug in the main quest that is consistently talked about on forums about this game, which freezes the game and requires you to restart from an autosave. For some reason, this hasn't been fixed.

Spinosaurus isn't in this game :(

There's more, but I'm running out of space and patience. All in all, it's not a terrible game, but I would encourage new players to buy this when it's on sale. For me, it's pretty much a shiny hunting simulator, as I'm primarily looking for ultra rare colors and doing not much else after having finished the (serviceable but somewhat boring) main quest. Once I find them all or lose interest, I will probably stop playing.

Then again, these 80+ hours have been fun, and that's why this isn't a not recommended. But it has its flaws, and I think new players should be aware of them.

As cute and fun as this game is, there's just not enough here after over a year's worth of "development". The studio behind it seems more interested in making and selling plushies and other merchandise than actually adding anything to the game itself. I find it frustrating how it can still feel like day one of release even after all this time.

Cutest dinosaur game ever! Its a similar experience and feel to other games like; Stardew Valley, Star Stable Online and Animal Crossing. Im absolutely in love!!!!!

It is a very cute and fun game!

It feels a bit underdeveloped in some areas. Animals are all cuties and my friends, but the build mode sucks, farming is kind of lackluster (can't grow my own food for my pens??? hyper-capitalist farm structure), and the amount of running back and forth you need to do to cook food or do a quest is a bit bonkers. I feel like the game should find a 50/50 of ranch and open-world gameplay, but it feels like it's not really hitting either mark.
My only other major gripes are with the UI, namely the map and the loading screens. Hitting a load screen every 4 minutes isn't fun, and it's also a bit disappointing it's just the same image. The map is also a bit confusing, and it's easy to get disoriented in some places like Dapplewood.
Overall cute game and I'd recommend if you don't mind a kinda barebones farming sim. Scientifically accurate-yet cute dinosaurs makes up for the game's faults but it is a bit tough to even hang out with the dinos.

Before buying this game I read a few reviews that didn't like it, and after playing enough to get to the second area I think I can conclude that it just wasn't their kind of game. I have been hooked on playing this since getting it, I love the dinosaurs and their *adorable* noises, and that you can pet them!! The flute communication is very whimsical and fun, I have been learning each dino's song to be able to play for them every day :) The farming had unexpected depth to it with the soil types, I haven't seen that in other games I've played but I like it! That and the favorite foods and dino preferences, there's a good amount of things to keep track of without being overwhelming. As a player of Animal Crossing and similar speed of games, I enjoy the slower pace that the game goes at since it helps you just chill out and do your own little tasks between quests. The looser sandboxy feel to it is nice, it reminds me of Slime Rancher especially with the creature collector similarities.
The one thing I saw others saying that I do admit is true is that the questboard missions are repetitive and simple, but honestly I don't mind that either since it's pretty funny to go between people standing 20 feet from another delivering things and also the simpler quests make it easy to just relax and run around the map with your dinos (which they enjoy and gain experience from!).

Overall I would definitely recommend this game to people who are fans of slower games and just want to relax and take care of cute dinosaurs! There's enough micro-management and complexity to keep things interesting, but not *too* much to make you run around frantically trying to keep things in order.

I really wanted to like this game but found it grueling. The graphics aren't great, which doesn't bother me if the gameplay is awesome. But the gameplay was very boring and grindy. It was hard to get enough money to buy fences to get new dinosaurs, and you need their pens already in order to get them. You also end up having to look up how big of a pen a dino is going to need because some of them are solo dinos, some need to be in pairs, and some need to be in larger groups with a certain amount of space per dino, but there's not an easy way to tell prior to catching a dino (and you are encouraged to have pens ready beforehand). Also, it's not easy to tell how much space a pen has prior to putting a dino into it, so planning my farm was almost impossible. You are incredibly limited on what you can do per day (depending on how many dinos you have - see my struggles above). The quests were repetitive and boring. I made myself stick it out until I unlocked the next area, hoping that would inject some freshness into the equation, but it didn't. There is no fast travel so it was really annoying going back and forth to pick up materials from my farm to deliver to people in the second area and explore. It was a cute idea but needs some refinement and quality of life upgrades for players.

Definitely a super fun game! I love the cute artstyle, the soundtracks, and the variety in all the dinos/other prehistoric animals. The quests are very repetitive (most of them are fetch quests) but I love the rest of the aspects of the game so far! The character customization is a little lacking, specifically with clothes, but I haven't made it to the canyon just yet so there could be more options there, and I'm looking forward to exploring the game further!

Very good

i love dinosaurs i always have. i wish this game existed when i was a kid because it wouldve been my favorite game ever. but also if this game existed when i was a kid, in 2007, and information about it wasnt easily accessible, i would have never made it halfway through the game because there are some roadblocks that the game just expects you to know how to solve when it hasnt given you any information. i feel like this game could benefit massively from like a quest marker where you can select a quest and itd tell you where to go. this is the biggest problem for me.

anyway, unrelated, i dont care about any of the human characters. obviously im just here for the dinosaurs. another complaint i have is small dinosaurs really only have 1 ability and i wish they were more varied. i wish there was a winter season since theres all other seasons but not winter? idk. it wouldve been very pretty and a christmas-adjacent event would be fun. weird winter erasure.

human food is basically useless, i dont run around the overworld as a human im on a dinosaur 99% of the time, so the buffs it gives are meaningless. even with the crop buffs, it takes too much effort to craft the food that the buff doesnt feel worth it. the character customization is extremely bare bones, theres like 4 hair options in total. clothes have to be crafted and are eeeeh, theyre ok. theres no gender so thats a plus.. i wouldve liked it if crops could be made into herbivore food too

i could go on even longer thinking more petty "there shouldve been this" and such but its an indie game and i think they have dlc planned so i wont whine too much. overall i really enjoyed it, i just had some moments that frustrated the fuck out of me that id never get past if google didnt exist

It's a cute dino farming sim. A bit lacking in some areas, like despite the amount of wild dinos running around the world does feel rather empty at times. Still I have had a lot of fun playing it, especially looking for some of the unique skins and I love how it features a lot of different species, not just the well known ones and not just dinos! It's a game that I highly recommend.

Pretty cute, but did get annoying after a while. Not bad, but I wish I didn't buy it...

Cute and satisfying, quiet enough that you don't get overwhelmed. Sometimes a bit lacking in tutorial info, but there's zero stakes, so not a big deal to just take a bit to figure stuff out. Obsessed with the sound effects. Crisp and full.

Give me all the dinos right now!

this is a cute, dino farming sim that i desperately wish i had as a dinosaur obsessed child, it has quite a few dinos to find, and unlike most dinosaur games, doesnt only have the handfull everyone knows.
if you have a dinosaur obsessed kid, or were a dinosaur obsessed kid and want something that will feed your inner child i highly recommend this game.

Cute Game. Needs to explain stuff more, like how to stuff, how to release dinos u have friended. I had to google alot of it. I heard u have to play the friend song then the release song, it took me so long to get it right. How to unlock more pipin favors, i wanted to friend a dino that liked spicy but didnt have a spicy pipin nothing to say how. I think i have to do more quests for her. or how to cook for the 1st time etc Many things that arent explained how do to.

Very cute ranch/farm game. I wish there was more jobs for the smaller dinos though like helping with pen cleaning and maybe food dispensing? Very enjoyable finding rare colours of dinos <3