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):
You don’t need a dog whistle to imply human slavery when you can literally enslave humans in the game.
There are human NPCs in the game and you can put them in the pokeballs. At that point, they become docile and you can put them to work.
Wew.
And there's still hella people trying to go to bat for that even here, thinking "did you know SHOOTERS exist?!?!??!??!" is good cover. Like motherfucker call me when there's an Iceberg Slim simulator in GTA, or an in-depth player-operated POW torture scene for winning teams in CoD multiplayer. Foh, crackers gotta have their slop I guess