A fun time, it's got some good gameplay and nice enough graphics. There's nothing it does poorly, but nothing extraordinary either.
I will say, it's not worth the full price if you don't try to collect everything in every level, as it'll just be too short. The strengths of the level design are mostly evident when going for every fruit/key.
And as for how good of a remake it is, I can't say with full certainty since I haven't played the original, but it seems it fixed that game's difficulty spikes (it's an overall easy game), and otherwise it's simply a nice facelift.

[Reviewed in 0.1.3]
I get why it got a huge boom in the internet (meme wise), but the game is so generic, there is no other word to describe it this precisely, everything feels and looks generic, from the worst animations I have ever seen (Pals glinding over the water without swimming for ex.), to the all copied elements from Ark, Zelda, Pokémon (not that I dislike copied elements, but there is no effort to make them unique).
Some Pals are well designed while others are just ugly specially the begginers one like the cat.
Now about the gameplay, the core of the gameplay (which is 70% of your game time) is about capturing Pals ala Pokémon Arceus, same way but you need to weaken the Pal first, which can be really annoying and too much time consuming and it's just plain boring after a while, they could've gone the same rote as Arceus (Violet/Scarlet should've too).
The game have some good ideas and executes them ok, it's better than the current Pokémon games that have been stuck in the same formula for decades and have crappy animations and not difficult at all. But it's not good enough to be a great game to be played more than 20h, you just get bored of the capturing loop really fast but I hope someday (now that the devs have money) they fix the game and make it unique and not overly generic and boring.

I played this thinking it would be so bad that it would be funny, but it really isn't that bad. It's pretty standard for an early access survival game.

I unironically think this could be a really good game, but there are two main things they need to change before the game is worth playing in my opinion. Number one is a huge amount in quality of life improvements, building a base is annoying as fuck, and combat and movement is boring.

The second and more important problem with the game is the lack of soul. The Pals themselves are cool (mainly because they are just ripping off pokemon designs lol) but the world, npcs, character designs and lore are so generic and boring.

I went into this expecting an uninspired Pokemon clone. The only Pokemon game this even vaguely plays like is Legends Arceus but even then this is far more like Ark or a random generic survival game than Pokemon. That's probably why I found the game to be very boring because it doesn't even play like the games people build it up as a rip-off of. If you remove the Pals then it's literally just the most basic survival game ever gameplay wise. When it comes to the monsters yeah it is exactly what it's hyped up to be or rather whatever the opposite of hype is. These monsters have no originality. They're made to look like Pokemon but be different enough to loosely avoid getting sued. It feels like those mobile game ads that try ripping off Pokemon for a quick dollar before getting taken down. I'm genuinely surprised such a sloppy and unoriginal game has become mainstream debate. Like this would be the kind of game I see an ad for, forget almost immediately, and then never talk about again cause it's such a nothing game, but instead people want to make it the main talking point of the gaming industry for some reason. Anyways if you want a good survival game or a good monster tamer there's dozens out there that are better than this even within just last year. Play Tears of the Kingdom if you want an adventure game that actually tries new concepts instead of being the most barebones concept. If you want a monster tamer that isn't Pokemon (which i think is the reason people even try this game) from last year I'd recommend Dragon Quest Monsters but there's also many other cool monster tamer series like Yokai Watch, Fossil FIghters, Digimon, and so many more that are actually worth investing your time into instead of this slop. I'm not usually this negative towards a game but the fact the monster tamer genre has suffered from "Pokemon rip-off" allegations for decades when nearly none were yet something comes along that actually does rip-off Pokemon but gets hyped up like this is just really annoying. The genre deserves better than the way it has been treated and the fact so many actually quality games with unique premises get skipped for this just does not sit right with me. Anyways I'm going to attempt to move on from this game now cause it really is not worth discussing in mainstream discussions for that long. Just needed to vent my thoughts before moving on.

Edit:
Increased the rating from ½ to 1 ½ cause it's not that bad. Just really annoying this is the discourse game that won't leave my timeline.