This review follows an old format. It's been modified to match my current layout, but falls short of my current writing standards.

Slime Rancher is another game that my current girlfriend, Princess, wanted me to play. My first time seeing this game was my sibling, Kudrea, playing it on our newly purchased Xbox One around the mid-10s. I thought it was a cute little game, but I didn't understand what was going on, and only watched them play it in passing. Fast-forward to 2021, Princess says I need to play the game. Seeing the main menu for the first time, I could tell why she wanted me to play it. She loves cute things, and seeing the little slimes fall from the sky onto my character and make their cute squishing sounds was delightful.

As the name of the game suggests, you ranch slimes. You're tasked with taking over a farm, after the previous owner goes off on their own adventure. To accomplish this, you're given a vacuum that sucks up slimes, items to feed them, and “plorts”, which slimes give you to exchange for currency. As you go through the game and make more money, you can expand your farm to hold more slimes and chickens, upgrade your vacuum, boots, and hover pack, and craft machines that give you exclusive crafting materials.

Slime Rancher very well put together, allowing progression to feel natural and fun. Every new slime you get gives you progressively more money, but there are mechanics in place that keep earlier slimes worth something. The more plorts you turn in, they decrease in value. To supplement this, you can combine two slimes together by feeding a regular slime a plort. This mechanic alone allows for thousands of different slime combinations, and ways to organize and re-arrange your farm.

Exploring the world after getting a few upgrades makes you feel pretty powerful, too. Occasionally, I would run around in circles instead of doing anything, simply because the movement was so fast, and flowy. Attempting to find all the treasures, and hidden areas gives you a sense of exploration, allowing this massive world to have so much charm. Going out to explore the world, and coming back to min-max my farm provided an exciting gameplay loop.

Overall, I found the game to be one of the best I've played. A topic I didn't touch on because I didn't want to spoiler it was the story. Even if the gameplay wasn't as good as it is, I think the story has a story that people need to hear. The end of the game, and the story, made me cry. Compared to the expectations of games these days, Slime Rancher was a short and sweet experience, well worth your time.

So, is it worth completing?

If it weren't for three achievements, you would end up completing this game simply by playing it. These last three achievements are bad by any means, but they aren't a part of the core gameplay experience. They're time trial modes, where you're tasked with making a certain amount of money within a small timeframe. I had to do some research to complete these, as I had no idea how it was possible to accomplish them. They won't take you long to figure out, nor will the entire game take you to complete. I wish the game had more content to complete, so that alone should tell you it's worth a completionist look.

Published 02 November 2021 @ 8:30 AM EDT

End of Game Information

Total Time Played: 39 hours, 35 minutes