[REVIEW] Slime Rancher

Monster-raising sim games? Don’t mind if I do! But unlike many games that fall under that description, Monomi Park‘s Slime Rancher doesn’t involve traveling around the world and battling against other monsters in order to progress. It’s something very different, much more relaxing, and 100% adorable.

Slime Rancher takes place on another world known as the Far Far Range, in which the player, as a woman names Beatrix Lebeau, has a new job as a slime rancher. Rather than just being a fancy name, this actually involves setting up and running a ranch, as well as hunting down and corralling the inhabitants of the world, the slimes themselves. Slimes roam around in the wild, and with the help of your trusty vacuum backpack (known as a Vacpack), you have to suck them up and bring them to the ranch in order to start making bank off these little guys.

See, Slimes produce plorts, which are very valuable. They make these plorts after they eat, and yes, that is an accurate description of poop. The economy is based on poop. There’s probably some valuable piece of social commentary in that. There are multiple different types of Slime, and each one has their own preferred type of food, so maximizing profits not only involves keeping a good variety of Slimes on your ranch, but also ensuring you’re growing or raising a wide variety of foods to feed them, from Stony Hens for the Tabby Slimes, to Mint Mangos for the Honey Slimes. The more different types of Slimes you acquire, the greater your potential profit, but the greater investment you need to make to keep them all fed and happy.

PLORT AUTHORITY

The Plort Market, as it’s called, fluctuates from day to day, so plorts aren’t always worth the same amount when you sell them. The fluctuations aren’t random, either, but are based on supply and demand. Sell a whole lot of one type of plort, and the next day you’ll find their worth has decreased, since you essentially met the demand and flooded the market with a single kind of product. You can see by the little arrows on the Plort Market board whether the worth has increased or decreased from the previous day, which can give you a better idea of what to sell and when. If something keeps increasing in value, it might be worth holding onto your supply for a couple more days, to make the most money before the value drops again. It’s a simplistic but accurate representation of real-life economics.

Though it does admittedly get a little bit frustrating to see rare plorts sell for so much when you haven’t even encountered that sort of Slime yet, that can be incentive to go out and explore more of the world, to unlock new areas and see what new Slimes live there.

But when do you do when you have way too many common plorts and the prices aren’t going up? After a certain point in the game, a research lab is unlocked near the ranch, which lets you exchange plorts for pieces of technology or blueprints. These new pieces of tech can, for instance, let you drill underground to find new a valuable resources, not ones you can sell but that are valuable for acquiring upgrades to your ranch and equipment. Everything feeds back into everything else, in a never-ending cycle.

You do get some customization in your Slimes, as when one Slime eats the plort of another type of Slime, it becomes a hybrid, capable of producing both kinds of plorts. But this also makes it become a Large Slime, a supersized Slime that is much harder to corral and can’t be properly sucked into your VacPack the way smaller ones can. Some of the hybrids can be absolutely freaking adorable, and it’s fun to see what different combinations can look like. For instance, you absolutely can combine a Tabby and Boom Slime to create an exploding cat. But care is needed, since a Large eating a plort that isn’t from either of its types will turn it into the dreaded Tarr, a feral violent Slime that can’t be controlled, produces no plorts, and will pretty much consume everything in its path. Including all of your ranched Slimes, if you’re unlucky. So there’s a limit to the creativity, and a warning not to get too greedy in your pursuit of profit.

IT ALL LOOKS THE SAME

Though the game’s graphics are charmingly adorable and there is a decently large map to explore, after a while the game starts to feel a bit stale. The pattern of your day becomes routine very quickly: wake up, feed Slimes, sell plorts, maybe explore a little, go home and sleep. Sometimes the gap between exploring all of a new map section and unlocking another one is quite large, as you need to gather resources and get certain upgrades to be able to navigate around properly. You’re going to be doing the same thing, day in and day out, for a long time before there’s much new to break up the monotony.

Now, the game gets a fair pass in a lot of ways, because it can be a lot of fun learning how to care for Slimes and properly setting up your ranch as you go, so especially early on you’ll find yourself with so much to do and so much to explore than the novelty will carry you through for quite some time. But after a while, it can start to feel like the only reason to keep pushing on is to get more money in order to get more resources in order to get more money… And so on and so forth.

And occasionally you do come across new twists on the formula, like getting to visit the ranches of others who are doing the same job you are. They’ll get you to complete certain tasks, like gathering a certain number of plorts for them, which they’ll exchange for resources, which you use for upgrades or money… It’s fun for a little while, doing some different things or approaching “find me 10 things” quests from a different angle, but I found even that started to feel pretty samey after a while.

I dunno, maybe that too was a piece of social commentary on the economy…

EXPLORATION MAKES IT HAPPEN

I mentioned a few times that the world you’re on expands as you play the game, with new areas being unlocked. Each new area typically has its own environmental theme, such as a jungle or a canyon, and there’s usually at least two new kinds of Slimes there for you to acquire and bring back to your growing ranch. Not all of those Slimes will be friendly; some are wild and violent and have to be either repelled with your handy-dandy water cannon or else mollified by throwing food at them. If they attack you, you’ll lose health, and if you lose all your health, you’ll be teleported back to your ranch to recover.

Without the items and/or Slimes you acquired along the way.

All that wasted time…

This can become a real problem if you find yourself lost and unable to get back to familiar territory. You can deliberately teleport yourself back to the ranch, but the same problem occurs: all of the items and Slimes in your VacPack are sacrificed in the process. So you’re often stuck having to make the decision to teleport back to safety at the cost of wasting time and possibly losing something rare, or else continuing to struggle on and find a way back yourself. Get unlucky or be somewhat directionless like me? This might take days.

And if it’s early enough in the game that you don’t have auto-feeders for your Slimes yet, then you might be coming home to some very hangry — and possibly escaped — Slimes.

I understand the concept of trade-offs, but yeesh, this was frustrating!

What this means is that Slime Rancher is really good at making you feel your limitations. Sometimes you push too far and end up suffering as a result. Now, as somebody current dealing with chronic illness and disability, I can really relate to this sentiment, but the reason I relate to it is the reason I can find it so disheartening. I already get enough of that in real life, thanks, and having that forceful reminder in a video game wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Ultimately, though, whether you consider this to be a plus or a minus really depends on you as a player. Some people appreciate that you can’t do everything whenever you want, others would prefer a milder punishment for their mistakes.

Slime Rancher is a game I think is best played in fits and starts. Trying to sit down and power through the whole thing from beginning to end, fast and you can, will probably just leave you a bit burned out on the process. The game’s charm definitely helps pull you through, but there’s only so far that aesthetic can take you. The intuitive controls and easy-to-access in-game tutorials, however, make it a great game to play for a while and then put down until a later date, extending the play time and preventing burnout over the grind. Finding and sucking up new and fascinating Slimes is a lot of fun, though, and I think relearning how fun that can be, after a bit of a break, can be almost as enjoyable as discovering it all for the first time.

Developer Monomi Park did a great job with Slime Rancher, when all is said and done. I can’t think of many other games like it, and certain none with its degree of adorable characters. Seriously, the Slimes of this game are just begging for plushies to be made of them. (Oh holy crap, they already exist, and I want them all!) If you enjoy monster-raising sim games that have less emphasis on battles and more emphasis on capitalism, with a heavy dose of exploration to move things along, then Slime Rancher is a game that’s probably worth your time.

Just remember to take more breaks than I did, to avoid that burnout.