A globule is the most efficient design for a video game character. A pair of eyes and, if you’re feeling sassy, maybe a mouth stuck to something contained by surface tension (or perhaps a thin membrane) is all you need to make something cute. Slime Rancher understands this well. Slime Rancher knows that’s all you need.

There are slimes. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.

MY FIRST BATTERY FARM

Slime Rancher then asks the question, “Well, what do you do with slimes?” The answer is to put them in cages. Slime Rancher is the cutest battery-farming game.

You’re equipped with a vacuum cleaner and can suck things into inventory slots. Your vacuum then can blow whatever you’ve crammed in there wherever you want at tremendous velocity. Maybe you want to send a chicken sailing over the horizon. Sometimes, the occasion calls for it. Mostly, however, you’ll use the vacuum to move slimes around and pick up their poop.

Slime poop is the central commodity in the market. Each slime has its own branded poop, which are called plorts, but we all know the truth. You sell these plorts on the market in order to get currency to spend on farm and equipment upgrades. If you sell a lot of one type of plort, the price of them will go down as though you’re saturating the market, so I guess the idea is to…

I don’t know what the intended strategy is here. I’d just stockpile one type of poop, then wait until it reached a certain price threshold. I’d then jam all that poop into the market chute at once, flooding the market. The price would quickly tank the next day, but I already made my profit. Look, I’m not a finance person. I shouldn’t even be trusted with money. However, if this sort of thing isn’t illegal, it probably should be.

FERTILIZER

When it comes to farming, a lot of your success centers around your ability to crossbreed slimes, turning them into dual-pooping largos. Each slime has a favorite food, and if you feed them that food, they’ll poop twice. So, if you crossbreed slimes, you can only need to grow one favourite food for the two types you combined into one, and you’ll get tonnes of plorts, and…

Oh, gosh. I just completed Slime Rancher a couple of hours before starting to write this review. Let me tell you, after, I don’t know, 20 hours, the actual ranching part of Slime Rancher gets so damned tedious. Running around, sucking up food, jamming them into auto feeders, taking the poop, sticking it into silos, selling when it gets to a good price, and then also gathering resources and crafting equipment; it’s a lot by the end. You wind up spending a lot more time ranching than you do anything else. The adventure becomes ancillary.

It was getting painful – physically uncomfortable – to play. There is not enough automation, and not enough freedom to actually take the pain out of the equation. There are some ways to ease it, but just not enough.

HOW TO TREAT A GORDO

Ranching is only one part of Slime Rancher. The other half of the game is exploration. You hop around the Far, Far Range, looking for new slimes, food, and other treasures. It’s not, like, what you’d maybe consider a traditionally open world. Not in the sense of, say, Breath of the Wild. It’s actually a bunch of interconnected areas that consist of enclosed canyons. Sort of like Metroid Prime but with less density and depth.

Like Metroid, it’s a gated exploration game, but the gates are literally locked gates, and you get keys to them by feeding chubby slimes. The rotund blobs are called Gordos, and they’re just gigantic, immobile slimes. You feed them until they pop, and sometimes they leave keys behind. It’s easily the best locking system I’ve ever seen in one of these games, even if it’s not a very deep mechanic.

There’s a laid-back, cozy feeling to the exploration since there isn’t any purpose to it aside from gaining more slimes. There isn’t really an overarching plot, aside from following boring notes from some person (Hudson) or reading really boring emails from some other person (Casey). You’re not trying to defeat evil slime poachers or save the world through slime friendship. You’re just nabbing slimes to stick into your battery farm. If there’s a bad guy here, it’s you. You jerk. Is this really a humane way to treat your slimes?

Feeding the Gordos? That’s how you treat a Gordo.

SLIME MEAT

The actual goal of Slime Rancher – the point you have to reach to get the credits to roll – is a real head-scratcher. If you penetrate to the furthest reaches of the Far, Far Range, you find one last message from Hudson and then nothing. They suggest that something cool might have been in this spot at some time, but it’s not there anymore. Just a fancy-looking chamber.

From what I understand, you need then need to wait until you receive all the emails from Casey. You also need to read them in order because new ones won’t arrive until you’ve read the previous one. Like they can sense if you’ve read their messages. Very boring messages.

I suppose that it makes sense that these people don’t have much to say. If there was some exciting story, it wouldn’t really be cozy. Instead, they talk about life and the lessons they learned. Like sitting on a park bench, enjoying a delicious chicken shawarma wrap, and feeling the hot sauce tingle on their tongue. Just being in the moment. I’m so tired of hearing about life. Can we talk about something else?

It’s just a strange thing to hinge the ultimate objective on. To get through the messages, I would read the last paragraph and decide based on that if it was worth reading. No, usually not. I stopped interacting with Hudson’s floating, holographics H’s.

To quote Steve Martin’s character in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: “When you’re telling these little stories, here’s a good idea: Have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”

PLORT CREEK

Speaking of other people, you can also do side missions for a few characters. These involve delivering certain types of fruits, plorts, slimes, or chickens to them. Get friendly enough with them, and they’ll invite you to their ranch. There, they have little side jobs for you, which is where the game gets a bit of extra depth. Not a lot, and by the time I actually started unlocking these, I was already puttering out and getting bored. Progress on them takes so much time that I wound up not getting far. Especially when my slimes were threatening to drown in their own poop.

Their rewards are pretty interesting, but at that point in the game, I had an embarrassing amount of money with not a lot to spend it on. If I needed a new pen, I could just buy it, purchase all the upgrades, and that was it. It was enough to keep all the slimes locked up with no hope of escape.

Except for the quantum slimes. Those guys you need to make extra-special happy, or they’ll escape. They don’t care for your perception of reality.

It’s difficult to get excited about anything that might make your job slightly easier. There are gizmos to build that make the ranch operations simpler, but it felt pointless. In the beginning, there’s some threat that slimes will get out and eat your chickens or eat different types of poop until they become an evil tar slime, but you can prevent most of these mishaps by putting ceilings on their pens. Slime wrangling is quickly replaced by monotony.

BUILDING DISTASTE

You don’t hit this point until later into the game. Closer to the start, it’s a compelling little title. The ranching is fun for quite a few hours. But then you hit the point where everything is smoothed over, and things just drag and drag. Slime Rancher’s year in Early Access means that the core experience was laid down in a functional state, and then things were added on top of it without knowing what the end game would look like. As a result, everything past a point feels unnecessary, and it severely, severely overstays its welcome.

I suggest playing Slime Rancher, but if you do, go in without the goal of finishing the game. Once you get bored, simply drop it, and you’ll feel a lot better about it. For me, a game that I started off enthusiastically loving eventually dropped off to near contempt. The slimes did nothing to quell the building distaste.

So, it gets a razor-thin recommendation. Just don’t force yourself to finish it.

6/10

This review was conducted using a PC and digital copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.