As I was just casually scrolling through Steam250, I noticed Slime Rancher topping the list of the "Discount 250" category, which contains the top 250 games on discount. I had seen the game name being thrown around by a few YouTubers and had taken a cursory look at it before, but I wasn't too sure whether I'd enjoy it. With its price going down to 6 SGD (~4.5 USD) and me getting an itch to try new games, I decided that I would give it a shot!
It was released in 2017 by Monomi Park and had over 5 million copies sold at this point, so I was pretty late to the party. Nevertheless, a game's age never stopped me from enjoying it. Without going into too much detail, you play as Beatrix LeBeau and your aim is to get rich by slime ranching. A microcosm of today's capitalism indeed.
The game starts you out in a rather barren area. A vast desert land with nothing but a bunch of pink slimes.
However cute they may be, they only have one purpose - to make me, Beatrix LeBeau, richer than anyone else on this forsaken land. To achieve this, I had to make use of the slimes by ranching them. Using my trusty vacuum, I vacuumed a bunch of slimes and put them into a slime corral.
My vacuum is not only able to vacuum slimes, but also vacuum fruits, vegetables, and even hens... it's amazing! The only thing was that it can only hold 4 things at once.
At this point, the game told me what the slimes were used for. After all, what use were the slimes if they couldn't make me rich? By feeding the slimes, they would drop plorts which could be exchanged for money. Sweet!
First, I decided to collect a bunch of slimes. After all, the more slimes I had, the more profit potential there was, right? I went about vacuuming slimes and food and got enough plorts to make a garden plot. Although finding food in the wild was fine, it would be a lot better if I could grow my own food to feed my horde of slimes.
I plopped in a good ol' Pogofruit and my garden plot was good to go! The Pogofruit garden would bear fruit in just a day (imagine if real-life fruits grew in one day!) and would become a great source of nutrients for my hungry slimes.
For a while, I did some exploration, finding new species of slimes, food, and chickens. I brought back some of them to my base without much additional thought because I mistakenly thought that the objective of the game was to ranch as many slimes as humanly possible. Of course, I didn't know what was about to befall my quaint slime base in just minutes after...
The slimes were jumping out of their corrals! I was flabbergasted - I thought slimes had no agency of their own and existed for the sole purpose of making me money! It turns out that I haven't been treating my slimes too well, putting way too many of them in the same corral without giving them adequate food. A hungry slime is an angry slime.
I watched helplessly as my slimes jumped out, destroying whatever order I had built up. The reason for not wanting the slimes to mix together is because when a slime eats the plort of a different slime, it becomes a combination of the two slimes. This combination slime is too big to be sucked into the vacuum, although it can still be vac'd and moved around.
What did I do with all these big slimes? Uhh.. don't tell the Slime Rights Association but I threw them off the cliff into the sea. I'm sure they can swim anyway.
While I was managing this mess of a slime ranch, I also unlocked the Range Exchange where I can trade stuff with other NPC ranchers for stuff that I actually need. What can be traded? Slimes, plorts, food - anything goes.
The first trade request I received was pretty simple. I could trade 7 pink slimes, 7 carrots, and 7 pink plorts for a bunch of food and some money. While there was a 25-minute time limit, the items that were required were simple enough that I managed to gather them in just a few minutes.
With the additional money that I gained, I could now buy some upgrades for my slime corrals. I immediately went to buy an Auto-Feeder and Plort Collector for one of my corrals. The Auto-Feeder enabled automated feeding of a corral, and the Plort Collector would vacuum all the dropped plorts from feeding those slimes. These upgrades would make the plort farming much easier. Previously, I had to manually go in and vacuum the plorts generated from the slimes before; this resulted in many slimes being unwantedly vacuumed as well.
When night arrived, I decided to do a bit of night exploring. Nocturnal slimes come out to play at night and I wasn't about to miss that. Their plorts were also much more valuable as compared to the plorts that I had been farming from pink slimes, so I also brought some food along and fed them until they were full.
Walking a bit further down into the wild, I found a message that accompanied a map of the Far, Far Range that I was in. I knew that there was a whole world waiting for me out there, but I want to set my ranch up for success before I continued on. Like ensuring that my slimes weren't starving every time I left them alone for 5 minutes.
Final Verdict
The game has a really chill vibe and I think that I'll be playing it for quite a bit more! Although the gameplay is relatively simple compared to other management/farm-sim style games (I played Satisfactory some time ago and the amount of spreadsheeting that you can do to optimize is absolutely insane), I think it's something that many people can get into and have a little 30-minute play session every now and then.
Even if you screw up some part of your ranch, it doesn't seem like fixing the issues would take too long. Just vacuum those problematic slimes and shoot them off the far coast! They'll never know what hit 'em.
If you're looking for a relaxing management game without the stress of deadlines and micro-managing, Slime Rancher seems to fit that bill pretty nicely. Of course, I might be entirely wrong since I'm only on my first hour of gameplay, but the Steam reviews seem to suggest the same.
Slime Rancher is on sale on Steam now, so now's the perfect time to get it if you're interested! Let me know if you've played Slime Rancher before and what your thoughts are on it. I'd love to hear them 😄
Post header image from official Steam product page of Slime Rancher
Screenshots and GIFs are taken in-game by me.