Slime Rancher

If Slime Rancher isn't the cutest thing I've played in a long while, I don't know what is. Problem is, that's about the only thing it has going for it.

Slime Rancher is a mix between an adventure game and a farming simulator. The game essentially plays in two parts. First you go around the map, finding new slime types, and new types of food. Then you bring them back to your farm, combine the slimes into bigger, better, slimes, and plant their favorite foods to grow more locally. You feed the slimes to get valuable slime poop, which you sell to buy upgrades to your farm and your equipment. You progress by exploring the world and solving little puzzles, like feeding big slimes a bunch of some specific food to get a key to unlock a new area.

While there are a few hazards regarding leaving your slimes unfed, or accidentally combining more than two types of slimes, the game really isn't any difficult. It's more of a relaxation game, looking at all the adorable little slimes. Progress is extremely slow, mostly gated by the speed of waiting for food to grow, or how fast you can traverse back and forth through the map, again, and again, and again. See, your farm can't hold a lot of things, so you need to venture out to gather more from the nature, which is a lot larger. But you also have very limited storage space, meaning you can't collect a lot during one trip. Combine this with the game being rather repetitive, because new slimes, while maybe requiring new food or a new enclosure, don't require any fundamentally different approach to what you've already been doing, and I just felt I had seen everything after a couple of hours, and the rest was just a grind to unlock the rest of the slime skins.

All that said, while I don't like or recommend Slime Rancher personally, I think it's a pretty good casual game. It's easy, it's simple, it's nice to look at, and there's a lot to do as long as you don't abstract these activities away as a single repetitive thing. I can somewhat see the reason for this being one of the highest rated games on Steam, but, yeah, totally not a game for people such as myself.