That’s a pun on sublime, and slime. Glad we cleared that up.

Slime Rancher is a wonderful and calming game, but then at the same time it’s also a total bore and monotonous grind party. Thankfully, the main disasters the game falls into only occur towards what could be considered the end of the game, otherwise it’s mainly a disgustingly adorable jaunt through a land full of happiness and cute slimes jumping around having a good time, and eating everything, including each other’s shit.

The name of the game in Slime Rancher is well, ranching slimes, sort of does what it says on the tin. You’ll mostly find yourself setting out into the world to find new and interesting blobs of goo to suck into a vacuum pack and eventually confine them to captivity. Once you’ve imprisoned your prey, and by prey I mean adorable creatures with happy smiling faces, you set about feeding them their preferred foods and harvest their poop, or plorts, and then sell them on the plortmarket for money. Quite literally selling shit for large profit.

The main appeal for Slime Rancher comes from exploring around the Far Far Range and discovering new and increasingly different types of slime. You’ll start out bombarded by your basic pink slimes with their featureless forms, to the tabby slimes with their cute and adorable ears and tails and maybe even the quantum slimes who phase in and out of existence trying to break out of the cages you place these adorable, innocent creatures in. Getting lost and finding new caves and new slimes is the bread and butter of this game, or at least a slice of bread in the sandwich, the other slice of bread is the Harvest Moon style ranching, the slime ranching, as it were.

As you work on your ranch you’ll set up corrals to keep your slimes in, upgrade them to try and deal with some of the unique quriks that slimes have, such as an aversion to light, and eventually to make taking care of the ever growing hoards easier, like an auto-feeder or plort (poop) collector. That’s what you’ll put your money towards, improving and expanding the ranch, opening up new areas for you to work on and trap your increasing variety of slimes. But that’s not all, you need to feed your adorable sludges which mean setting up simple gardens or chicken coops. These don’t really require much attention, once you set them up they’ll keep churning out fruit and veg until the cows come home (there are no cows in this game), and I think chickens are made in the coop, somehow.

The main way you’ll play Slime Rancher is once you’ve set up some number of enclosures you’ll wake up, dash around the range collecting various foods and distributing them however you see fit and then heading out for the day into the wild world, as the auto-feeders will take care of your slimes while you’re gone. The world to explore is massive and expansive. Areas that you thought you probably can’t get to are completely accessible and you’re definitely meant to for delicious secrets, that said there are a lot of empty dead ends and areas. But, areas in this game are large and furiously populated with cute slimey creatures. Eventually after a long period of exploring you may come back to your home and repeat the process all over again, but now with more slimes, maybe.

There’s a taste of optimisation that passes through Slime Rancher, each type of slime eats a specific variety of food, meat, veg or fruit, but then also has it’s favorite specific food. Slimes can be combined by eating the plort (poop) of another which changes their appearance to a combo of the two and the slime then gains the powers of both slimes, and the dietary needs! If chickens are too much hassle to deal with, and building on your conscience too much, combine that carnivorous tabby slime with a gooey honey slime, who loves mint mangos, and suddenly you’ve just got to maintain a simple tree to satisfy their hungers instead of the troubling ways of the proverbial birds and bees. Hopefully, unlike myself, you placed that mango patch nearby so you don’t find yourself having to run from one end of the ranch to the other, as there’s already a lot of running in this game, almost too much running… definitely too much running.

The salt and pepper of this metaphorical sandwich that I’m bringing back into play is the sheer volume of running you’ll be taking part in. The world is big and full of caves, and if you want to reach some of the later bits you’re damned skippy you’ll be running from the home plate to it, every single time. There are a few warp points hidden below gordo slimes, who are giant gluttonous variants of the slimes of the world who sit there with their mouth agape, waiting expectantly for you to unload your cannon into their mouths, much like your mum. No! Not like your mum! The issue with these warp points is that most of them are one way, so while you can get back home in time for dinner, a delicious sandwich of as of yet mysterious filling, getting back out into the world can take up a large chunk of your time that you don’t simply go for a stroll, you only plan for an expedition. It is a bit of a shame though, as the world is quite nice to look at and explore, just watching cute and adorable slimes roam the land and devour everything in sight, much to their own detriment, is a charming experience, but you’ve probably got stuff to do, for all you know while you’re looking at the pool full of pink cat slimes, your radioactive exploding slimes have gotten out of their pen and are causing untold levels of havoc, no one wants that their ranch to go the ways of Megaton in Fallout 3 (this isn’t actually possible).

There are ways to further optimise this, however, and that’s the slime science aspect of the game which is the very disappointing third slice of bread to the game. The filling of the sandwich was bread. The horrible and monotonous grind that is slime science brings the game to a halt and becomes something I completely ignored, and even when trying to get into it was such a time sink for little reward that it didn’t deserve the investment, my slimes needed feeding and I left their favorite parsnips as far away as possible. The slime science adds items like your own warp gates, or a hole that goes directly to the plort market, saving you from running back and forth quite as much. Useful stuff, however in order to acquire half of these items you’ll need to acquire non-slime items, like royal jelly. The acquisition of these odds and ends comes from placing drills, pumps and apiaries across the land. It’s never that simple though, the resource providers give you a random assortment with a variety of rarities, so that royal jelly you need is unlikely to be (bee?) what you get, instead you’ll deal with countless supplies of honeycomb. This operating alongside the 10 minute wait that you have to endure for these machines to do their business as well as the resources needed to create the damned things. All those plorts that you use to make money are also used to create a lot of the slime science gear. You’ll be using 10s and 20s of various plorts a go to create machines that are single or triple use. Time is definitely not of the essence here.

Slime science is such a boring and monotonous process all for the sake of reducing the amount of running around you might be doing, but in order to improve your quality of life, and save yourself some time, you need to spend more time than necessary grinding away at this system that among its many requirements also takes up your hard earned cash in spoonfuls. Your gold is stretched far and wide, which is good as you’ll keep force feeding those slimes, whether it be between expanding your ranch, improving your kit, cosmetically upgrading the ranch or unlocking the various slime science bits and pieces, however the game rapidly doesn’t like giving you money. The plort market likes to consider itself a normal market, so prices fluctuate and increase and decrease depending on supply and… well just on supply. The issue I found was most plorts rapidly depreciate in value beyond repair. Even the late game plorts drop to a measly 40 coins and looked to never recover, even when stockpiling like the filthy capitalist I have become. It’s not exactly an issue when living on the ranch, but when you add in the exponential grinds of slime science and the 7zee rewards you might find yourself losing patience with the game.

Slime Rancher is a good game, sort of. It’s come out of early access but still feels a little lacking in stuff to do but at the same time exploring the world and discovering all the slimes is a joy to be had. They’re adorable and colourful and it’s an almost calming experience. The different combinations of slime that you can make adds that uniqueness to each ranch that it feels like it’s YOUR ranch. There’s such an odd counter balance to the adorable smiling slimes who are just happy comes in the horrible and disturbing tarr who devour anything and everything, acting as nature’s reset button. There was a moment where I found myself blasting baby chickens into a furnace to create enough ash for my small burning babies to continue on living. It’s horrifying, but those small puddles of flame were too cute to not kill the younglings. There are quantum fruit trees that require you to fire another fruit into it’s incorporeal body only for lemons to fall to the ground.

It’s a game that oozes in charm and cute puddles of goo that will put a smile on your face, but don’t expect anything too grand as where it tries to insert advanced gameplay mechanics, it instead adds a boring and repetitive grind that provides little reward that leaves a sour note in your mouth. The act of exploring and working through the world is great, fun and I enjoyed learning my way around the world as well as the small bits of puzzles you’ll come across. There are snippets of story scattered around the land that feels like it’s trying to be more than it actually is, and sadly falls a little flat. Ultimately Slime Rancher is a fun and enjoyable experience of cute creatures, but does suffer from some rather lame features.