Quick Look: Slime Rancher

Yaaaaay! Been waiting for this one since the first time it was on the show!

Two!

This is a good ass game and you should buy it. I have nothing else to add.

I bought this game after Jason first showed it off during one of the UPFs. One of the best purchases I ever made. Thanks Jason.

Cat slimes are adorable.

I've been playing a lot of this game the past few days. Right now I'm feel like I'm in the area where things should start pivoting to what I'm building towards. The trouble is, this game feels like it's loops for the sake of loops. Harvest crops to feed to slimes, to harvest ploots, so you can make money, so you can have more slimes to harvest from.

There doesn't feel like there is anything I'm working toward other than some linear progression of cosmetic unlocks for the ranch. There isn't some town I'm saving by being a successful rancher, no characters in the world I'm interacting with, I'm not making money to support a family, I'm not building the world's sickest looking ranch. The only goal seems to be to get better at making money so that you can make more money.

@hatking: isn't this what life is anyways

awesome :D

Shoot a hen at it.

I don't like the word "plorts".

Jeff "Stony Chickadoo" Gerstmann

This is one of the games I had sitting on my wishlist since forever while I waited for it to leave early access. Played quite a lot now, still have some areas I haven't been to, and I haven't been able to unlock most of the treasure pods yet. Does seem to lack any sort of end goal, though. Farming to make plorts to make money and stuff to make more plorts. It's real hard to care about what other characters are in this game (in text form).

The sound when slimes popup from the ground really resembles OG Rayman and it drives me nuts.

I've been close to obsessive about this game since I got it. I'm cooling on it a bit now but damn this game is good. Played it almost nonstop when it came out last week. Rough framerate on Xbox though.

This game is great!

@hatking: This game is not about the destination but the journey. It's relaxing and cute, nothing else, really. But it does both of those things really well.

I hear Sauce Gurney is playing the Gasworks this weekend, they're a great live show but I just can't stand the fans.

Hello, Ben Pack. Hello, Jeff Gerstmann. Please!

As someone who played a ton of Dragon Warrior Monsters and used almost exclusively the Slime monsters, this game is speaking to me.

The camera work was good in this Ben. Smart move, lowering the sensitivity.

Can you customize your weird cyber lady rancher or is that one house screen the only time you see yourself?

There are points in this video where I can't tell if it is Jeff or Brad.

I love this game so much!

I used to play slime hunter when i was a kid. Most of my big scores came from my nose.

It has been a lesson in addiction, playing this game. A fully realized clicker.

That's a weird sentiment for me. That usually applies when there is a destination, but here there is none. It's not like I get to a place and it's kind of weak, but I beat it and feel like I overcame something. It's just a constant journey. It's walking in circles at a certain point. My ranch is so productive at this point that I literally spend entire in-game day filling feeders and collecting plorts. If I spend a day exploring, I come back to plort collectors that are full and no longer collecting, at which point I have to spend the entire next day running back and forth between the corrals and the place to sell plorts. And at the end of all that, the only apparent reason to explore in the first place was to collect more slimes to get more plorts. What am I even saving these plorts for? I feel like I'm missing something.

@bocckob: No real customization to speak of. Eventually you can change the colours of certain things on the ranch, including your vacpack. But that's about it, as far as I've seen.

Owned this game since it was in Early Access, great game for sure!

Slime Rancher seems cool, It'll be awesome when they put a game in it

I don't see the appeal of this game at all. I guess it just seems like if Stardew Valley had no NPCs or combat or really any side activities other than "do the main loop of gather resources, grow things, sell things".

Also that inventory limit looks infuriating.

I like a lot of it but yeah you would want another basically half of the game to fill out as a Stardew Valley kind of thing. It's odd to me as well.

Downloaded this with Games with Gold, haven't played it yet and had no idea what it even was. Looks pretty fun though.

I love this game. It's a great chill game for podcasts and audio books. No, there isn't an end goal. You're going through the loop of building up your ranch. If you require a hard end, this isn't for you. I like it in the same way I like Truck Sim. Just working towards upgrades that allow you to do more of the initial mechanic. I find games like this much less stressful when I just want something to play at the end of the day.

Oh god I hope you can change the FoV

@scorch: Yeah, the default's fucked. But you can change it, first thing I did

@scorch: You can! It defaults to 75.

@nightmaresabin: @radleyduder: Does it not become really fisheye-y for you above 75? Had to turn it back down here.

EVERYTHING is adorable in this game.

@hatking To me, this seems like the eternal conundrum between story-driven and "sandbox" games. There's nothing wrong with havng the goal of the game being "build the coolest ranch to show off to your friends" so long as they don't advertise as having a deep narrative storyline.

That said there does seem to be at least a hint of a story here through emails, so it's not quite as "Errr-so-what-do-YOU-want-to-do?" that something like early Minecraft was.

Yeah, but you don't build the coolest ranch to show off to your friends. You build exactly the same ranch as your friends do. The progression is linear. Other than in which predetermined square plot I set which slime in, all ranches are basically indistinguishable.

MineCraft is cool because that world is yours. Hell, even Animal Crossing's villages vary from one player to the next.

but can you rocket slime jump?

@lovcol: Fired it up again, you're right, it does look that way if you turn it up to 90, but I guess with my setup, I don't have a problem with it. When I started, I swore it was on 60, which I couldn't do, but people are saying it defaults to 75, which after playing both extremes seems fine

Wait, does Ben seriously think those floating Hs are "tips"? Those were clearly in-world diary entries.

Wish Dragon Quest would do a cross promotion.

This game looks really cute and pleasant and calming. *thumbs up*

I think the Sherlock Holmes quote Ben was going for was "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."