Farming games aren't usually my thing, despite me wanting to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and maybe touch on Stardew Valley, I let my curiosity get the best of me. There's no highly involved story in it, but the gooey world of slime doing all sorts of wrong things is worth looking at. I played the first game years ago, and I thought, hey, if people are into this, they'll definitely enjoy it. Slime Rancher 2 feels like a game anybody can get into, and I am also enjoying it.
I guess it boils down to it being a few things; SR2 is an exploration, puzzle-solving, and farming game, when it is fully explored, that's about it. It's odd at first because I thought there was going to be a multiplayer mode somewhere. But no, there's a beginning and an end.
The story is told through the wonderful experience, enriched thanks to the environment, various slime wildlife, the music, all of this is catering to the only basic gameplay that requires you to wholly embrace the wonderland itself before learning how to actually play the game.
So I suck things like a vacuum gun, put these things in a storage tank before shooting them out. That's the basic foundation that the game is based around of. In order for me to farm, I need to create enclosures for a specific group of slime, and then feed them food in order for them to pop out byproducts called Plorts. Acting as both the exchange currency for money, and what I'll need to make upgrades on myself. Some of these upgrades are needed to deal with the verticality of the exploration.
Just by that opening, you should be able to figure out that this is a game about micromanaging. Manage the food farms, feed them their preferred diets, and then collect the Plorts. But the other half of the game comes with exploring the areas, and finding the rarities. The main mission of the game is about the main character fulfilling her excavation duty. Also, she's the same character from the first game, so a direct sequel too.
Not going to lie, the game had me mostly confused at first, it was intimidating to figure out what I should be doing because I could by chance screw it up. Like throwing the slimes over to the seawater, wasting the food in the tank, or falling over by the seawater myself, losing everything I have while staying unconscious losing in-game 6hrs of daytime. There's no death mechanic, but the game can be punishing in certain ways.
The difficulty also extends to learning the ropes, exploring through the slime wilds you have to navigate through dens, find these giant slime that are pathblocking and need to be fed their diets before they explode, opening locked passages inside hidden areas, farming for rare minerals, and so on. There's also the upgrades, I had to find a way to save money and deposit Plorts and said minerals in the refinery for fabricating these parts.
The last thing I finally got was a jetpack, and that was a godsend because of how difficult it is to explore the unknown areas on foot. Again, the game can be really tricky with the platforming and exploration, falling into the water meant losing what I've found. That jetpack just made my experience so much easier for dealing with such verticality.
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Playing as a rancher meant you have to monitor almost everything that goes on in your base of operations, and find a way to use the wildlife to your advantage. I could just build farms, and then just feed them to the uncaged slimes. But then there are the rare type of slimes, out of reach that are kept for the more valuable Plorts. There's an in-game Plort economy, and it changes the value of each unique Plort per day cycle.
The variety of slimes come in all forms, there's like those that are literally honey dew and likes fruits only, spiky ones that'll damage you if you get caught on their rolling trajectory, there's one that floats and glows, it's like a galore of rarities, kind of like catching and farming Pokémon.
But if per se, like the usual pink slime eats a Plort of one of these rare slimes, they balloon up into a fusion slime. Feeding them their favorites will shoot double of two different Plorts(combined 4). Hence, getting the hang of the farming thing, buying these subsections of enclosures closed off, helped me to gather the slimes and put them in their cages for farming. I know it seems wrong to put them in cages like this, but then again, their squeaky voices, cute bouncy nature is a thing of disguise for something else.
The slimes nature is to consume, replicate, and at worse, destroy. Now, how does the last bit happen? Well, if the big guys eat another rare Plort, because they like eating anything they come across, they'll turn into the Tarr. These guys are like Defcon 5 for slime control. They need to dealt with by lethal measures. Well, I never got around to getting the part that allows me to store water in my VAC tank, because water is the one thing vaporizes them. They have to be, or else they'll consume everything, and start hurting me too. Pure anarchy.
It does seem like an intimidating game at first, but there are ways to play it thanks to adjustments that can be made for your game. Like damage sliders, enabling presence of angry slimes or Tarrs. It's also like the cutest game I've ever played. Complemented even by a sleep inducing soundtrack. There are areas that give a real sense of wonderment, while being an endearing and fulfilling experience itself. Slime Rancher 2 is a worthy sequel to the first, but it's not finished tho, this was an early access release. There's still more for the devs to add.
So next time I'll be staying in touch with the game again, I also hope they invest in providing some form of online part. This is a fully offline game, just like its predecessor. That in-game economy thing could help a lot if I was involved in someone else's game, or an online component makes the in-game economy reactionary based on active player's involvement. Aside that, I really had fun. You should check it out, it's really one of those best games of the year type.
