Slime Rancher is a farm sim video game developed by indie developer Monomi Park and released in January 2016. It centers around the life of Beatrix LeBeau, an adventurer who moves to a planet thousands of light years from Earth called the Far Far Range, to start her new life as a slime rancher.
The core element of the game is to explore the planet, and build your farm gathering crops, materials, and the adorable kinds of slimes. Said slimes come in many kinds such as the standard Pink Slimes, Rock Slimes, Tabby Slimes, Rad Slimes, Honey Slimes, and many, many more slimes. If you’re lucky, you can find the elusive Gold Slime, but the player must act fast as it will run away and disappear upon noticing them. You use your Vacpack to capture the slimes you encounter, and put them in corrals, which are essentially a Slime’s home, to take care of. You must feed your slimes regularly with food specific to their diet. Examples include Pink Slimes being able to eat all things, Rock Slimes are vegetarians, and Tabby Slimes are carnivores. They then produce a plort, which is then used in exchange for Newbucks, the game’s currency. If a slime eats a plort from a different type of slime other than itself, it becomes a Largo, a hybrid of the two slime species. When the Largo is fed, it produces plorts of both its types. However if it eats a plort unlike its own, the Largo then becomes a dangerous, large black slime called the Tarr, which can infect other slimes around it, transforming them into Tarrs, damage the player, and rot nearby gardens. Depending on how common a Slime is and how often a plort type is exchanged, the price typically varies. Pink Slimes, being the most common, have the least valuable plorts typically, but a rarer slime like the Tangle Slime have plorts worth lots of Newbucks. Newbucks then are used to buy ranch expansions such as a storage tank to store excess resources, gardens to plant your crops, or even more ranch space with areas such as the Overgrowth, and the Grotto.
Another important item to collect is the Slime Key, which is collected by Gordo Slimes across the map, and used to unlock different biomes of the Far Far Range. You start off in the Dry Dry Reef, but other biomes such as the Indigo Quarry, the Moss Blanket, and the Ancient Ruins are accessed with Slime Keys. Build your farm, breed your slimes, and explore your new home to become a thriving slime rancher.
The game has seen mountains of success with over 5 million copies sold by January 2022, and a score of 81 on Metacritic, stating the game succeeds at keeping you hooked and simulating farm life, but it can get repetitive. It was also nominated at the 2017 Game Awards as the Best Debut Indie Game, and in August 2023, it was revealed that a film adaptation was being worked on.
“The joy of the game comes from how 1: how absolutely cute and interesting each type of slime is and 2: navigating which slimes work best for you and how to keep them wrangled without their chaotic behavior causing too much trouble”. As stated by Youtuber Indie Jurnee
Even with a sequel that is frequently updated, the first Slime Rancher combines survival with a tap of cuteness to create an immersive and addicting experience.
