#GAMES LIKE SLIME RANCHER SIMULATOR#
#GAMES LIKE SLIME RANCHER TV#

#GAMES LIKE SLIME RANCHER SIMULATOR#

And, this time last year, I think I’d have railed against its very existence, contested the very fact of a chore simulator like this. It’s actual light-years away from the delirious hyper-violence than makes up most video game fare, that populates and defines anything like Doom or The Witcher 3. Pink plorts are the least valuable ones, as far as I know, and their value has decreased as I’ve played, but it’s so easy to get that ignoring it seems somehow stupid. I don’t feed them because I love them, though I’d once found a strange sort of delight in just how happy the sight of food made them, I feed them because doing so produces plorts -like shit, but cuter- which I can suck up and exchange for cash at what amounts to a reverse vending machine somewhere else on the ranch. As it is, I’ve stopped thinking about ethics on the job.Īfter ranching the slimes, my next job is to feed them, which I usually do with the carrots grown on my farm a few metres over. If the slimes were anything else- pigs or cows or chickens- anything other than the joyous great space hoppers they are, it’d seem cruel. Sometimes, if I put too many into one, they’ll stack on top of one another and bounce out. They’ll press themselves against the plasma walls in what looks like a desperate bid to get out. The slimes, pretty exuberant by nature, are slightly too energetic for it. The pens themselves basically plots of land I’ve cordoned off with plasma walls, are morose in a strange way. The idea, then, is to suck them up with the pack, holding down the right trigger to hoover up the little joy-balls and store them in the bag on my back, and then drag them back to my ranch, where I’ll shoot them back out into huge pens. I’ll probably need about thirty slimes to replenish what I’ve already lost and, thanks to a few character upgrades, I can do that pretty easily. The slimes are paperwork, my vacpac a big, sexy red-pen. I approach them the same way an accountant approaches a spreadsheet with a resigned sigh, nebulously achy hands, and a weirdly cathartic desire to just get it done. I’d once liked, really liked, the sight of the slimes frolicking out here in the wilderness, their weirdly amorphous bodies bouncing back and joyously forth. A few hours ago, I realise, this scene would have made me pretty bloody happy. I’ve long since stopped asking why Space Texas has naturally occurring carrots. I urge my avatar to waddle forward a few metres, into a mini-clearing, and watch as the slimes spring joyfully up from under the earth, some of them chasing chickens, others clawing at the patches of carrots that I know populate the edges of the clearing. I’m out here in this weird, science fiction Texas with my vacpac, looking for pink slimes. Fifteen minutes ago (about a day by the game’s count) a few escaped from my ranch and I’ve got to find some way to replenish the numbers.

In this case, though, I’m only looking for some pink ones. The blank spaces in the game’s menus tell me there are more still I haven’t discovered yet. They’re usually pink, but there are other varieties some are blue, with rocks attached, others like look like cutesy bulbous cats. I’m using it to collect slimes, you see balls of gooey nothing nothing that bounce around the game world like the physical expression of joy. It’s what the video game onscreen, Slime Rancher, tells me is a Vacpac.

#GAMES LIKE SLIME RANCHER TV#

On the TV, suspended from the wall by a cheap TV bracket, there’s a gun floating over a cartoonish Texan landscape. The weird kind of hot that makes you think you can smell yourself sweating, and which makes you think you don’t smell very good. It looks cold but it’s not, for whatever reason, today is desperately hot.

Outside, the sky is the kind of melancholy grey you’d only see in a French indie film. I’ve got nowhere to go and nowhere to be.

Games like slime rancher