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I love a game that is both as sweet as apple pie and as dark as pitch, and Monomi Park's bubbly sci-fi farming sim Slime Rancher is very much one of those. A sort of first-person Harvest Moon knock-off with a splash of Dragon Quest, it casts you as Beatrix LeBeau, a pioneer seeking her fortune on a distant planet overrun by squealing, bouncing, emoji-faced slimes. Feed a slime something and it'll squeeze out a "plort" (a frightful piece of onomatopoeia that puts me in mind of, ugh, "squanching" from Rick & Morty). Scoop up and fire that plort into your farm's market terminal using your trusty vacuum gun, and you'll earn cash. That's right, this is a game about the economics of poop, and the in-game Slimeopedia is only too happy to go into detail about what each creature's excretions are used for back on dear old Earth. Of the relatively docile, omnivorous Pink Slime, for example, we learn that its crap is a key ingredient in coffee sweetener, cleaning spray and burger-mix - it's essentially the extra-terrestrial equivalent of corn syrup. The more hazardous Crystal Slime, meanwhile, supplies the manure for a variety of transparent construction materials, while the nocturnal Phosphor Slime's faeces are ground up to fill lightbulbs. A vision slowly builds as you bustle about the game's restful, warmly lit wilderness, planting crops and doing your best to keep your charges from eating the chickens behind your back - a vision of an Earth that runs entirely on slime products, an Earth walled and floored with shit.
If Slime Rancher is quite the agribusiness satire, those who like their games gutted of political relevance will be relieved to hear that it's also a charming, playful sandbox game. The core of it is straightforward - you alternate between roaming the planet's canyons (which are dotted with treasure chests, hidden grottos and sealed doors) in search of new slimes, and expanding your farm with new pens, carrot patches, poultry coops, fruit trees and the like, all constructed on preset building plots. Next to the sheer quantity of furnishings and cosmetic touches you'd find in, say, Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher may sound a little bare-bones, but it's lifted by the slimes themselves, who are (a) impossibly cute, even when they're squirting from the barrel of your vacuum gun, and (b) dangerously unruly.
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