Game Reviews
Slime Rancher: Just One More Harvest Before Bed
- Format
- 4.5 / 5
- Platform
- Steam · 63 hrs
- 4.5 out of 5. Sixty-three hours on record, and most of them felt like a break rather than a chore.
- You vacuum up slimes, feed them, and sell the plorts they drop. It's a much better loop than it has any right to be.
- The late game slows down once upgrades get expensive, and early inventory space is tight.
- Runs on almost anything, including the Steam Deck with a few control tweaks.
The review title I gave this one on Steam was a quote from myself: "Just one more harvest before bed..." at 3 a.m. That's the whole review, really. Slime Rancher is a farming game where the livestock are slimes, the tool is a vacuum gun, and the thing you're growing is a slightly unhealthy attachment to a pink blob with a face.
I've got 63 hours in it. Here's why.
What it is
You're Beatrix LeBeau, a rancher who moves out to a planet called the Far, Far Range. You've got a vacpack: it sucks things up, stores them and shoots them back out. You use it to catch slimes, carry them home, pen them up and feed them. Fed slimes drop plorts. Plorts sell for money. Money buys upgrades, more land and better gear, which lets you catch weirder slimes in weirder places.
It sounds like a spreadsheet with fur. It plays like a toy box. Every slime type has its own personality and animations, and you'll find yourself building little systems on the ranch just to see what happens when two kinds share a pen. (Sometimes what happens is a Tarr outbreak, which is how the game teaches you to be careful.)
What worked
The loop. Collect, feed, sell, upgrade. It's paced well, with a new slime or a new area showing up often enough that you never quite hit a wall in the first twenty or so hours.
It's genuinely relaxing. No timer breathing down your neck, no competition, nobody to beat. The world has a light story told mostly through messages and the places you find, and it doesn't ask much of you. That's the point.
The ranch is yours. There's a lot of freedom in how you lay it out and which slimes you mix. The Slime Science stuff later on adds some depth for anyone who likes building little machines.
Tip
Upgrade your vacpack's storage early. The first few hours are mostly you juggling a too-small inventory, and it gets a lot more fun once you can carry more than a couple of stacks.
What didn't
The late game grind is real. Once the upgrades start costing serious money, progress slows way down and you're mostly running the same routes to top up the bank.
Combat is minimal. If you're coming for action, you'll find it thin. I didn't mind, but it's worth knowing.
A few technical nits: some frame drops when a lot of slimes are in one place, and the occasional clip through the terrain. A reload has fixed everything I ran into.
Worth it?
Yes, easily, especially on sale. The main story runs somewhere in the 20 to 30 hour range, and there's plenty more if you want to finish everything. It's the rare game that's good for a fifteen-minute session and for a whole lost Saturday.
If you like this kind of calm-but-busy loop, Wobbly Life scratches a similar itch with a sillier sense of humor. And if you want to see everything I've played and finished, I keep score under mookyjooky on the Elsewhere page.
Just don't start it after 10 p.m. You know how that goes.