"Slime Rancher" - Cameron Ilavsky

Slime Rancher

         Slime Rancher was a video game released in 2016. It was meant as a game where you collect and farm slime-like creatures in a cutesy and minimalistic art style. 

        Slime Rancher opens up abruptly; you play as a girl named Beatrix as she explores a strange world for scientific advancements. The first area is quite normal, a large tent that serves as a house, and a few empty plots meant for farms and enclosures. As you move out of that region, you see small, pink blobs with smiling faces. In your hands is a device, something similar to a vacuum. You use it on the blob and suck it up into your inventory, learning that it is a "pink slime". From there, you can go around and collect slimes and raise them and eventually, combine types of slimes together to profit off of. 

        However, the man who sold the farm to you, Hobson Twillgers, has left little notes for you to find all over the map. Piecing all of them together, you actually get a nice, genuine story that can teach quite a few lessons.

        Hobson introduces himself by explaining that he was the previous owner of the ranch and apologizes for leaving it in poor condition when he left. The next few areas he leaves notes in are just helpful tips: which slimes could pose a threat, secret passageways he had found, etc.

         From there he goes to talking more casually with the player, talking of how he loved to sleep in the large cave by the lab and think about things. He mentions a few times a woman named Thora, who he met in a region called the Indigo Quarry and soon fell in love with. He confesses his struggle between his thrill for adventure and exploring, and his desire to stay with Thora and settle down. 

        Upon reaching the second to last area of the game, you can see that there is a change in Hobson. The notes he leaves are more philosophical. At this point in the game, there are several puzzles that involve closing one door in order to open another. Hobson references these by explaining how similar they felt to his life; "sometimes you gotta choose one path or another and there's no way around it. But you know what? Either path you choose is gonna make you hurt some for want of walking the other". You can tell that Hobson is struggling with the decisions he must make in his life. 

        At the very end of the game, you are presented with two doors and several notes from Hobson. He regales about his life and compares these two doors to himself once again. One of the doors would guarantee a life of adventure and wonder, but he would have to leave the love of his life behind. He decides against it, selling his farm and moving into Thora's ranch to live with her. 

        Hobson reminds all of us that there are some tough decisions in life that we have to make, even if we don't fully like either outcome. Slime Rancher is a very calm game, it's entirely about collecting different slimes and making sure they're fed; it's therapeutic almost. The fact that the creators put a message like that into a game meant for people who were dealing with too much is really powerful to me. I really appreciate the attention to detail and the pacing of the story just makes it that much of a better game.