Slime-vacuuming should be an established genre with 20 years of back catalogue to go through. Slime Rancher feels like one of those buzzing with electricity, once in a generation-type games, but at the same time it’s hard to believe no one’s harnessed the intrinsic act of harvesting things from an organic environment this beautifully before. Money’s tight on the ranch these days, and it’ll be a long time before I have all the mod cons some other, less scrupulous ranchers seem to have strapped to their boots, gun, and deployed around their farms. Their Plort (excrement to you or I) might be the least valuable in the game, but these guys don’t seem to mind the corral at all, and they eat carrots or Pogo Fruits without complaint. They begin bouncing towards some Pink Slimes and I leave before having to watch them interact in case things get messy. The Tabby Slimes who’ve been subsisting on a diet of battery Hen Hens – and I don’t feel great about this part – get sucked up into my vacuum gun and spat out again as kindly and benevolently as I can manage in a nearby wood. I only keep herbivores, too, which means my chicken coop is superfluous and can henceforth be demolished, my feathered captives suddenly free (to be eaten by wild Slimes instead, inevitably). well, they only bounce up and down making squeaking noises really, but there’s at least plenty of room to do that. The Slimes I keep are in corrals of no more than eight, so there’s plenty of room for them to. Without ever truly admitting it to myself, I persevere with what I imagine to be a kinder, environmentally friendly Slime ranch. What does an Xbox One X Enhanced game do? It's not just 4K and HDR Is it right that I’m keeping the Hen Hens in a tiny enclosure just to be fed to these Slimes so I can sell their poo? Is it right that I’m keeping the Tabby Slimes in the first place? And what’s the point of it all – to invest in ever-more aggressive methods of farming these once wild and carefree beings for their faeces? Maybe I’m overthinking it and Slime Rancher isn’t actually a sneaky parable about industrialised farming techniques, but it’s always nice to have your real-world views challenged, and especially so when the challenge emerges in a surprising place. Laugh if you want, but there’s a conscious process that needs to happen when you feed some Hen Hens to a corral full of carnivorous Tabby Slimes, and running it through the brain produces some thought-provoking results. Intentionally or not, Slime Rancher pokes and prods at my ideology about meat eating and industrialised farming techniques. Despite its colour palette and abundance of smiling faces, though, it’s not all plain sailing.
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