Slime Rancher 2

es incleible

te amo slime rancher mwah

It improves and expands on Slime Rancher's ideas considerably, the adventure and exploration aspects are more extensive and more difficult, and there's a great deal of new customization options via the shops. However, the central gameplay loops are severely limited by the size of the player inventory, high cost requirements for upgrades and utilities, and ranch maintenance and management. There are some late-game options to mitigate this, but I felt like I was spending the vast majority of my time farming, storing, and depositing plorts rather than having the freedom to explore and expand. Many survival-crafting games have a problem with feeling tethered to your base, and Slime Rancher 2 has that problem on multiple different axes. The aesthetics are relaxing, but the experience is stressful, feeling like patching holes in a leaky boat or spinning plates or whatever frantic metaphor best suits you. I would imagine that mods alleviate this, but I always like to try a game at its standard experience first, and while I enjoyed myself throughout it, eventually the tethering problem overwhelmed everything else. I still recommend it, because how you play it may not be how I play it, and I'm sure there's an equilibrium to be found by interacting with the systems more efficiently, or not trying to over-optimize everything like I tend to do. There are accessibility settings like turning off the Tarr transformations which probably make it a lot more relaxing as well. I'll likely return to at at some point and adjust or mod many of those settings to smooth things out for myself.