Slime-san PC Review

To call Slime-san a poor man’s Super Meat Boy would be apt, but at the same time, this platform game is also so much more than that. From expanding ideas to veering off to the side fully, the wall-sticking, trap dodging jumper has a lot of scope inside of its challenging design.

There are some more traditional aspects about Slime-san, such as its pixelated look, heavy on single colors, mostly only accentuated for binary coding, such as green and red representing good and bad respectively. A little slime, the protagonist, goes through the digestive tract of a gigantic worm, which makes for quick, one-screen levels. Inside, the blob can even find some other creatures and strike up a conversation. There’s a surprising amount of interaction to be done, when there’s no platform game in sight.

When there is stuff to jump over, however, there’s a lot to take in. Aside from just ledges and gaps, Slime-san uses dashes to crush blocks or a transparent model to shift through green zones. With these systems in place, the game quickly grows from a cutesy little adventure to a tense test of skill. Sticking to walls, avoiding red orbs and killer critters can all appear at once or even start rotating around the screen. It’s hard to sum up just all the things Slime-san throws at the tiny piece of goo, but let’s just say that the game scales, both in added folds as in a higher difficulty curve. There is a lot going on here, a lot.

Aside from a little slide here and there, Slime-san holds its own to make the play seem fair. Using one-screen makes progression easy to understand and momentum is applied just snappy enough to be able to gauge distance adequately. The game controls well, in layman’s terms.  And given all the active elements in later levels, a good guide is necessary. To help out, the transparency system also slows down time, which can be used to precisely jump over to a moving platform.

There is, however, a downside to the breadth of Slime-san. For instance, having to keep track of all systems at breakneck speeds can often lead to spaghetti fingers. More grating than just muscle memory though, the timed aspect of levels can often lead to a lost cause. After a while, the game will start filling the screen with a death wall, coming from any side. That wall sometimes will block off the exit of a stage, making it no longer possible to complete. At that point, there is nothing to do but wait for death, which feels rather spiteful.

To take a break from platform gameplay, Slime-san offers an entire new section of adventure. The little slime can go visit a town full of quirky little characters, such as a long-legged from or a loopy bird. Even further than that, there is a giant city with a dozen districts, each offering their own services. Here, it’s possible to customize a ton of visuals and other details at the cost of currency earned throughout the game. There’s even an arcade where the slime can kick back for a game of fake Mario Kart or Doom, because why not. So, not only is there a lot in the game of Slime-san, there’s also a lot in the meta game of Slime-san, aside from the main attraction.

It’s as if building just one tight game wasn’t enough, Slime-san goes above and beyond in its cute platform game and gives its audience a completely new world on top of that. It may be a bit too hard for some, but then at least there’s an alternative there to just chill and go for a stroll, talk to some people and then come back. To put it plainly once more, Slime-san is just a really cool game worth playing.

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed (@Daavpuke)