Developer: Fabraz
Publisher: Headup Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Slime-san – Review
Slime-san is a fast-paced puzzle platformer, which requires the player to develop some serious platformer skills during gameplay. Slime-san is full of cute characters, Japanese-inspired pixel art and funny references. This is a fun retro indy game full of action, developed by Fabraz and published by Headup Games.
Story
The story of this game is pretty simple, but bizarre. You are a little slime hanging out in a forest, then suddenly you’ll get attacked by a giant worm, and eaten alive! The whole level progression is progression through the worm. Somehow, you start at the butt-end of the worm, working your way forward to escape. During your journey you’ll encounter several other survivors living inside the worm, and you’ll quickly learn there’s even a little town full of survivors you can visit! All the survivors have their own personality, reading the conversations is usually pretty funny.
Graphics
The graphics are retro pixel-art style. The color scheme is simple: there is a dark blue background and mostly white lines for everything else. Everything that kills you is red, and your character, the layer of slime you leave behind wherever you go and everything you can interact with without dying is green. The game and the interface are clean and easy to use. Hints and tips are displayed in boxes in a level, displaying the actions you need to take. The window you play in is square rather than wide screen, so the sides of the screen are filled with either default borders, or pretty awesome pixel art you can buy with in-game currency. You can also buy new looks for slime-san or your bird, and different color schemes for the game with in-game currency.
Sounds
The music of the game is pretty good chiptune music, and changes every few levels. The moves and interactions of your character makes retro, arcade-style noises, befitting the style of the game. You can talk to many characters, but there’s no voice acting: conversations have classic ‘blippety’ sounds.
Gameplay
Slime-san is a puzzle platformer. The game has 100 levels, and each level is four different screens, so you get 400 screens you need to play through to finish your whole first run, and after that you unlock a new game mode where you can complete 400 screens again.
Each level has a theme, for instance: dodging bullets, moving sawblades or pushing boxes. The set of four screens you need to finish for each level has different variations of that theme, needing different strategies to complete them. You cannot take too much time to solve one screen: after a certain amount of time (displayed in the upper left of your screen) stomach acid will slowly start to fill the screen, and touching that will kill your character.
In the middle of your screen is a timer displaying your playtime for that level, and a time you can try to beat. This is one of the challenges you can do besides simply completing a screen: trying to finish a level as fast as possible, and the second challenge is trying to collect all collectibles. Every screen has an apple you can collect, but most of the time those are rather tricky to obtain. The apples are the main in-game currency, and you can re-visit levels in level select in case you missed an apple. Some screens have hidden exits where you’ll meet some other survivors, and obtain coins you can use in the in-game arcade.
In the in-game town which you can visit anytime via level select, you can spend your apples to change the graphics of the game, buy cosmetic items, or change the play style of your character. This town if full of funny characters you’ll meet during your journey, mostly references to characters from other games or Japanese culture. There’s also an in-game arcade with cool mini-games based on classic games like Pong, Zelda and Doom.
The game can be played with either a keyboard or a controller. Both work fine for this game. You’ll need a lot of combos to pull off the moves you need to complete a screen, which makes this game fun and challenging. You need to be very fast, and able to react quickly to your environment. There are many ways of interacting in this game, like smashing blocks, pushing, bouncing on trampolines, being shot out of revolving turrets, swimming, morphing through blocks, etc. This makes the game really diverse, and fun to solve each screen using all these techniques.
Conclusion
Slime-san is a fun, fast paced and challenging puzzle platformer game. With 400 screens to play through, several side games and side-areas and a new game+ mode to complete, it guarantees you plenty of playtime and a lot of diversity. This game is perfect for speedrunners, with a timer that’s always displayed, timed challenges, and leaderboards. Slime-san is a good game, and has a lot of humor and cute characters, a nice retro art-style and a great chip-tune soundtrack.
Slime-san - Review,
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