Recent reviews by Vaati

This game is insane. (Not in the good way,)

You're feathered along a string of quest markers with no correlation, relation, or explanation to one another.

The protagonist dies at the very beginning of the game and is brought back to life at complete random with zero explanation. This is not brought up again, atleast not in the three hours I played.
The entire narrative is completely disconnected, you will get quest markers miles away from with no rhyme or reason, with nothing to guide or signpost you there. Just randomly sweeping a persons chimney after a life changing event. The protagonist does not mention or in any way bring any of this up. No questions are asked, so none are answered.

The controls are dog water. You hold left trigger to fire a bow, cannot cancel an arrow. You must commit if you accidentally hit the button, and you will, because every button they chose to place abilities on is profoundly unintuitive.
They've opted for the GTA sprint where you spam A, but it's a half measure, you and only need to double tap it once to increase speed. This would be fine if it actually responded to your inputs, this goes doubly so for riding horseback.

There are baffling choices with inputs chains to get certain mechanics to work. The sword light beam thing is one of them. Hold L1 and R1, then only hold R1, then press L1 when you're ready. Are you serious?
Hold a key/button, then move a reticule to speak to the NPC (but only sometimes). It's wildly inconsistent. Easily the most unintuitive and inconsistent controls scheme I've ever seen in a video game since the 2000's. And it only gets worse the more abilities you unlock.

There are these INSANE animation locks when trying to open a locked door that lasts for upwards of four/five full seconds that cannot be canceled. You will try every door in a keep in an early quest only to find that you spend over a minute, if not longer, waiting on the animations in total to check every door.

The UI is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I can't even elaborate on it, I'm sure there's been enough people talking about it, but Jesus Christ, dude. It took me two minutes to figure out how to get to the settings menu. I know someone somewhere quit the game when they couldn't figure out how the lantern worked.


The worst part? The game is beautiful, well optimized (in my experience), and the combat is very fun - albeit in the early game there is absolutley zero enemy diversity.

Overall, this is not the game it was marketed as. It's clear they only showed the nice looking bits and abstained from showing anything below the crust of this hodgepodge-game-mechanics-greatest-hits pie.
No rebindable buttons or keys, the story is a disjointed mess, the quests are an MMO slog (I play FFXIV, I know how low the bar can go.)

If it sounds like I'm salty, it's because I am. I wanted to love this game so, so, so much. I tried to hard, but the game didn't even make an attempt to meet me halfway.

Let me make this clear: My wife is not a gamer. Or, atleast she wasn't until she seen slime rancher on YouTube.
She seen someone playing it on YouTube, and I happened to have an old GoG copy.
We played for around 9 hours before we bought the updated steam version.

So far we've spent over ten hours. She has a knack for organizing, so she ran the Ranch, managed how much and where everything goes. Scheduled everything and meticulously crunched the numbers to keep us afloat.
She would pass it to me for exploring, adventuring, and collecting.
This made this game so much better than I had ever imagined.

The pros of Slime Rancher are too copious to name. If you enjoyed simulation and tycoon games, love exploring in a first person perspective, solving some puzzles, crunching some numbers, and experimenting with slime then this game is for you!

Thank you, Slime Rancher!