2 years 5 months ago
Ooblets on Switch
There’s a certain charm to farming and life sim games. There’s just something so incredibly appealing about living a quiet life somewhere, undisturbed, where you can tend to your crops, raise animals, and eventually become a self-sufficient produce monolith. Ooblets leans hard into that idea, bringing enough innovation and uniqueness to what should be a very predictable formula, and it should be lauded for that even if it does fall short in some aspects.
As the game starts, you learn that you’re playing a character who’s just moved to Badgetown. You’re finally leaving whatever backwater island you grew up on, and you know it’s backwater because they don’t even have any Ooblets where you’re from. After meeting a few of Badgetown’s residents and getting acquainted with the lovely Mayor Tinstle, your farm life begins.
Right off the bat, I was immediately surprised by how overwhelming Ooblets was. Most farming games tend to ease you into your new life, giving you a few freebie seeds to plant before showing you how to start raking in the cash. Ooblets isn’t very forthcoming in these early hours, and you’re immediately left to your own devices as you try to figure out how to make a living here.
Money, or Gummies as they’re referred to here, is extremely hard to come by in those early hours. Seeds are expensive, furniture is expensive, clothing is expensive, food is expensive, and your character’s energy bar is tiny. Everything in Badgetown is so damn expensive and when you’re too tired or weak to get a ton of work done in a day, making a living in Ooblets feels impossibly hard. Stardew Valley, this is not.