Slime Rancher 2 is the long-awaited sequel to the indie classic, Slime Rancher. Released on September 22nd of 2022, the game would remain in the alpha stage until September of 2025. I have been a longtime fan of the first game, so I’d like to share my thoughts on what Slime Rancher 2 both succeeds and fails at compared to its predecessor.

Starting with arguably the most important thing, vibes. In a cozy simulator game, it’s pretty important that the game feels well… cozy. While the first game nails this, the over-saturated and flashy visuals (as well as much more intense lighting) make the sequel much harder to get immersed in. There are several times where the visuals are so high fidelity that it feels plastic, especially in the place you spend most of the game.

The ranch in Slime Rancher is perfect, a small farmhouse in the rundown, abandoned farm with plenty of random food and slimes lying about. The expansions to the ranch are perfectly connected to the main farm in a seamless way, like a small crevasse that leads into a large sprawling cave, or a ravine pathway leading to a jungle grotto. In Slime Rancher 2, you are immediately bombarded with the brightest lights, brightest grass, and the biggest greenhouse imaginable. It feels terrible to be on your ranch in Slime Rancher 2; it hurts my eyes.

The expansions are also way worse; every single one is a land bridge connecting an island, which sounds neat, but in practice, all the expansions feel the same, and the single island that feels unique is so far away (due to the land bridges) that it’s a complete waste of time to even go there.

The vibes may be off, especially at the ranch, but the rest of the game is actually a lot better than the first game. It doesn’t fully make up for the lack of vibes, but the gameplay feels like the natural evolution of Slime Rancher. Ranching isn’t nearly as profitable in the second game, which keeps money a much more important resource, on top of the revamped (for the purpose of this review) crafting system, no longer requiring you to invest all that heavily into it. In the first game, going out into the world for resources was a really bad move. Wild slimes were buggy; there weren’t that many of them, and non-slime resources were better put close to the exits or your own placeable teleporter. The rebalanced systems make it so that most of the money you spend actually goes back into the ranch, and non-slime resources require you to go out into the world. Overall, it’s a much tighter gameplay loop, and I didn’t find myself skipping any days other than when I felt impatient.

The decoration/gadgets also have huge sweeping improvements. First off, you can place anything anywhere now. In the first game, you were limited to a select few locations that the developers picked out a long time ago. In practice, this doesn’t really change much, but it allows for much more in-depth decoration, which does help with the earlier-mentioned vibe issues, as you can sort of transform the world (this doesn’t fix the lighting or texturing, though)

Spoiler warning for this last bit, the ending. Despite my positive streak, I have almost nothing good to say about the ending. The side quest you have to do before the ending is almost really cool, but for some reason, they condensed the entire thing into one area rather than making you actually search for the objective. What could have been this awesome quest, going back through your entire journey, just becomes another side objective in the already very full area called “The Grey Labyrinth.” After you spend 20 minutes completing the last step of the journey, there’s a cool boss fight against a giant tar slime.

I have no complaints about that fight; it was very fitting and pretty fun. The ending cutscene, however, needs context to explain why I so adamantly hate it. In the first game, while you’re playing, you’ll periodically get mail from your characters’ best friend and potential love interest that they had left behind on earth. You come to learn all about your character and theirs through the messages, hearing their shared life story. Through this, you learn they’re a musician, and throughout the course of these messages, as time passes, they plan and go on another tour, leaving you the final message that deep down, they hope they somehow see your character in the crowd, saying if they do, they’d sing a song for you. Immediately after reading this letter, the end credits roll with them sitting on a ledge playing a song while looking at the stars. As the screen scrolls up and travels through space, the song “1000 light years away” plays out the credits. This whole ordeal had a huge impact on me; to this day, I still cry just by hearing the song. It’s among my favorite endings to anything ever. It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t action-packed, it just felt real and grounded.

Now armed with that context, the second game’s ending has nearly zero buildup. The overarching story is that the daughter of the person who left the ranch for you in the first game has traveled back in time from the future to stop some great cataclysmic event. Immediately, you can see how all those feelings from the first game are just gone. After going through that boss fight, you see the credits scene… which was so forgettable I forgot it. But there is a scene after the credits where the future daughter goes and talks to her parents. I imagine I don’t even need to explain where this ending fails compared to the first game, but honestly, they could’ve told this story very well. The message they were trying to convey was a very good one, being one of prenatal love and not trying to handle everything alone. The ending and build-up just fail at properly building up those themes since they’re always so fixated on the incoming cataclysm. The game honestly would have been better without a threat. Slime Rancher works best when you don’t feel rushed, when you can just enjoy yourself and embrace the scenery. There are some logbooks found around the game that show a lot of these themes, embracing the world, being homesick, and feeling alone, but much of the story just ignores that.

For all its flaws, my final rating for Slime Rancher 2 is still an 8/10; it is much better as a game than the first one, which slightly makes up for the lack of a good story and poor vibes, but the main hub of the game being an eyesore keeps it lower than a 9/10. I still love Slime Rancher 2 and would consider it one of my favorite games, but if any DLC content for it comes out, or maybe even a third game, I’d like to see a lot of corrections to these issues.