Fall is here, which means it’s time to cozy up with a game before winter comes. And what better way to do so than with Ooblets, a farming sim all about dancing with effortlessly charming creatures?
Ooblets
Developer: Glumberland
Price: $30
Platform: PC & Switch
MonsterVine was supplied with a Switch code for review
Ooblets has your character fresh off the boat in a new town called Badgetown. You’re immediately introduced to the mayor who (surprise surprise) puts you on a dirt lot and expects you to get to work. It’s all a lot more whimsical of a setup than something like Animal Crossing where you’re immediately indebted to Tom Nook, but the overall setup is still the same.
Now I’ve always had trouble getting into farm sims, but I usually bounce off them because I’m a big dumb who needs to be told what daily loop the game is expecting me to do and I just sit there kind of lost. Now while Ooblets doesn’t exactly hold your hand throughout the process, it does feature mechanics that help steer you into knowing what activities you should be focusing on. As someone who doesn’t have a super huge amount of time to play games, and has to play them in small chunks, it was nice being able to boot up Ooblets and easily know what crops I was/should be growing or what objective I was working towards. To accomplish this, Ooblets features sets of quests that you can acquire from the mayor herself (these are more story focused and push the plot along) or you could also pick up some smaller quests from the local quest board. It all works together to ensure that there’s always something pointing you in a direction to work towards so you’re not just standing there wondering what to do next.
Additionally, the town features a host of quirky characters that you can interact with you increase your friendship with that will reward you with stickers to fill your journal or cosmetics. These interactions are all very surface level, and mostly involve just chatting with them each day, but they all have their own endearing personality that quickly has you picking favorites and wondering what they’re up to each day. You can also acquire your own shop that you can run after you progress far enough. My only real issue with the game’s quest system is that it can sometimes be kind of vague with how to acquire an item a character needs. Some requests will see you needing to buy the seeds to grow a particular fruit, then tossing that into a dehydrator machine to turn it into a powder, but sometimes there’s not a clear throughline in the naming scheme of both items so it’s not immediately clear one turns into the other. It didn’t happen super often, but when it does it can leave you a bit frustrated and running to google.
Ooblets’ major gimmick is the pseudo Pokémon element to it. The titular ooblets can be found all over the game’s various environments and there are dozens to find. You’re told which ooblets will appear in an area, and after bringing it a particular item it likes (like some planks of wood or a fruit) you’ll then be able to challenge it to a dance battle. These dance battles are the other half of this game, as you need ooblets to help tend to your farm and you need to perform in these dance battles to acquire new ones.
Dance battles can be comprised of either a single ooblet, or multiples, and the goal is to fill your hype meter before the opposing team does. You do this by performing dance maneuvers with the cards you draw each turn from your deck. Now don’t worry, this isn’t a deck building game; each ooblet comes with their own handful of cards, and those are shuffled into a deck for you before each battle. Ooblets will have their own unique cards that can do a variety of things like give a massive point boost, or steal points from the opponent, and you can acquire more by leveling up these ooblets in battles. The battles are pretty simple, and I don’t think I ever lost one, but they go by quickly and are charming enough to win you over its repetitive nature.
After winning a battle you’re presented with a seed from the other team’s ooblet, which you can then plant in your garden to grow an ooblet of your own of that type. These ooblets can then either be placed in your party (that follow you around and are used in battles), thrown in a preservation area, or kept on your farm where you can assign them tasks like keeping plants watered. It’s an immediately addicting loop as you see what ooblets are available and where, battle them for their seed, then growing your own and assigning them wherever you want. You can even go to a character that lets you print out 3D models of any new ooblets you find, that you can then display in a collection over at city hall, which instantly appealed to my collecting habit.
The Final Word
Ooblets is an immediately charming game with its whimsical cast of characters, that does enough different in the genre to help keep you wanting to check back into it when the mood strikes.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
