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Ooblets Preview: Put On Your Dancing Shoes | Screen Rant
For players who keep a close eye on indie development, the hype for Ooblets‘ release couldn’t be higher. For those not in the know about what an Ooblet is or why they should play a game about them, Ooblets takes the farming and life sim elements of games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing and mashes them up with the monster collecting and battling of Pokémon, but with its own idiosyncratic spin. While that might make it sound like a paint-by-numbers affair, Ooblets packs enough personality and clever mechanics that it never once feels derivative.
Ooblets wastes no time establishing exactly what its tone will be even before the game starts in earnest. The initial loading screen is full of cloyingly cute fake progress messages that lead into a splash screen of a bipedal goldfish in sunglasses (technically an Ooblet) dancing on a dock while a goofy but excellent song plays in the background. The game then asks for your name with the message “What’s yer name buddy?? Spell it out,” and a button labeled “Dunnit” to click once it’s entered.
The point is, it’s a lot to take in up front and it leaves the impression that Ooblets isn’t content to let a single text box go by without a joke in it. Once the game actually starts, it keeps delivering whimsy at nearly lethal doses, explaining how the player will need to collect nurnies, plant sweetiebeeties, and recruit Lumpstumps to join them if they want to make progress. It makes the first hour or so of the game utterly perplexing and buries a lot of the genuinely good and funny writing on display.
Once Ooblets is satisfied that its laid a foundation of silliness and gotten the player to understand what it’s all about, things get considerably better. The cuteness overload of the first few hours settles into a sweet and welcoming atmosphere that’s almost palpably calming to spend time in. Ooblets’ central hub of Badgetown is filled with mostly charming characters who are worth talking to as much for their sharp dialogue as for how they help progress the game. Along with the town’s human inhabitants, there are of course the Ooblets, a collection of knee-high monsters based on plants, animals, and machines that players will spend a lot of time interacting with.
The first few hours introduce the game’s central elements at a quick but digestible pace, getting players up to speed on farming, fulfilling townspeople’s requests, and managing their Ooblets without ever bogging them down in hand-holding tutorials. Like most life sim games, Ooblets follows a daily structure, giving players a laundry list of tasks to get done and a finite amount of time each in-game day to do it all. On this level, players will never run out of things to do and there are rewards for doing just about everything. Planting and harvesting crops, collecting and processing junk, and talking to villagers are all tied to quests and grant experience points at the end of the day. There’s a constant sense of progress without any overarching goal, feeding the compulsive gameplay loop that drives so many life sims, and unlike many similar games, there’s almost no sense of pressure to get anything in particular done in a given day. Ooblets makes spending a full day shopping for furniture or talking to villagers just as worthwhile as one spent planting crops, and that’s an extremely welcome feeling.
Of course, Ooblets isn’t just about farming; it’s also about Ooblets. The titular creatures are the number one obsession of seemingly everyone in the game’s world, and one of the player’s main objectives is to gather an ever-growing army of them to engage in dance battles.
That’s right, late in development Glumberland decided to replace its Pokémon-style combat with much more ethically sound card-based dance battles between Ooblets. Any time a player encounters a wild Ooblet or runs into another Ooblet trainer, they can initiate a dance battle. In practice, it doesn’t feel much different from any other card-based combat system. Players draw a hand of cards each turn and have a certain number of points (called Beats in this case) to spend on them. The most basic type of card awards points, and the goal is to hit a target number of points before the opponent. If that sounds simple, well, that’s because it is. Things get a bit more complex than that, with cards that can increase your point gains and decrease the enemy’s, stun Ooblets on the other team, trade points for new cards and so on. In the end, though, the best strategy almost always seems to be just to get points as quickly as possible. These dance battles are the part of the game that needs the most work by far, as right now they go from being adorable and fun to slow and repetitive after just a handful of encounters.
Repetition eventually permeates the rest of the experience as well. While there are always more checklists to fill out in Ooblets, the range of activities available right now is pretty small. A new player could easily see just about everything the game has to offer in one or two play sessions, and while that’s good enough for now, the full game will be tough to recommend if it doesn’t get more variety.
Despite the game getting repetitive quickly, it never quite gets boring. Even things as simple as picking crops and going shopping are fun, thanks in large part to Ooblets’ relentlessly cheerful music and gorgeous, colorful art style. While there might not be much of an arc to the game at this point, buying new outfits and decorating your home feel as compelling as any more substantial goal would in a game without the endless charm of Ooblets. That charm may not be enough to carry the game after its full release, but it’s a solid place for the pre-release version out now to start from.
Ooblets is available now in Early Access on the Epic Games Store and on Xbox Game Pass on Xbox One.
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Source: ScreenRant
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