Review of Ooblets: you are a really rad guy
Our Verdict
A new contender for the best wholesome game on Switch, Ooblets matches smart farming mechanics with satisfying creature collecting, and the vegetable critters known as the Ooblets are the star of the show. Dance battles are thrilling, and there are endless amounts of ways to customise and improve every aspect of the game but don’t expect to get anywhere quickly, as with so many different gameplay elements it’s easy to get buried under the workload
Farming games and other "wholesome" games that mimic the relaxing atmosphere of games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley are abundant right now and provide a cozy experience ideal for curling up with for a few hours on a chilly Sunday afternoon. The popularity of the aforementioned games plus a few really popular Instagram accounts have propelled the once niche genre into the mainstream, so there may be too many of such games coming out in the near future.
However, much like a quality Apple product, there are occasions when creating something entirely new is unnecessary; instead, the greatest features should be gathered and presented in a single, easily portable package. The iPhone of agricultural simulations is called Ooblets. Not the newest or greatest at the party, but a sleek package with all the functionality you could want for tastefully displayed.
Ooblets, developed and published by Glumberland, was previously accessible on Steam in a beta form. Today, the game's significant 1.0 update is released on PC, and it is also simultaneously released on other platforms, such as the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation. Now that you may gather little vegetable beings anywhere, how well does this Nintendo Switch game stand up? And what makes Ooblets unique for those seeking to immerse themselves in a cozy new farming game among the plethora of options available today.
If you're unfamiliar with Ooblets, it's a charming game with pastel colors that skillfully combines a farming simulation with creature gathering. After your character relocates to the laid-back town of Oob, the home of the Ooblets, you go on a mission to develop and renovate a dilapidated farm while spotting some of those cute Ooblets. The town is home to a number of amiable individuals, a few interesting stores offering a variety of food, apparel, and furnishing products for purchase, as well as more locations that you may access as your relationships with people deepen.
Once you become friends with the owner of each vendor, you may expand them all. Your friendship level is shown on a meter that rises as you speak with them often or do tasks they assign you. These may include obtaining materials, assisting them in locating Ooblets, and a few other entertaining factors. Both Badgetown and your farm begin very shabby and unassuming, but you have the ability to transform them into magnificent, vibrant communities full of character. You may unlock more furniture, clothing, and other items to wear, decorate, or cultivate on your farm as you increase each vendor.
I spend a little portion of each day just strolling around and conversing with everyone since it's a rewarding gradual build and because you can make friends by talking to people. I try not to skip the conversation since it's pleasant and well-written, and I really like spending time with the hilarious characters. In addition, you may fish using litter-made bait, collect necessary materials daily, and even participate in the daily dance combat competition (more on that later) to gain more resources. There are so many things to do in Badgetown and around Greater Oob, making it a very delightful destination to explore.
You can discover additional clothing, Ooblet accessories, and furnishings to switch up your look in the home and wardrobe as you farm and collect more Ooblets. You can also dress up your favorite Ooblets in lovely ensembles. The soft pastel art style goes well with the decoration elements, and there's a great selection of clothing items, with new ones being added every day. I made a particularly aesthetically pleasing house for myself with some softly colored furniture and a few interesting pieces for my home.
Naturally, this is all done to help with the game's primary objective, which is to gather creatures. The beings in question are the little, sentient vegetables known as Ooblets, who roam the country of Oob in many locales. After a set length of in-game time and some love and care, the seeds you get from the Ooblets may be planted on your farm to create your very own replica of that Ooblet.
After you've assembled a small group of Ooblets, you may either assign them to work on the farm, where you can cultivate food-related seeds (more on that later), or you can keep up to eight Ooblets in your group and go out and find additional Ooblets to add to your expanding harvest. It may seem straightforward to discover and gather seeds from Ooblets if you've played a creature-collecting game like Pokémon, but it's not quite that simple.
I want to break down the essence of collecting the Ooblets since it's a trip; I'll discuss the other components of the game at a later time. To begin with, each day begins with a brief overview of all the many Ooblets that inhabit Oob and its numerous locales (which may be reached by hot air balloon) on that particular day. In addition to having a large number, Ooblets are essentially shiny Pokémon that come in common, uncommon, and gleamy colors. So much to locate and gather.
Collaborating with a nearby scientist, you go on a mission to record every Ooblet, and in exchange for your efforts, you'll receive gummies—the in-game money. A standard Ooblet will get you fifty gummies, a rare one hundred, and the elusive gleamies a cool three hundred. The procedure of extracting the seed from each Ooblet is when things become complicated. You don't have to fight an Ooblet to the death, throwing carrots and onions together in a terrifying stew, in order to beat them. You participate in dancing wars that induce fever dreams instead.
I think my favorite part of the game is probably the dance battles; they're silly and joyful in the best kind of ways, the music is great (a good variety of electronic beats mixed with a theme from a children's TV show), and the mechanics behind the dance battles themselves are really clever. A few regular decks that are always available determine the cards you use in combat, and each Ooblet adds a variety of unique cards to the deck.
No matter when you gather an Ooblet, you begin with one card, and as you level it up via dance fights, you may unlock the remaining two cards to add to your deck. Each Ooblet has three cards in total. You combat with the number of Ooblets that the other side has, even though you may have up to eight Ooblets in your party. This may be 1v1 at times, but I've also seen bouts up to 6v6, and the more Ooblets you add, the more chaotic things become. The number of beats you have determines how many cards you may use; in general, you can utilize three beats every turn in single fights, and many more in bigger ones.
Every dance fight is a race to get a point total, which usually starts at twenty and goes up as additional Ooblets enter the field. A card that uses up more of your beats will do more than one that takes up two beats and adds two points. However, because of the status consequences of enthusiasm and fluster, it's not quite that easy. Some of your cards may be used to generate buzz, and the more hype you generate while playing your normal cards, the more points they will provide you. A card that took two beats to play might now give you eight points if you manage to get three or four hype, and so on. On the other hand, if you give your opponent more fluster, you may negate their hype or, in the absence of any, make their cards worth zero or one point when played.
Other features include the capacity to steal points, shock opponents, and add point-wasting cards, or "trepidation cards," to either team's deck. Certain Ooblets also have cards that provide items other than dancing battles, including resources like planklets or seeds for nourishment. I've been hooked to this massive system for a very long time, and it gives you a great added reason to uncover new Ooblets so you can find out what cards they have and level them up to disclose even more. Since I really like surprises and the opportunity to try new things, I haven't used any of the web resources that list all of the cards. In contrast to Pokémon, I switch up my squad all the time and experiment with different strategies, particularly because later Ooblet opponents progressively raise the stakes.
That takes care of Ooblets and dance fights, but we still need to talk about how to get Ooblets, which is where farming comes in. It's not enough to just go up to an Ooblet and throw down a dance fight, a la Starlord. Rather, you must provide them with an offering of their favorite cuisine, which may take the form of seeds, resources, or even whole dishes made up of a variety of other items. It goes without saying that they begin simple enough, with Ooblets begging for some of the berries you may pick by just walking about Badgetown, the primary center, and shaking down some trees.
Later on, however, things become a little more difficult since Ooblets need recipes that, if you have them at all, consist of many distinct meals. Occasionally, when exploring the environment, you will come across regions or items that have a golden aura, indicating that something is there just waiting to be found. Occasionally, one of these things is a recipe scrap. If you have the necessary tools and supplies, you may put four recipe parts together to form a single dish, expanding your culinary versatility.
One can obtain ingredients through two methods: either foraging (many towns have bushes that yield items like chillies, seeds, or other edibles and leftovers), purchasing seeds from various stores and planting them on your farm (which takes a few days), or processing some ingredients to create something else. You may make froobtose, or sugar, by processing the vegetable known as a sweetiebeetie in a machine called a crunchster. In the meanwhile, spring beans may be used to make beanjuice or spressy, a beverage that tastes like coffee but really provides you with more energy.
Finding an Ooblet is the simple part, is what I'm trying to say. It might be rather difficult to ensure kids eat enough of their favorite cuisine on the appropriate day, even if you can't locate or afford the components. Finding a new Ooblet only to discover that it either didn't have the correct formula yet, that crops were growing but wouldn't be ready for a few days, or that it even had the precise food I required but wasn't in my pocket was quite irritating. Of course, I could simply go back home, take it out of the refrigerator, and go back to my original position, but that would just highlight my main issue with the game—unnecessary busywork.
I'm a patient guy and I simply love a farming simulation. I've invested more than 200 hours in Stardew Valley, a comparable amount in Dragon Quest Builders 2, and I shudder to think of how much time I've spent over the years creating my various teams in Pokémon games. In addition, and I don't want to take anything away from how much I'm loving Ooblets, I simply can't get over how difficult it is to complete the task that seems to be the core of the game.
I like Ooblets, I want to collect them all, and it always makes me extremely happy to see one for the first time since they all have hilarious puns based on vegetables and ridiculous designs. It depresses me a little when I can't even find the recipe or the supplies to prepare it, even after spending weeks working through the game to get there. Yes, it's something to strive for, but eventually, when I simply wanted to be enjoying the dancing fights and earning Ooblets, it started to seem like a very difficult task.
I completely get its purpose, which is to emphasize the significance of farming. I realize that it's just a feature of the game at this point, but if I could change anything, it would be that you could either magically summon the food an Ooblet requests from your house's expanded inventory, such as a chest or refrigerator, or you could give it to them from your own inventory. Either that, or I would let the Ooblet give you the formula so you could get them, so at least you would know precisely what you need and where to go.
Finding recipes by gathering them from the odd fragments lying about is a laborious and unsatisfactory method. On the other hand, Mayor Tinstle of Badgetown awards you with badges for doing in-game chores, and these badges may be exchanged for wishies. These may be used at the town's wish well to get resources, open up additional features for the town, unlock recipes, and open up a larger farm. Since there are so many wonderful things to discover and advance, I must admit that I also resent having to spend my hard-earned wishies on a recipe I really need. Not that I disliked the procedure, but there were a lot of Ooblets to catch, locations to discover, and recipes to discover—it became old far faster than I had anticipated.
In relation to exploring, let me add that Ooblets has an engaging tale at its core. Numerous towers can be found scattered over Oob's territory in places like Mammonia, Nullwhere, Port Forwards, and so on. The objective is to locate every tower and activate it, boosting the Oob network's signal, among other such ridiculous goals. Basically, all you have to do is locate the tower by doing the necessary chores in each location, then flip a large switch. Even if you still want to do some exploration and farming each day, there's enough motivation to keep things moving forward.
There are several other jobs you must perform in order to unlock the towers, but my personal favorite is Port Forwards. A variety of arcade cabinets with fully functional tiny arcade games that are ready to be played can be found at Port Forwards. Your goal is to top the scoreboard on each and every one of them; some aren't knockouts, but they're all entertaining in their own unique ways. Later on in the game, I was quite aback to see such dedication poured into another section, and to be honest, Ooblets simply keeps becoming bigger and bigger as you play.
After a while, I was able to create my own store, however it's now not operating correctly. To be honest, if you reach that point in the game before the fix goes live, you have a ton of free time. The developer has acknowledged that it is aware of the problem and has already put out a patch, which should be live in a few days. Unfortunately, there are a few additional minor defects here and there, such as UI glitches and the sporadic collision of objects in the environment that are moving.
The minigames in Port Forwards are all entertaining, yet the Switch controller instructions need labeling, since A and B appear on different buttons from the real controller layout. I should note, however, that the game functions quite well overall. The game looks stunning, particularly on the OLED with its lovely soft color palette; load times are there but not too bothersome; and while the game may chug a bit during intense dancing fights, it never does so to the point where it becomes impractical.
When it comes to agricultural aspects, Ooblets excels as well. Its intelligent user interface makes it simple to go around and use tools, and in due course, you can automate a great deal of your farming using equipment like sprinklers and gradually by utilizing the Ooblets to tend to your crops. Adding more Ooblets to your farm may be a bit of a pain since you can only have so many Ooblets on your farm. To increase the number of Ooblets you have, you must install more structures called oobcoops, which need a significant amount of resources to build and renovate.
The fact that I had many seeds on my farm ready to give birth to brand-new Ooblets that I had spent hours courting just makes things worse. I had to spend additional hours collecting the materials to construct an extra shelter for them after I had previously had problems actually unlocking the Ooblets. Even while it's not nearly as bad as the recipes, the total is still high. Once again, I've had a great time playing the game and collecting Ooblets.
Not to mention various colorways, I have over twenty of the darling little blighters, and each one is a delight to unlock because to the designs and unique cards. But sometimes it may be so hard to even get there. People who are not as patient as I am would find this to be a deal killer, but I can tolerate it since I like this kind of game. I'm not sure if this is something I'd suggest to beginners looking to get into the agricultural sim genre. Well, by all means, go ahead and enjoy the lengthy process if you know what you're getting into. Perhaps you won't find it as bothersome as I did the difficult procedure of actually unlocking Ooblets.
Ooblets is an amazing, captivating, and aesthetically pleasing game that is packed with of entertaining activities, locations, and things to discover. I simply don't see why the process of actually catching the Ooblets has to be so drawn out in a game that already has too many things to do, even while fighting with Ooblets is an incredible fun and constructing your deck offers so much space for experimentation.
It does not lessen the fact that Ooblets is a great hit in the cozy, healthy farming sim genre. It pulls off a lot of things extremely well while adding its own unique charm to each and every one of them. However, those who lack patience may find it difficult to go beyond the simple first stages, since the several systems might combine to overwhelm the player with busywork.