The game so nice, we reviewed it twice!
There's something interesting about coming back to a title after some extra polish.
A little while back, we actually did a review for Slime-San upon it's original release on the Switch...Well, I say 'we'. I. I did the review. Game's still on my Switch. If you don't want to go back and read that review to see my initial impressions of the core game, the incredibly short version is that it's a really really good 2D platformer that looks like a Super Gameboy game. Thank you, come back next time, could you click an ad on the way out? You're the best.
Okay, everyone that's still here, let's start talking. Slime-San sits as a unique item in a lot of different ways. First, let's run down what you're actually getting. Slime-San is, at its core, a basic 2D platformer of the single screen variety. You spawn somewhere, you need to get to a goal, there's a bunch of stuff to navigate between the A and the B. You've probably played one of these before.
Where Slime-San sets itself apart is...Well, three places. The first is just that it's a very well executed game. The mechanics are interesting, the designs fair, and the levels tend to make survival really straightforward, but getting the collectable apples or meeting the par time pretty tricky...And doing both is super hard.
The second is in its broader aesthetic, which rides a very careful line between cute and gross. It's, and I'm genuinely surprised I never seemed to have written this in the first review, almost in the vein of the superflat art movement. Now, the cute and gross thing is not a terribly uncommon combination, but Slime-San feeds it very carefully so both are maintained, instead of just shifting from one extreme to the other for effect. And it's all enhanced by...
The third point of setting itself apart, the color scheme. I briefly mentioned it at the top, and did some history talk in the original review, but Slime-San uses a very strict 4+1 color scheme that looks straight out of a game built exclusively to use the Super Gameboy's hardware mix. The other thing this does, is it makes Slime-San the single most color-accessible game I have ever played. It has complete color shifts for every major type of color blindness, plus a customizable mode that lets you completely adjust each of those major colors.
This all comes together into a game that's a bit different from almost everything else I've played. Now, of course, just about everything I've said so far applies to both versions of the game. The original release I played last year had all of this be just as true.
So what's the new version bring? It's an ultimate edition, which means DLC out the colossal worm hiney, but what does that actually mean? And is the stuff you get any good? Ah, now there's the key question. The main additional content brought forth from the additional content are three new campaigns: Blackbird's Kraken, Sheeple's Sequel, and an additional set of levels, each built around a different member of the Slime family and their unique mechanics. This all adds up to, quite frankly, an absurd amount of content.
Content you probably won't be seeing for a bit, though, because these are hard. The DLC stages are absolutely built under the assumption that you've completed the core game, and while a good chunk of the levels are still reasonably fair to survive, trying to get the fruit and come under par is a genuine madness-inducer on some of these stages.
Not that that's the end of the world, though. After all, this is a lot of content, after a lot of content. And when combined with the core campaign, you get a very smooth ramping up of difficulty that teaches you a lot of the skills you need. There are even training areas all about learning new, complicated techniques to turn them into raw and brutal muscle memory.
So all of this is to say that the Superslime Edition is well worth your time if you're just getting into the world of Slime-San, now that it's available on PS4. But what if you're on the Switch version still, like I have from when I reviewed that original version last year? Is it worth the money to upgrade?
I have good news for you.
You don't have to.
Because you already did.
All of the content was patched into pre-existing versions, for free. That's right. If you bought and mastered Slime-San at some point in the past, there are roughly 60 new stages just waiting for you to go play. Right now. On whatever device you own.
That's...That's bananas, right? Like, I'm literally sitting here, doing some research, I go to boot up the original Switch copy of the game to do some quick comparisons and see just what content is only in the new Superslime Edition, and it does a patch update and is the new Superslime Edition.
So, here's the thing I'm left with. Go get this game. It has become massively more than it was when I reviewed it last year, and it was a fantastic game then. I can only speak to the Switch and PS4 versions I've reviewed, but they're gold. Even if you're working with just an Xbox or a Steam account, in which case I'm a little surprised you're reading this, but I have no reason to believe you'd be getting anything less. It is so, so worth your time and money.
Slime-San started great, and got better. You need this one in your collection.