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Ooblets is a sickly sweet Poké-like, but it’s got me hookedPokést Moon
Pokést Moon
Oobletsis what it looks like. That can be a bit of a cop out as descriptions go, but I saw almost no footage of it before guessing it was a cross between a Harvest Moon farming/fix-up-the-town game and a Pokémon-style monster collector, and so it is.
Farming takes very little hard work, but it’s still nice to see everything grow.
Farming takes very little hard work, but it’s still nice to see everything grow.
It’s incredibly generous with all of it. There’s more than enough time to get lots done, plentiful food items to replenish your energy, and you have no costs aside from buying seeds, some of which are exceedingly cheap. You’d have to be trying extremely hard to fail, and although much of your earnings come from the usual routine of clearing and tilling land, planting and watering seeds, and then selling the produce to the local shop, you’re showered with money and rewards for just about everything.
The ooblets are too tiny for the dance moves to really look like much but a bit of wiggling and jumping.
I neglected cooking terribly. Silly, since you can sell food, use it for more energy, or give it to certain villagers.
This is done with a card game that’s almost, but not really, a deckbuilder. Hands are drawn randomly from your deck, but you don’t have to worry about collecting cards or obsess over numbers. Your ooblets each add their own dance moves to your deck, with some being good point earners, others better at making the other team nervous, lowering the points their moves generate. Some outright steal opponents' points, and others hype up the crowd so your other dance moves score more.
You can pet any wild ooblets around town. When you win a badge, the mayor’s asssitant runs all the way across town to beak-deliver it.
When you travel to new areas of the island, you meet more complicated dancers and strategies, but it remains very low pressure and frankly it’s hard to lose. The AI is not yet able to handle advanced moves and often hamstrings itself with them. But this is okay! Perhaps there’ll be more difficult bits later during its early access period, or harsher difficulty settings - but I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t. It’s not meant to be difficult, because it’s more about the joy of collecting and capering about with your ooblets than about becoming more powerful.
When you win a dance-off, you reassure the opposing dancers that they did well, and optionally, pet them so that they fart out a seed, which you can plant at your farm to grow your own new ooblet. It is all super cute. Practically everything in Ooblets has a near toddlerish name. One of my tasks was to deliver 20 nurnies to the gotsaplop for some gummies. If I feed a frontywun to the dumbirb the mayor will give me 10 wishies. I need to find more seaplops, quibs, and a sporbet for the lernery, and I only made up one of those words. Instead of “to fish” you say “to sea-dangle”, and my favourite villager has a “printypress”.
Arah is my favourite but I think she already has a gf :(
A shop worker sometimes cheerily hints that she’s going out of business. The mayor’s day is mostly taken up with her weird and awkward dancing in the town square instead of fixing anything, and someone asks for help recovering some stolen items, explaining that “I don’t like confrontation, so I was waiting until someone else came along to do it for me”. It’s a knowingly odd place, but not one that’s trying too hard to prove it.
Not every game needs outright conflict, but a tiny pinch can go a long way.
Oh, and you can give your ooblets little hats.
Ooblets is out now onEpic Gamesfor £20/€21/$25, discounted to £20/€16.80/$20 for its opening week.
