I first heard about Ooblets when I was actively involved in the Twitter indie game development scene. It’s not often that I find something before it blows up, but that’s what happened and I feel like some snooty hipster every time I mention it. Despite that it’s kind of an amazing feeling to make a discovery, so I guess, it’s all good?
If you’re not familiar with Ooblets, it’s been described as a love-child between Pokemon and Stardew Valley, but it’s not really as robust as either. The tone feels like something pulled straight from Nintendo’s Mother series (Earthbound). The humor is goofy, the aesthetics are cute and the music is eclectic. It’s surprisingly addicting too.
Ooblet’s biggest selling point is its tiny plant-based creatures. You essentially grow them from your garden, and you obtain their seeds by winning dance battles. Dance battles are card battles where the cards are determined randomly by which ooblets you have in your battle roster. For the most part, it plays well but I certainly don’t enjoy it that much. Personal opinion: the pacing is slow enough that the battles feel cumbersome. I have found a couple of issues, e.g. being stun-locked an entire battle or being so mired in fu
However, let’s focus on what I absolutely love about this game. First of all, ‘farming on a grid’ mechanic is brilliant. If you ever accidentally clicked the wrong square in other farming sims, you will appreciate how it works in this game. Selection is the primary focus; your character moves to the square you have selected.
The game also has an auto-detection feature that switches the prompts depending on your input method. I like that it does this and more importantly I like that it asks me instead of assuming that the accidental button press was me trying to switch control methods.
There’s a lot of different tasks that you can do from full-fledged quests to delivery tasks. The best part about the quests is you can do partial deliveries of the required items; no more accidentally selling or using items you needed to turn in.
Oh, and did I mention the accessories?
As is, I think Ooblets is worth it’s asking price, despite still being in early access. It will be interesting to see how the development will go from this point forward now that the game is generating revenue. I for one look forward to seeing what will be coming up next.