Continuing the trend of very janky indies that I’m weirdly fond of, Oooze Keeper! Even though they are slimes. In all the game text, they’re slimes. What are oozes. Someone help.

Ooze Keeper is what I’ve been calling a Landlordlike, one of many roguelike deckbuilders based on making rent that has popped up in the wake of the genius Luck Be a Landlord and its child Balatro. I love this genre and I hope we continue to be flooded with them, which undoubtedly influenced my weird enjoyment of this very punishing and grindy game, so take that into consideration.

In its current state, it is kind of tough to recommend Ooze Keeper. You’d have to love this subsubgenre, love weird janky indies, probably also find slimes as a creature type as cute and appealling as I do, and not mind grindfests. But I actually think the fixes to take this from “can’t rec” to “solid entry in the genre” are pretty mild, and I would love to see the dev keep working, either on this or other games.

In Ooze Keeper, you place, uh, slimes on islands. The slimes interact with each other and environments on nearby island, producing items which you can then sell to buy more islands and/or slimes. The goal is to make enough money to pay your periodic rent. Slimes can be bred to create new, rarer types of slimes, and the game encourages you to experiment to find them all.

The issue with that last part is that trial-and-error-ing your way through slime breeding is impossible. Some review calculated something like 500,000 possible combinations. For me, this very quickly became frustrating, and I started using a guide. But… the guide made it fun again. Because just knowing what combos you needed didn’t mean I suddenly had a setup that made that slime possible to get. The guide let me say, “Okay, on this run, I’ll aim for X, next run I’ll do Y,” and I was actually able to strategize around what I needed to do. This was true for the plot elements as well — knowing what to do next instead of trying to stumble into stuff randomly made it a lot more interesting.

And I genuinely think that’s the fix for this game: Tell the player what they need to do, and let figuring out how to do it be the challenge. Adding a “how to breed” into the encyclopedia and a journal with detailed quest notes, for me, would take this game from a “well I put 30 hours into 100%ing it but couldn’t really rec it,” to “if you like this genre this is a great entry.”

The other big change I’d make is I’d quarter or even halve the pay period. I found runs of this game to be insanely long, so long that it was taking me all day to get through just one run. IMO this is a big problem in this kind of game, because that meant that if I got late into a run and realized I wasn’t set up well enough to accomplish the story thing I needed to, I’d wasted a huge amount of time, which was not a fun feeling. I honestly think the pay period could be cut without any rebalancing on rent or slime output — there was just so much extra time. Even my self-guillotine runs in Landlord are nowhere near this long.

I also think this fix would fix something else that I don’t think is the actual problem — the Crab Problem. People were pointing out that Crab Runs were the only viable ones, but this isn’t true — I actually didn’t discover the crab runs until relatively late, getting by fine on other combos (especially Turnips). The reason so many people are using crabs (lol) is that it’s a simple and reliable way to not waste 6 hours. The effect of runs being so long is that is discourages you from experimenting with different combos and such, because the opportunity cost of risk is just too high. If you’re doing shorter runs, you may be losing more, but you’re also seeing more of the game, and taking chances on weird combos is easier. I suspect the pay periods were made so long to make the game easier, but I think it paradoxically makes it more difficult, or at least less fun.

I think these changes would take this from that “interesting indie that doesn’t quite work” to possibly a general rec for me, as I think the bones and concept here are really good. It’s a fun iteration of the formula and also slimes are cute and I love them. I do think it’s worth checking out if you like interesting-but-not-necessarily-successful-indies, especially if you’re also fond of this genre. But in its current state I think it would just end up confirming for someone who doesn’t like these games why they don’t like them.

I hope the dev continues to work on this game, or at least continues to make games, because there’s flashes of brilliance here, and I’d hate to see them give up.