Review: Slime San (Switch)

by Jon Cousins

S-(ub)-lime San.

There was once a time when indie games were very few and far between. It was uncharted territory for a small group of individuals to compromise their very livelihoods to pursue their passion night after night to take part in the lottery that is success.

In 2010, Super Meat Boy changed all that, and the indie game scene has gone from strength to strength ever since. Of course, with such an explosion in popularity, there are inevitably some who take the 'imitation is the highest form of flattery' philosophy a little too cynically, forever blurring the lines between homage and just plain rip off.

After years of different success stories, failed attempts and copycats, indie games are incredibly prominent, and with the recent success of the Nintendo Switch, they show no signs of slowing down.

Slime San, from developer Fabraz, is a briskly paced platformer, requiring excellent reactions, timing and a healthy slab of persistence. As an innocent globule of slime, our protagonist was just going about business that slime typically does, only for a giant worm to swallow him whole. Rather than be digested by the worm's ever rising stomach acid, Slime San must navigate a series of platforming levels within the worm's intestines and escape by reaching his mouth.

Starting with a couple of standard jumping and climbing moves, it isn't long before you can combine dashing, slowing down time and phase shifting through walls to progress through the worms insides and achieve your goal of escaping, all with a very satisfying level of dexterity and skill that never seems unattainable. As well as the main game, there's also town areas where you can spend your hard earned fruit currency on cosmetic accessories or borders, to a wide variety of power ups that balance different attributes, such as speed or jump height, and waste an embarrassing amount of time playing the mini games, trying out the speed running challenges or interacting with local towns folk. There's also a decent amount of cheeky humour in the dialogue and the dancey chip tune soundtrack keeps the tempo up.

If you even need to get past the rather garish colour scheme and the initially unforgiving pace, there is a brilliant, truly addictive, fiendishly but not unfairly difficult platform game here. Plenty of levels, collectables and customisation compliment tight and rewarding mechanics, even if there is a bit of a learning curve to endure. Slime San is a charming and solid (in more ways than one) retro gem that is well worth your time, that is very reminiscent of Super Meat Boy, but always manages to feel fresh.

Final Score: 8.5

(Review code provided by the publisher)