Slime Rancher

Slime Rancher is an enjoyable foray into virtual ranching, yet fails to provide enough meaningful depth beyond its adorable visual identity. Befriending slimes and populating your growing farm with them is engaging at first, and remains so for several hours. Soon after, though, the cracks begin to show.

Everything comes to together in a carefully crafted whole with surprising depth that provides incentives to collect every slime and buy every upgrade (not to mention lots of resource-intensive, late-game rewards for the especially dedicated). Slime Rancher has the ability to keep you hooked for hours; I often looked out over my ranch, felt pride at my accomplishments, and eagerly ventured back into the wilderness to see what other strange things I could find.