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Maybe it’s because I’ve been bouncing between a lot of weighty games lately, but I’ve found a great diversion in The True Slime King, a simple three button platformer that recently left early access.
Speaking pedantically, this isn’t “as simple as it gets”, but you’ll get what I mean if I describe it that way anyway. You move and jump, dodging spikes and lasers and ISO 13370 compliant death pits, and ideally collecting all the hard to reach thingies along the way. These are far from my favourite genre, but I’ve played enough to realise I’m partial to a good one, and this is a great one.
It helps a lot that it has a bit of character. You’re the slime king, long lost after your obsession with finding immortality drove you a little mad, and had some tragic consequences for your kingdom. But now you’re back, having died countless times, ready to die countless more to reclaim your land from the pretenders who’ve built all these elaborate death gauntlets to keep you out. It’s unclear whether you’re actually in the right, and what will actually happen if you succeed, giving a small but sufficient story hook. It’s light and slightly slapstick, not harrowing like Heads Run and its world less sprawling and… crayony than Gambol
You get a fairly standard distribution of levels, unlocked in sets of five that you can do in any order by jumping around a sort of overworld level. Finishing these, and particularly, collecting little globs of slime dotted about them will unlock barriers and form bridges in that overworld, lending a minor but welcome layer of exploration with a few hidden bonuses. It’s not enormous, but the world opens up quickly, and not necessarily in a strictly linear order, which helps prevent you getting stuck on one level for too long. You can fast travel by schlooping through little tubes that connect completed levels to save some of this time, too, and each area has a somewhat different look, and some excellent backing music to distinguish them further, and add tonal variety to go along with the increasingly varied hazards and complex levels.
The difficulty is pitched just about right. It’s not sadistic at all, but the easier levels will still catch you out for complacency, and the harder ones are just a little more difficult than you think you can handle, gently pushing you to go for it anyway. It takes a balance of pausing to work out the puzzley parts and what order to collect things in to mark a viable path, and winging it, trusting your instincts and ability to eyeball the distances needed. Sometimes you need to trust that there’s exactly enough room to gloip along that ceiling and freefall between those spikes, and at others you need to consider whether this jump seems impossible because you should be sliding down that less obvious wall instead.
This is a neat thing to take up a weekend. Probably a little more comfortable on a controller, but the slight trouble I had in repeatedly jumping into very obvious oncoming arrows was more of my own cackhanded brain’s doing than any fault of the game’s. I would not be a very good slime king, but that’s okay.