Monomi ParkSometimes a game is a reinvention of the original, but others it’s not much more than a fresh coat of paint — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After entering early access in 2022, Slime Rancher 2 is out in full, and while it doesn’t cover much ground that the first Slime Rancher didn’t already get to, it’s still a supremely relaxing, gorgeous farming sim that’s easy to get lost in.The premise of Slime Rancher 2 is simple: as Beatrix LeBeau, protagonist of the original game, you receive a summons via mysterious self-piloted boat to leave your ranch for the new environment of Rainbow Island. Beatrix, whose desire for adventure apparently outweighs her self-preservation instincts, climbs aboard, finding an abandoned conservancy waiting for her with all the amenities she needs to start her slime ranching operation anew. From there, you capture and raise slimes while exploring Rainbow Island to discover the new location’s history through notes left behind by its now missing former inhabitants.It’s a pretty thin story to start out, and while there’s some intrigue to uncover through the logs left behind by now-missing researchers, narrative is never the real draw in Slime Rancher 2. The reason to play is the chill farming, which sees you vacuuming up slimes across the island, bringing them home to raise them in enclosures, and feeding them their favorite foods to make a profit. How does feeding them make you a profit, you may ask? Why, by causing the slimes to leave behind a “plort,” which you can sell at a handy machine you find on your ranch. I won’t pretend to understand the poo-based economy at work here, but it does make for a simple, satisfying cycle of exploring the island to find resources and bringing them home to care for your slimes. The more plorts you cash in, the more money you’ll have for upgrades and devices that make your slime vacuum more effective and your farm more efficient.That’s all carried over from the original Slime Rancher, and aside from the new environment, one of the biggest changes for the sequel is the introduction of more slimes. There’s the bunny-eared cotton slime, the winged flutter slime, and the high-speed hyper slime, just to name a few. Each new slime brings its own quirks, like the cotton slime’s penchant for jumping making it much more likely to escape and cause chaos on your ranch, and each also has its own diet that you need to be mindful of to keep them happy and turn a profit off their plorts. For unknown reasons, slimes absolutely love eating the plorts of other species, but doing so runs the risk of turning them into tarr slimes, essentially the gremlins of the Slime Rancher world, who live to make a mess of your hard work. Again, I can’t explain why slimes go so wild for eating each other’s excretions, but I would love to watch a Werner Herzog documentary on what exactly is going on with this ecosystem.Slime Rancher 2 doesn’t reinvent the life sim genre, but it’s one of the chillest farming games around all the same. | Monomi ParkThe process of capturing new slimes, hunting for their favorite food, gathering resources for upgrades, and carting everything back the the conservancy makes for a lot of repetition and backtracking in Slime Rancher 2. That’s on top of often vague goals making it hard to determine what you should be aiming for aside from continuing to grow your farm. That can certainly be a drawback of the game, but looked at another way, it’s also part of its charm.Many farming sims are about giving you an ever-growing to-do list and limiting how you can actually accomplish with strict quotas on how much you can do each day. There’s a sense that you need to be constantly progressing or risk falling behind. None of that is present in Slime Rancher 2, where the lack of pressure lets you fall into the routines of ranching without feeling like you’re wasting precious time or energy. Rainbow Island is a fantastically colorful place, like a world designed by Lisa Frank with the saturation turned down a couple notches. Running back and forth through its landscapes is charming and chill no matter how many times you do it.Slime Rancher 2 is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.