It is such a pleasure to explore, I would be out there wandering even if I wasn't lured through it with the promise of slimes to capture.Īnd maybe this is the point. ![]() Slime Rancher 2 is absolutely gorgeous, a kind of duvet-soft archipelago filled with thick waving grass, sun-warmed rocks, and dreamy coastal vistas. The difference between the first game, which I have not played very much of, and the second game, which at the time of writing I have only played for a lazy morning, is that the world has changed so much. Slime Rancher 2 is not trying to hide you from the fact that you're basically a cheery battery farmer - at least at the start. This is not the subtext, incidentally: this is the text of the game, as it were. Quickly you start putting them in pens, and feeding them, and harvesting their waste to spend elsewhere and create various game loops that are undeniably pretty compelling. Like the first game you are dropped into a colourful world with a gadget that allows you to vacuum up colourful slime creatures and deposit them elsewhere. Watch on YouTube An introduction to Slime Rancher 2. I don't think that would be entirely fair, but everything about this game is contradictory and challenging. But it is also the kind of horror that Crary would potentially identify as pure capitalist indoctrination - a game that people are exposed to rather than asked to play. Slime Rancher 2 is a thing of joy: exploration and curiosity delivered in thick, buttery pastels. I don't need to add anything at this point, but I will: my great uncle was not a very nice man and should not be interpreted as the hero of this story.īoth of these things - Crary's illuminating book and the involuntary memory about a family member that it prompted - created what is basically the single least ideal mindset in which to experience Slime Rancher 2, which is out in early access at the moment and is taking over the world. He rigged up a system in his turkey farm, a farm which clearly should have been shut down by the authorities, in which the lights continually went on and off, the theory being that the turkeys would age by a day each time this happened, and would be ready for market sooner. What he doesn't mention - and I understand this, I guess - is a great-uncle of mine who used to own a turkey farm, and had heard that turkeys were so stupid that when the lights went off they thought the day was over. Sleep is the last place where you cannot be sold stuff, or made to work, and so capitalism must fight sleep, and it will probably be a fight to the death.Ĭrary takes this argument in a number of fascinating, alarming ways. ![]() Crary, who is a professor of modern art and theory at Columbia, makes the case that the contemporary world's focus on an endless 24/7 treadmill of consumption and toil has made sleep the true enemy of capitalism. I suspect a lot of it went over my head, but the basics are pretty simple. A few weeks back a friend recommended Jonathan Crary's 24/7, a short, vital book I have just finished reading.
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