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Kill, kill, kill, kill 'em all!

Slimes is a game by Scitydreamer that you can play in 4 hour and a half or maybe less if you play easy difficulty and do not complete the game 100%.

The premise of the game is rather simple: after some falling stars hit the earth some people mutate and became monstrous slimes. We play as Julius Anderson, a gunslinger that works for the Church of the Sacred Heart, and he is trying to eradicate the slimes from a dungeon. For his crusade he needs a medic, so he's joined by a healer that use magic, the same kind of magic that created the slimes (but the poor guy needs the money so he will work with him!).
As you can expect they will soon hate each other!

The game consists in exploring dungeons and fighting slimes. That's all. Well ore or less, to tell the truth there are also some puzzles like finding a needed item or push some dead rock slimes around, bit it's a minor component of the game.



So the main part of the gameplay is dedicated to combat: we have these two characters, the gunner and the healer. The first is a damage dealer that has three guns, and each one has some advantages and a special attack move. Each one is better against a particular enemy, so you have to switch them depending on the situation (luckily you can change weapon without spending a turn to do that!), and also remember to reload them (and this cost one turn!). Then we have the healer that can concentrate to earn mana and then use it to... heal!
As you can probably expect each character earn experience fighting slimes, but do not improve his stats, he just learn some new abilities: while in the case of the healer, those can be some special attacks or spells, in most other cases these are both buffs and debuffs. Why? Because since the two characters hate each other, buffing one of them means debuffing the other! It's a rather interesting dynamic.

Oh and since characters do not really improve their strength, don't expect a great variety of opponents. You have slimes of different kinds, but the ones you will find in the beginning of the game are more or less the same you will find near the end, what changes is the enemy group composition. Each one kind in different, some bolster the defense of the group or heal the other slimes, others have strong attacks and low defense, and so on.
Bosses do exist, and these are often unique slimes that are really difficult to defeat (but I had no real difficulty until the last boss!). Luckily these are often encountered just after a safe room, the only places in which it's possible to sleep and recover all strength.



While many opponents are avoidable (all enemis are always visible, there are no random encounters) it's suggested to fight and kill every slime not only to earn more levels (and abilities) but also because each secured level adds one item that gives some extra informations about the world, the studies on the slimes and the Church of the Sacred Heart. Some other items tell the stories of two other teams of adventurers: Joseph Sol and his adventuring party, and a trio of precursors of Julius & the healer (Thomas, Zakin and Kyle) that meet a mysterious woman. These stories do not influence the adventure, but give a lot of details and explanations about some items and characters. This clearly enrich the experience and flesh out the game world.

As I wrote before the game difficulty in my opinion is well balanced and becomes quite hard towards the ending. BUT in the beginning there is the option to make things easier (removing the need to change weapons and to reload them often, and making both characters ridicolously powerful) and to remove the limit of supplies in the safe rooms so resting can be done at will.



Graphically the game is quite simple with its limited palette of three colors (red, black and white) and simple style of graphics. Still these are dark and evocative, and music is likewise atmospheric and disturbing (and goes in crescendo, becoming more and more eerie and creepy). All this well contribuites to the unncomfortable feeling of playing in a dark dungeon in this grim setting. It's a game of violence, hatred, lonelyness, despair and crudelty, not a happy fantasy world but a realistic and flawed one.

Verdict
This is a game whose story cannot be told but must be experienced. This game is a simple dungeon delving in which most events and cutscenes were happened before the adventure itself (that is a simple and short, but the real fun is in the combat system). There are no items or inventory management, everything in this game is exploration, combat and cutscenes.
I've read some people complaining about the fact that the firearms are always to be manually reloaded, to tell the truth I understand that this was made on purpouse: you are supposed to play a cold blooded efficient killer, so you have to remember to ready your weapons before each fight.

What I liked particular was the ending. Unexpected and beautiful (I don't know how many endings are there... I killed 100% slimes, so I guess it's the "good ending").

This game earns a 4/5. Certainly good and original, not fancy or beautiful to look at, but it's not a game about beauty. It's an experience. A very good experience indeed.