I've been following Ooblets since 2016, when it was called Moblets and consisted of some sparse but finely animated GIFs on Twitter. For that reason, and without having played it, it's great to hear that Ooblets is going to hit 1.0 and exit early access on September 1st. Aw, the Oobs are all grown up.
]]>There are 40 Ooblets in the Early Access version of Ooblets. Finding all of them will take a lot of work in making items, but also locating and battling the enemy Ooblets.
]]>To meet new Ooblets and have dance battles with them, you need specific items. Some items need to be grown in your farm, while others require to be processed in other facilities.
It can all be very confusing, so I thought I'd put everything you need for all the items into one place.
]]>Monster collecting games have been very popular for decades, but there have been few examples on PC. I first heard of Ooblets many years ago, but it is now in Early Access on Epic Games Store, complete with dancing plant-like creatures.
But what is Ooblets? How do you farm your creatures, and how do you raise your dance troupe to be the best movers and shakers in all the land?
]]>After three years of us cooing over it, Ooblets today launched in early access. To be crudely reductive: it's a bit 'Stardew Valley meets Pokémon, but cutesy'. There we are, growing crops on our little farm and befriending folks in the local town. We're also growing little critters named ooblets, who we raise and train to compete - though rather than bite, claw, electrocute, and drown each other, they bust moves in dance-offs. Adorable.
]]>Ooblets is what it looks like. That can be a bit of a cop out as descriptions go, but I saw almost no footage of it before guessing it was a cross between a Harvest Moon farming/fix-up-the-town game and a Pokémon-style monster collector, and so it is.
But while both those types of game tend to soak up days of my life and leave me with powerful grinder's remorse, Ooblets feels less insidious than either. Time was going by a lot faster than I'd realised, but not in the mindless haze of repetition or chasing numbers. It's a good time.
]]>After spending years in the works, growing tiny little roots as it prepares to break free, Ooblets has an early access release date. Glumberland have announced that the critter-collecting and dance-battling little town sim will launch in early access on July 15th.
]]>Even my sea-chilled heart is warmed by the sight of Ooblets, a town life game full of farming, friendship, and training cute critters who have dance battles. Today, after a lengthy stretch of vagueness, developers Glumberland announced that it'll be entering early access this summer. Summer's soon! And I have absolutely no plans for summer. Come have a look in the new trailer below.
]]>June's not quite here but we're already being treated to a few digital showcases in the style of E3 presentations. Wholesome Direct rounded up a whole 55 indie games with varying styles of kindness and cuteness to show off in a 35-minute show. A few big names like town sim Ooblets and boat manager Spiritfarer showed up to join arms with some smaller but equally swell looking games you may not have heard of. You can rewatch the entire show below.
]]>Look, we all know that the behemoth that is Stardew Valley isn't going anywhere soon. Heck, it recently got another update. So sure, we'll all be playing it for years to come, but sometimes you want a bit of a switch up - a crop rotation to keep the soil fresh, if you will. To that end, we've got a list of the best farming games like Stardew Valley on PC. Haunted Chocolatier isn't coming for a while, and there are some surprises on the horizon like Moonlight Peaks, but there are a hell of a lot of cute (and not so cute) farming life sim games already out there, and we've picked our favourite from the bunch for this list. Check them out below. From tending a graveyard to learning to be a witch, clearing trash from the ocean to domesticating animals from scratch, there's a Stardewlike for everyone on this list.
]]>There are lots of things that look quite promising about Glumberland's cute town sim Ooblets. There's fashion, gardening, dance battles, and house decorating, Here's one more thing to like: a map. More importantly, a map on which you can see the location of the other townsfolk of Badgetown. Don't laugh, I am very serious about how very important this is. Oh also, Glumberland's new developer update has some other details but trust me when I tell you this is a big deal.
]]>How long has it been since I first saw gifs of Ooblets—those goofy critters trundling around town behind their awkwardly dancing human friend? RPS first posted about this cute little town sim three years ago. So probably about then, I'd say. I thought it might arrive in 2018. I had hope for 2019 too. According to Glumberland's development update for January, "2020 is the YEAR OF THE OOB." So this will be the year I jog around town with my little dancing monsters? I hope so.
]]>Glumberland's Ben Wasser, one of two people developing Ooblets, has written a response to the wave of harassment that's been crashing over his studio during the past week. It includes numerous examples of the hateful messages they received in response to their announcement that Ooblets would be a timed Epic Store exclusive. The announcement's ill-judged tone meant the team received a disproportionate backlash compared to the numerous other studios that have accepted Epic's offering of financial stability, which is as rare as gold dust in small-scale games development. Wasser made a "stupid miscalculation", he says, but still stands behind his message. Good.
]]>As many good-lookin' small-budget games are wont to, Ooblets has signed a timed exclusivity deal with the Epic Games Store in exchange for extra funding. That's common enough that we didn't even post about it. Also disappointingly common is the harrassment which follows, here directed at Glumberland, the tiny two-person development team behind the 'kinda Pokémon with cute dance-offs' game. The studio misjudged the tone of their announcement and that's being used to justify some real unjustifiable garbage. What makes this especially frustrating is a response from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who tweeted an unfunny joke using the Ooblets outrage as a punchline. Nice one. That'll calm everyone down.
]]>I bet you thought that what with all the spooky stuff we’ve had on the site over the past while, we were leading up to a big horror extravaganza of Halloween-themed stuff today. “Someone is going to use the word ‘spoopy’,” you thought. Well you’re wrong!
All our special Halloween features are about nice things today. We are wall-to-wall niceness. Dare I say suffocatingly cute. Guaranteed no fun jump scares built into the code of the website as you scroll down. The only thing you have to fear is being so relaxed that you fall asleep and nap for too long and then you wake up with a fuzzy brain and aren’t able to do anything except nap again. Oh no! You were going to make dinner but now you’ll just have to eat a can of pringles and a bag of Bitsa Wispa! Let RPS be the light you turn on when your living room is a bit dark and you think the bag on the sofa is actually a monster about to kill you. And you turn on the light and you're like, phew, it's okay, it's just the replacement Bitsa Wispa I bought from Tesco. Everything is okay.
To start, here is a big post rounding up lots of sweet, cute, or otherwise lovely things we’ve written or made or talked about on the site for the last few months.
]]>Chickadingding, Fleeble, Gullysplot, Plob. “Why, the good people of Rock Paper Shotgun have finally lost it!” you might cry. But these nonsense words are poised to become household names. They’re the names of a selection of Ooblets, the titular cutesie creatures of Glumberland’s upcoming town life indie game.
If you’ve seen any of the grassroots marketing behind Ooblets, you already have an idea of the charming, laid-back world it's attempting to create. You can easily see sprigs of Pokémon, Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley in its garden, but that’s not to say it isn’t making any meaningful strides of its own, experimenting with and riffing off the features it's drawing influence from.
]]>How, exactly, does one mechanically win at a dance battle? That’s the question addressed by a recent update by the developers of upcoming creature farming sim Ooblets. Apparently, the answer is that you play your cards right.
]]>Now that the festival of bellowing that is E3 2018 has come to an end, we begin the arduous process of making sense of it all. This means sifting through mountains of press releases and trailers to find all the curious games that lurked outside the spotlight glare of the larger publishers. And we find such treats as Maneater (Jaws RPG where you play as Jaws), Rapture Rejects (battle royale where you fight for the last spot in heaven) and Neo Cab (Uber-sim meets Blade Runner). So many delightful things, in fact, that new video person Noa couldn't resist gathering them together.
]]>The festival of dumb explosions known as E3 is over, but that won’t stop us. The RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, goes deep into the show, picking out our favourite games, the oddest moments, and best rats (spoiler: it was the one crushed by a shelf in the Resident Evil 2 trailer). We’re also introducing two new voices this week. Who are these strange people?
]]>You're about to watch some humans go about their business as they get followed around by adorable tiny animals, occasionally stopping to pet them or dance with them. Don't be fooled. Those animals are out for blood - or at the very least indentured interior design work. That's the subtext I'm picking up: Ooblets is an upcoming game that's ostensibly about farming crops and looking after 'lil Pokemon-like creatures. As developers Glumberland revealed in their E3 trailer, it's now also about helping those creatures resolve their disputes through the medium of dance rather than body slams. Supposedly.
]]>As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework that exploded in the many midnights of New Year's celebrations was stuffed with games and they were still raining down across the world this morning. We cannot stop them, we cannot contain them, but we can attempt to understand them.
Hundreds of them will be worth our time and attention, but we've selected a few of the ones that excite us most as we prepare for another year of splendid PC gaming. There's something for everyone, from Aunt Maude, the military genius, to merry Ian Rogue, the man who hates permadeath and procedural generation with a passion.
]]>Each year E3 rolls around like a giant evil worm, crushing all that's good and pure. BUT that worm also announces lots of exciting gaming news as it wreaks its carnage upon the Earth. Here we have gathered every announcement, reveal, and exciting new trailer that emerged from the barrage of screamed press conferences over the last few days. And lots of it looks rather spiffy.
A rather enormous 47 PC games were either announced, revealed, or updated upon, with new trailers, information, and released dates that will all be missed by at least three months. We've collected the lot, with trailers, in alphabetical order, into one neat place, just for you.
]]>Every now and then, in this vast hall of GIFs we call the internet, I see the mini-monsters and dancing townsfolk of Ooblets [official site] and it makes me feel good about life. It’s an as-yet-unreleased game of farming, raising creatures, and living among the townsfolk of ‘Hubton’. “It’s sort of like Harvest Moon meets Pokémon meets Animal Crossing meets the weird awkward people we are,” say the creators at Glumberland. Now they’ve been picked up by publisher Double Fine and have released a new trailer to celebrate that fact. Good stuff.
]]>
