Ooblets Farming, dancing, and very silly creatures

Ooblets are little creatures, and the way you get them is the best part: you collect their seeds, plant them on your farm, and wait for them to sprout. Winning a dance battle against a wild ooblet earns you a seed, so meeting a new one in the world is the start of growing your own. Each ooblet has variants to find, including the rare GLEAMY type, which announces itself with shooting stars and fireworks over town so you can run and look for it. Once grown, they follow you around, and later they can even help out on the farm through oobcoops you can upgrade to handle more of the work for you.

There is no fighting here. Challenges and disagreements are settled through dance, using a card-based system where each ooblet has its own unlockable moves. You build a team, play your cards, and work toward winning the dance-off, which earns you a seed rather than a captured creature. The tone stays friendly throughout: you are competing, but nobody gets hurt, and the whole thing looks as cute as it sounds. Put together a team that works well together, or one that just looks adorable on stage. Nothing is lost by taking it slow, and there is no reward for rushing to the end.

The farm loop is familiar and satisfying: plant crops, water them, cook treabies in the kitchen, and sell your produce in town. Your ooblets can pitch in with upgraded oobcoops, so a well-run farm eventually does much of the work itself and frees you up to explore. Later you unlock your own shop, where you sell what you have grown and crafted to the people of Oob: restock the shelves, decorate the place, and haggle over prices with a minigame. Money is tight in the early hours, so the first stretch is mostly about seeds and careful spending before things open up.

Badgetown needs your help, and the story takes you across the whole of Oob to fix it up. Each region has its own theme: the arcade-filled boardwalk of Port Forward, the spooky swamps of Nullwhere, the deserts of Mamoonia, and the frozen peaks of Tippytop. There is a dirigible, and possibly a mystery island. Travelling means new ooblets to find, new crops to bring back to your farm, and recipes to learn. The writing is genuinely funny throughout, offbeat in a way that keeps surprising you, and the story has a proper ending, though there is plenty left to do afterwards.

You start with a rundown shack and can turn it into a cozy homestead, a spooky sanctuary, or a retro-futuristic retreat, or just leave it as a shack. There is plenty of furniture and decor to collect, and your character gets hairs, hats, clothes, costumes and accessories as you play.