Slime Heroes is the game you give your kids if you want them to experience the stress and intensity of a Soulslike game, but adjust it to their level. You will explore this colourful, magical land as a tiny slime with a big task at hand. It looks innocent, but things do get intense as you progress.

You play as this slime, the last of your kind, who is transported away from your friend due to the corruption invading. Your task is to traverse this magical world to stop the source of the corruption and save your friend. As the game progresses, you learn where the corruption came from, what started it, and how you’re the only one who can save this world from darkness.

This magical world is very vast and colourful. Each section is like its own country and has a thing that makes it unique and a challenge to traverse. For example, snow areas require you to be near heat, or else you’ll slow down and freeze to death. There’s a swamp that will instantly kill you if you misstep. Meanwhile, the jungle is like a giant plant maze. The lands are all interconnected, and the only thing stopping you from getting lost are walls/gates that you either have to break manually or unlock automatically once you progress through the linear story or monster battles. If Slime Heroes allowed you to explore freely and then you suddenly learned that you were in a higher level area, it could have created an opportunity for you to either flee and level up or challenge yourself and see how far you could have gone.

There are six main bosses – the guardians- who were forever changed by the corruption. They reside on their home turf, which also suffers from corruption, with a few survivors. For some reason, you’re unaffected by it, so it’s up to you to grow your strength and save everyone. You must collect skills, elemental abilities, and weapons to strengthen your character. And if you feel like it, all the random hats you find along the way. What’s great about the skills and elemental unlocks is that you can collect as many as possible, creating crazy combos and strategies. This is useful, especially when dealing with multiple bosses. You can test your abilities in the dungeons scattered worldwide.

Slime Heroes has a handful of elements that make it ‘Soulslike’ in nature. For example; when you die, you lose your in-game currency, gems, that are used to level up your four main stats – strength (the stat used for melee damage), Magic (stats used for skills damage), Stamina (your energy bar), and Speed (how fast you move). They can only be obtained by fighting monsters or picking up small amounts throughout your journey. If you die before you can retrieve them, they’re gone for good. There is also a fifth stat – health, but that only increases by completing various dungeons in the game.

It also has a bonfire mechanic, where you get to heal yourself and level up, but doing so would respawn all the monsters you’ve slain. Also, some of the monsters in the overworld can instantly kill you, and they’re not even boss monsters. Speaking of boss fights, you have to do most of them twice. The first one is for story reasons and you unlock a new weapon. The second battle is in a nearby dungeon where, once completed, you get an ultimate skill based on the defeated boss.

Yes, the worldbuilding isn’t the same as a Soulslike game, and the details tend to be isolated in its area. However, it is enough to make it an “introduction to the genre” for someone younger. Slime Heroes has a difficulty slider that allows you to make the game easier or harder. It’s there for accessibility reasons and if you want to make the gameplay experience less frustrating. Just note even if you set the game to super easy, you will still get your butt kicked.