Slime Heist

Slime Heist is a Nintendo 64 homebrew game by Team A Spooky Sight and released on 30 Oct 2022 for the 2022 64brew Game jam. The game has you play as a slime that has to infiltrate a castle to steal the loot from its treasury.

You can download the ROM from the download page for this homebrew game by using the password spookysightspookyheist or see the source code on Github and download from Drive.

Slime Heist style and gameplay

Graphically, Slime heist is pretty interesting. It has a top-down perspective, but instead of making it a 2D game in the style of Legend of Zelda, the backgrounds are all in 3D and all the characters seem to be using 3D models as well.

Most of the levels use the same tileset, that being the brown clay tiles with only a couple of areas that use green flooring.

Slime Heist doesn’t have any sound to it, which is a shame since the awesome slurping animation could use a funny sound effect, kind of like how Super Snooper Spookers did.

The gameplay is a mixture between puzzle and stealth. There are generally two types of rooms: Those that have enemies and those that have puzzles. The puzzle rooms have gratings that can be passed by the slime (unless you’re holding a rock) or blue switches that need a rock to stay activated.

Stealth rooms have enemies that you need to avoid. There are blue slimes that walk in a path around the room and skull enemies that lock on and chase you.

Once you get to the treasure room, you slurp up a bunch of treasure and make your way back to the entrance. However, this time a bunch of baddies have spawned, making it a lot more difficult.

On the way back, the puzzles don’t need to be solved, but you have the skull enemies chasing you. The number of spawned skull enemies is proportional to the amount of treasure you stole. This is of course, in addition to the already-present blue slimes.

Once you reach the end, you get a score based on how much treasure you stole.

‘Spooky’ theme

The game has a spooky slime and some ghost/zombie enemies. On top of that, failing the stealth element has creepy baddies try to run after and kill you.

Credits

Slime heist was made by Team A Spooky Sight which consists of:

• Yoshimaster96 (most of the work)
• Raphaël (game design)
• Someone else (graphics)

Yoshimaster96 also previously worked on last year’s Featherlight.

Review and conclusion

I like that this is the only homebrew game (that I’ve played so far) besides the arcade-style games that doesn’t have an exclusively linear play style. There is a left, middle and right path to go and grab the treasure, and you can choose your return path from any of the three as well. This gives the game some replayability, as well as allowing the player to decide which path is the best for their own playthrough.

The backgrounds are a little bit bland and repetitive, but they are at least easy to identify and unambiguous. The characters in the game are very cute though. At first I thought that they were animated sprites but then I realised that they were 3D animated models.

What I don’t like about Slime Heist though is the pacing and difficulty. The real challenge comes after picking up the treasure when the zombies appear. Since the game has 1-hit kills, you’re going to be going through that first section many, many times.

The toughest part is the zombie enemies, which have two main issues. The first is that their vision is too good. As soon as they appear on screen, they’ll start chasing you so you can’t try to sneak past when they move away from you. The other issue is their speed. They run about as fast as the player so you don’t have anywhere to run unless it’s directly away from them.

All these factors combined mean that you often just have to try your luck at running past them or just run to the previous room and back to reset their position. With the highest difficulty (getting every treasure), it’s impossible to get past the screen right after the treasure room since you’ll have three zombies coming after you from each conceivable angle.

When I tried playing Slime Heist on an emulator, I noticed that the zombies were a bit slower which made the game a bit more doable, but still pretty tough. You can attack zombies with rocks, but it’s not viable in every situation and they respawn a few seconds later anyway.

Overall, I think it’s a great concept for a game, but I would have liked the puzzles to be a little bit more intricate and the return journey to be a bit more balanced.