Ooblets

Ooblets is a deliberately eccentric blend of farming, creature collection and town life that resolves its conflicts and disputes through dance battles instead of combat. You move into the town of Badgetown, inherit a rundown shack, and start the slow work of transforming it into your version of a homestead — anything from a cozy farm cabin to a spooky sanctuary to a retro-futuristic retreat, depending on the furniture and decor you collect.

The ooblets themselves are the creature-collection layer. You grow them from seeds on your farm — each species has a couple of variants to catch, including the rare and prized GLEAMY type — and each ooblet has its own dance moves that you unlock and combine into teams. Dance battles play out as rhythm-card encounters where the moves a given ooblet brings to the floor and how they synergize with teammates determines the outcome, but there's no penalty for losing slowly or styling at the expense of efficiency.

Beyond the farm and the dance floor, the game stretches across themed regions — the arcade-filled boardwalk of Port Forward, the spooky swamps of Nullwhere, the deserts of Mamoonia, the frozen peaks of Tippytop — each with their own quests, characters and ooblet varieties. A player shop lets you sell what you grow and craft, real-time seasonal events (Springtime, Halloween, Winter) add limited-time content, and the overarching story has a discrete ending — though Ooblets keeps generating things to do well past the credits.