Time to Morp

by Aethyna Mar 20, 2024 | 1 Votes | 12 Played | 0 Reviews

9 rate

Genres:

Simulation , Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Building , Exploration , Open World , Sci-Fi , Farm , Aliens

Platforms:

Publishers:

Yogscast Games Drawing inspiration from games like Slime Rancher, Time to Morp is an exploration-driven game where you’ll not only get to “ranch” a wide variety of morps, but also to fence them up so as to fulfill their needs and protect them from the corruption that’s spreading in the wilderness. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Drawing inspiration from games like Slime Rancher, Time to Morp is an exploration-driven game where you’ll not only get to “ranch” a wide variety of morps, but also to fence them up so as to fulfill their needs and protect them from the corruption that’s spreading in the wilderness.

Plotline

You’re an intern in a team of pioneers tasked to explore a new planet. Beamed down from the spaceship, your job here is to not only retrieve all your crewmates but also to help them with their requests via quests, be it gathering certain alien fruits for cooking or to gather a specific material to unlock research or craft stuff, all the while your more senior crewmates stay safe and comfy in their respective homes that you’ve built for them… much like what an intern usually do in real life!

As you venture out into the wilderness, you’ll also get to discover new morps and learn how they can help you expand your settlement by automating not only the resource extraction process, but also to produce rare resources. There’s also something dangerous spreading across the land – a mysterious corruption that’s mutating the morps it comes in contact with. Will you be able to keep the corruption at bay?

Gameplay

The gameplay in Time to Morp is quite similar to Slime Rancher in many ways. The basic morps in this game are the white ones. When these morps consume something, and that something can be a proton or a fruit local to the planet, they will then turn into a new kind of morp with a different appearance and color that can either produce said item, such as getting electrons from electron veins, or consume it to produce something new, like consuming branches to produce tree sugar. There are many different kinds of morps here, and some of them can only be found in specific biomes, so you’ll really need to go out and explore to “catch them all”.

There’s a bit of crafting here, too, such as the cooking pot where you can whip up some consumables, like Fruit Gello and Energy Drink, for your crewmates using ingredients mostly consisting of local fruits. There’s even a mini-game here to produce the best quality dish, where you’ll have to click whenever the fast-moving indicator lands on a highlighted area within the meter. Do this three times flawlessly and you’ll get the best quality dish as a result.

As you might expect, Time to Morp is a game that’s very oriented around resources, which range from materials like electrons, gello, and protons to fruits of all kinds, since that’s the main currency you need to do anything in the game, whether it is to build new enclosures and decorate them for your new morps, to set up new production areas, or to research any new tech via the Upgrade Tree. Note that some research requires Tokens rather than resources. There are several different kinds of them and you can get them by finding and opening loot chests that are scattered across the planet.

Thankfully, the game has a very convenient and helpful way for you to track down what you need as well – the in-game Wiki. Here, you can use the Scan function to scan the planet for the resources or even people you’re looking for. You’ll then get a ping on the little map indicator at the top of the screen in a way that’s similar to how radar works, showing you which way to go to find it.

However, I should point out that unlike materials like electrons and protons, fruits aren’t that easily gathered from the wild. Instead, there’s a bit of farming involved here where you’ll need to collect water from your well and water the plants – you can’t get seeds to grow them, though – to harvest the fruits. After harvesting, you’ll then need to water the plants again to get a new batch of harvest. There’s actually very little downtime here between watering the plants and harvesting the fruits, and you can remove all the need for manual labor by simply unlocking the sprinkler and setting up a pump-and-pipe system to funnel the fruits you make to the enclosure that needs them.

Building in this game is fairly straightforward. You see, in order to keep your morps happy, you’ll need to pen them up with fences (to protect them from the corruption outside) and fulfill all their needs in a way that reminisces of Planet Zoo – I’ve spent wayyyy too much time trying to make each animal in my zoo happy then. Their needs include having enough roaming space, having enough food, and having a certain number of morps nearby.

You can even add a theme to your enclosures, making the environment more suitable for the morps inside it and fulfilling one of their many needs. Of course, some themes have requirements that are more easily fulfilled than others. Aside from obstacles that can make placing fences a bit difficult, there’s also a size limit to building pens. You can’t just fence everything in and call it a day!

To spruce things up further, you can also add various décor to your enclosures to make your morps happy, but be warned – adding items to an empty space inside a pen will reduce the roaming space available to the morps, and may break certain themes since the space requirements are no longer fulfilled.

In addition to fences, there are several other structures you can set up, including houses for your crewmates, crafting pots and structures that allow you to… well, process raw materials into something new, storage pots to store the items produced by your morps automatically, and of course, as mentioned earlier, adding a pump-and-pipe-based system to funnel resources to and from a morps’ enclosure, automating resource transfer.

Now, I’m a massive fan of Slime Rancher and have spent an ungodly amount of time into both games (1 & 2), and I can safely say that Time to Morp manages to scratch that itch for me. As an early access title, the game already has quite a lot of content to keep players happy, and its randomized maps also provide players with plenty of replayability. The game also has a roadmap that I hope developers will be able to stick to – we definitely need more biomes and morps!

The only downside, I would say, is the quests. I find them a bit uninspired. It would be great if the quests come with mini-stories where you can learn more about each NPC in the game, much like how life sims design their NPCs. Adding some natural events might be an exciting avenue to explore here, too, like having “alien rain” that will make water morps appear. There is just so much potential here to expand the game further!

Community

Featuring a multiplayer mode, Time to Morp supports up to 4 players co-op, allowing you to have fun “ranching” morps with your buddies. Naturally, the game’s a whole lot more fun with friends.

Graphics/ Sound

The visuals here are truly astounding. I love how different biomes look absolutely unique, thanks to the fact that you’re exploring an alien planet – FYI, the biomes here aren’t the usual desert, winter, forest, etc biomes you may be accustomed to. The different morp designs look amazing too! I love that they reminded me of those cute Porings in the Ragnarok Online. Not to mention, my heart completely melted the very first time I picked up a morp and saw its adorable, big and shiny eyes that seemed to be imploring me to keep it safe from the nasty corruption running rampant out in the wilderness.

In terms of sound, Time to Morp features a blend of relaxing soundtracks and ambiance that make up the game’s immersive and chill atmosphere. The game fits really well in the cozy games subgenre,for sure!

Conclusion

Time to Morp may be an early access title, but it has enough content to keep players occupied until its next feature rollout. There are just so many morps to discover, technologies to unlock, and quests from your crewmates to complete, and exploration is truly satisfying here, too, with chests to find and new resources and morps to uncover. We would wholeheartedly recommend this game for fans of Slime Rancher and other sorts of automation-driven cozy games.