An incredibly fascinating game that's worth playing just to see the care put into the animal ecosystem. No other game will put you in the eyes of the "bottom of the food chain" animal and make you cower from every moving thing. It reminds me of the Metroid Dread horror sections but fully fledged and the thrill is very enduring. That only hurdle for me is the game is not great at showing you where to go or what to do. Even movement options are waiting to be discovered in non intuitive ways. The guide character is often unclear or spazzes around creating confusion on progression. Still a great play with always lively art style/animation.
It's common to describe video game worlds as ”alive”. Obviously, this isn't literally the case, but sometimes a developer will be able to create a strong enough illusion that something approximating life exists within the ones and zeroes of a game's universe. Very occasionally, the illusion will be so powerful that you almost fool yourself into imagining that the world carries on existing after you click Exit To Desktop. As if the AI-controlled figures carry on living their lives even when you're not there to observe and interact with them.
Even though I'm fully aware that this is not the case, there is one game that would make me doubt it. No other facsimile of real life has been more convincing than Rain World.
Rain World is an extremely unforgiving and harsh survival adventure that takes place in a postapocalyptic world, far removed from our own. You play as an adorable ”slugcat” who has to find their way back to their lost family. On the way you will need to hunt for food while avoiding becoming someone else's meal in the process. Alongside the many predators of this desolate land, you also need to avoid the deadly rain that regularly floods the world and will literally crush you to death if you don't find a rare shelter in time.
However, none of this is what makes Rain World a unique specimen. Challenging adventures with a focus on survival and exploration are even more common now than in 2017, after all. Instead, it's the way that the world moves around you that makes it special. That's because practically nothing in Rain World is scripted or predetermined.
Every creature in the game feels like an individual with their own unique needs and moods. This is partly conveyed through the innovative animation system, which feature no premade animations, instead being procedurally created with each body part moving individually. This creates an uncanny realness to their movements that gives each one their own personality and makes every interaction unique.
This is further enhanced with the sophisticated AI, which is as unpredictable as it is engaging. To demonstrate this, let's talk about Scavengers. These creatures live in clans and your relation to them can vary massively due to a number of factors. How you act towards them obviously plays into it – if you come carrying a weapon they will be standoffish, perhaps attack you on sight.
However, if you put the weapon down or lay flat on the ground to signal that you mean no harm, they can leave you alone. If you give a gift, they might even welcome you. Their mood and individual personalities can also change this. If you happen across a Scavenger who is hungry or scared or angry, they can take it out on you. And of course they'll also remember if you ever attack one of their own.
On the one hand this is a system that is ripe for frustration since none of this is communicated to you directly. You have to instinctively work out how to interact with others, largely via trial and error. But it's also the lack of hand holding that makes every interaction feel organic. When I manage to find peace with another creature it doesn't feel like I've cracked a puzzle designed for me by a game developer, but like I wordlessly communicated with a living being.
Even the more primitive creatures have a similar level of complexity. Crocodiles and giant centipedes will move from room to room hunting for prey, completely free of a predetermined pattern. Sometimes they will sleep or hide, ready to ambush a careless slugcat. Sometimes they will start fighting each other, or ignore you entirely if they're tired or already full.
Not only does this manage to give the game a genuine sense of reality, but also makes your journey entirely unpredictable. A room can be empty and safe in one playthrough, only to be full of bats and two crocodile squabbling with each other over the flying buffet above them.
Many games utilise this kind of systematic world design, and while this is sometimes used to create the illusion of a random, living reality, it's usually a way to let the player express themselves. By exploring and playing with the systems, the game worlds become a sandbox for you to experiment in and conquer. Rain World uses the same basic idea to instead make the player feel like just another part of a wild ecosystem.
Rain World is not a world made for you, or at least that's not what it feels like. Every time I return to its rusty, murky ruins, I get the sense that this world carries on whether or not I'm there to see it. There are no enemy routes to memorise, no clearly defined path. I have no power here, I am not its master. I am just a small slugcat in a large, unwelcoming world that doesn't care about me at all. And I love it.
Even though I'm fully aware that this is not the case, there is one game that would make me doubt it. No other facsimile of real life has been more convincing than Rain World.
Rain World is an extremely unforgiving and harsh survival adventure that takes place in a postapocalyptic world, far removed from our own. You play as an adorable ”slugcat” who has to find their way back to their lost family. On the way you will need to hunt for food while avoiding becoming someone else's meal in the process. Alongside the many predators of this desolate land, you also need to avoid the deadly rain that regularly floods the world and will literally crush you to death if you don't find a rare shelter in time.
However, none of this is what makes Rain World a unique specimen. Challenging adventures with a focus on survival and exploration are even more common now than in 2017, after all. Instead, it's the way that the world moves around you that makes it special. That's because practically nothing in Rain World is scripted or predetermined.
Every creature in the game feels like an individual with their own unique needs and moods. This is partly conveyed through the innovative animation system, which feature no premade animations, instead being procedurally created with each body part moving individually. This creates an uncanny realness to their movements that gives each one their own personality and makes every interaction unique.
This is further enhanced with the sophisticated AI, which is as unpredictable as it is engaging. To demonstrate this, let's talk about Scavengers. These creatures live in clans and your relation to them can vary massively due to a number of factors. How you act towards them obviously plays into it – if you come carrying a weapon they will be standoffish, perhaps attack you on sight.
However, if you put the weapon down or lay flat on the ground to signal that you mean no harm, they can leave you alone. If you give a gift, they might even welcome you. Their mood and individual personalities can also change this. If you happen across a Scavenger who is hungry or scared or angry, they can take it out on you. And of course they'll also remember if you ever attack one of their own.
On the one hand this is a system that is ripe for frustration since none of this is communicated to you directly. You have to instinctively work out how to interact with others, largely via trial and error. But it's also the lack of hand holding that makes every interaction feel organic. When I manage to find peace with another creature it doesn't feel like I've cracked a puzzle designed for me by a game developer, but like I wordlessly communicated with a living being.
Even the more primitive creatures have a similar level of complexity. Crocodiles and giant centipedes will move from room to room hunting for prey, completely free of a predetermined pattern. Sometimes they will sleep or hide, ready to ambush a careless slugcat. Sometimes they will start fighting each other, or ignore you entirely if they're tired or already full.
Not only does this manage to give the game a genuine sense of reality, but also makes your journey entirely unpredictable. A room can be empty and safe in one playthrough, only to be full of bats and two crocodile squabbling with each other over the flying buffet above them.
Many games utilise this kind of systematic world design, and while this is sometimes used to create the illusion of a random, living reality, it's usually a way to let the player express themselves. By exploring and playing with the systems, the game worlds become a sandbox for you to experiment in and conquer. Rain World uses the same basic idea to instead make the player feel like just another part of a wild ecosystem.
Rain World is not a world made for you, or at least that's not what it feels like. Every time I return to its rusty, murky ruins, I get the sense that this world carries on whether or not I'm there to see it. There are no enemy routes to memorise, no clearly defined path. I have no power here, I am not its master. I am just a small slugcat in a large, unwelcoming world that doesn't care about me at all. And I love it.
I don't know how this game manages to generate the aura that it does. It's so initially oppressive and frightening and blossoms so gradually into something manageable that you can't pinpoint when (or how, or if) things have started to fall into place for you.
This is the kind of game that you play in a dream. It's the kind of game that an author writes into a novel, not having a sense of what video games are actually like. It's a frightening doodle in a middle schooler's binder.
I'm afraid of advancing and approaching the future point where I know all of the areas of this game and it has nothing left to surprise me with.
I love it, it scares me.
This is the kind of game that you play in a dream. It's the kind of game that an author writes into a novel, not having a sense of what video games are actually like. It's a frightening doodle in a middle schooler's binder.
I'm afraid of advancing and approaching the future point where I know all of the areas of this game and it has nothing left to surprise me with.
I love it, it scares me.
goblin game design
The primal rush of picking up a pointy stick.
Instinctively, I want to love this game. I want to give it a perfect rating and gush about how incredibly interesting the design of this brutal and uncompromising world is, how emergent and complex the interactions between all the creatures are, how satisfying it is to slowly master the world around you so that not only can you survive -- a real accomplishment when compared with the initial cycles of the game -- but deftly navigate wherever you want, weaving around enemies, grabbing items, filling your stomach, and understanding the world inside and out. I want to say all these things are true about the game because that's the sense that I had about the game in the first 2 or 3 of the 10 hours that I played this game before dropping it.
But ultimately, in all of those areas where the game at first feels incredibly deep and fresh and engaging, I started to realize that everything was surface-deep at best. For example, fans rave about the complex systems of interaction that occur between different creatures, but after some observation in the game, it became apparent that by "complex" they meant "emergent," and I very quickly became bored by the fact that everything functioned on incredibly simple rulesets with a large heap of randomness. Is this natural? I think so, yes, and if this game were a nature simulator, that would be a great feat. But this game is a survival platformer. This does not particularly feel satisfying or interesting to me for the purposes of a survival platformer, it feels lazy and frustrating and lacking in the intentionality and design that make the best games in both of those genres the best .
This is, in fact, a recurring theme in how I felt about this game. As a survival platformer (or generally as a game altogether) many of the design choices fail to make any sense whatsoever to me. They make all the sense in the world if this game is ambivalent about being a game altogether -- and largely I think that was the intent behind much of the game. Certainly that is the sentiment I see emerge from fan discussions that I read while trying to understand why I wasn't clicking with the game. As such, I think the creators of this game and I fundamentally just disagree on what makes a good game. And that's deeply unfortunate, because this was a game that from the first I heard about it, I wanted to love.
Revisiting the point of randomness briefly, I want to discuss difficulty. I did not ever find this game hard in the span of my time with it, although I certainly found it frustrating at times. By pure chance my gameplay style of grabbing food items, sprinting through areas as fast as I can without dying, and making a beeline for the first new shelter I discovered was a winner, and not once during that normal pattern of gameplay did I die to the rain, although I found myself backtracking to known shelters once or twice when I failed to find a new one sufficiently fast. I did, however, die a number of times to the creatures in the world. Generally I found this not to be punishment for playing the game poorly so much as sheer bad luck to stumble upon a room where it just so happened that the creatures were positioned so as to pounce upon me before I realized what had happened -- on returning to these locations, the creatures were positioned differently and that plus my newly acquired knowledge meant I functionally never died to a known enemy. I died to random chance. In many cases, this wasn't frustrating, as in the situation described above. That just happens in this game, and I did not consider it a fail state given the flowers (a legitimately cool piece of game design for a number of reasons!) which protected my cycle "streak." What was, however, frustrating was when I found myself unable to progress due to completely uncooperative rideable creatures in several areas, or when a creature parked itself right where I needed to parkour and refused to move no matter my attempts to manipulate it -- these things also just happen due to the nature of the game, but they're frankly just bad, time-wasting pieces of game design that I did not enjoy. When I made it past obstacles of this kind, it did not feel like it was due to any improvement of my own, and ultimately one particularly tedious instance of this resulted in me completely shelving the game. This game is, in my opinion, not particularly difficult if you engage with it the way it wants you to, and I want to be clear that my problems with the game are not in fact because it is "too hard" or anything of the sort, but because of cases of what I believe to just be bad game design.
Some of the things about this game's design I do find legitimately engaging. I generally love when games do not tell me anything at all and want me to figure out what they are and how they function. The little companion fly guy that follows you around somewhat undercuts this piece of design in several places, which is incredibly strange to me because it is very easy to get off the intended path and not realize it. If you follow the path, he tells you what many of the items are and how to use them and what they do. If you don't, then you're completely on your own. This feels like an incredibly half-assed system and it makes the game actively worse. Specifically, the fact that this system is present meant that the developers seemed to feel there was largely no need to make items naturally interact with the world around them (or rather, to have creatures interact with the varying items -- spears are the main exception here). But because it's so easy to inadvertently miss out on the tutorial system, you are left with no natural clues as to what to do to interact with the world around you, leaving you to simply guess and experiment. This is, at best, a passable approach to being a game that never tells you how to play it, because the best of those games guide you from just below the surface while making the player feel as if they were unassisted the whole time. And unfortunately, even this passable approach feels unintentional given the inclusion of the tutorial guy, which begs the question: Why in the world does the UI go completely unexplained? I personally found it fairly intuitive, thankfully, but from what I saw in discussions about the game, many people had no clue what the UI was supposed to indicate. That is a failing on the part of the game.
In fact, it is a truly puzzling piece of design that there are non-diegetic elements in the game at all. It seems like it wants to be an immersive environmental simulator in many ways, including forcing you to figure out how the world around you functions, how your character moves (there's a TON of hidden movement that can largely only be figured out by pure luck or, as with most players, by reading about it online), and what your objective in the game even is . In that case, any mechanical complexities such as the survival cycle should be implemented into the world itself somehow! But then on the other hand you have the weird tutorial system, which suggests that this game actually wanted you to be told how to do many of the things in it, and if you're going that far then why not clarify one of the most basic mechanics of the game? Baffling is the only word I have for this -- it feels like the development team for this game was split in half on how they should fundamentally approach what this game is and how it is told, and they ended up with a half-conceptualized amalgamation of two far better games.
It is undeniably true that Rain World is unique, that it is ambitious, and that much about it is deeply interesting as a piece of interactive media. I find it hard to ever be truly negative about this game because I so deeply want to be drawn into it in the ways that many other people are. But other games exist that are also brutal and obtuse and tell you nothing about them and challenge you to engage with deep and interlocking systems in order to understand what the game is and how to play it, and they succeed in making me love them by virtue of being incredibly carefully crafted and well-thought out pieces of game design. As much as I regret to say it, for me, Rain World fails to live up to what it wants to be.
But ultimately, in all of those areas where the game at first feels incredibly deep and fresh and engaging, I started to realize that everything was surface-deep at best. For example, fans rave about the complex systems of interaction that occur between different creatures, but after some observation in the game, it became apparent that by "complex" they meant "emergent," and I very quickly became bored by the fact that everything functioned on incredibly simple rulesets with a large heap of randomness. Is this natural? I think so, yes, and if this game were a nature simulator, that would be a great feat. But this game is a survival platformer. This does not particularly feel satisfying or interesting to me for the purposes of a survival platformer, it feels lazy and frustrating and lacking in the intentionality and design that make the best games in both of those genres the best .
This is, in fact, a recurring theme in how I felt about this game. As a survival platformer (or generally as a game altogether) many of the design choices fail to make any sense whatsoever to me. They make all the sense in the world if this game is ambivalent about being a game altogether -- and largely I think that was the intent behind much of the game. Certainly that is the sentiment I see emerge from fan discussions that I read while trying to understand why I wasn't clicking with the game. As such, I think the creators of this game and I fundamentally just disagree on what makes a good game. And that's deeply unfortunate, because this was a game that from the first I heard about it, I wanted to love.
Revisiting the point of randomness briefly, I want to discuss difficulty. I did not ever find this game hard in the span of my time with it, although I certainly found it frustrating at times. By pure chance my gameplay style of grabbing food items, sprinting through areas as fast as I can without dying, and making a beeline for the first new shelter I discovered was a winner, and not once during that normal pattern of gameplay did I die to the rain, although I found myself backtracking to known shelters once or twice when I failed to find a new one sufficiently fast. I did, however, die a number of times to the creatures in the world. Generally I found this not to be punishment for playing the game poorly so much as sheer bad luck to stumble upon a room where it just so happened that the creatures were positioned so as to pounce upon me before I realized what had happened -- on returning to these locations, the creatures were positioned differently and that plus my newly acquired knowledge meant I functionally never died to a known enemy. I died to random chance. In many cases, this wasn't frustrating, as in the situation described above. That just happens in this game, and I did not consider it a fail state given the flowers (a legitimately cool piece of game design for a number of reasons!) which protected my cycle "streak." What was, however, frustrating was when I found myself unable to progress due to completely uncooperative rideable creatures in several areas, or when a creature parked itself right where I needed to parkour and refused to move no matter my attempts to manipulate it -- these things also just happen due to the nature of the game, but they're frankly just bad, time-wasting pieces of game design that I did not enjoy. When I made it past obstacles of this kind, it did not feel like it was due to any improvement of my own, and ultimately one particularly tedious instance of this resulted in me completely shelving the game. This game is, in my opinion, not particularly difficult if you engage with it the way it wants you to, and I want to be clear that my problems with the game are not in fact because it is "too hard" or anything of the sort, but because of cases of what I believe to just be bad game design.
Some of the things about this game's design I do find legitimately engaging. I generally love when games do not tell me anything at all and want me to figure out what they are and how they function. The little companion fly guy that follows you around somewhat undercuts this piece of design in several places, which is incredibly strange to me because it is very easy to get off the intended path and not realize it. If you follow the path, he tells you what many of the items are and how to use them and what they do. If you don't, then you're completely on your own. This feels like an incredibly half-assed system and it makes the game actively worse. Specifically, the fact that this system is present meant that the developers seemed to feel there was largely no need to make items naturally interact with the world around them (or rather, to have creatures interact with the varying items -- spears are the main exception here). But because it's so easy to inadvertently miss out on the tutorial system, you are left with no natural clues as to what to do to interact with the world around you, leaving you to simply guess and experiment. This is, at best, a passable approach to being a game that never tells you how to play it, because the best of those games guide you from just below the surface while making the player feel as if they were unassisted the whole time. And unfortunately, even this passable approach feels unintentional given the inclusion of the tutorial guy, which begs the question: Why in the world does the UI go completely unexplained? I personally found it fairly intuitive, thankfully, but from what I saw in discussions about the game, many people had no clue what the UI was supposed to indicate. That is a failing on the part of the game.
In fact, it is a truly puzzling piece of design that there are non-diegetic elements in the game at all. It seems like it wants to be an immersive environmental simulator in many ways, including forcing you to figure out how the world around you functions, how your character moves (there's a TON of hidden movement that can largely only be figured out by pure luck or, as with most players, by reading about it online), and what your objective in the game even is . In that case, any mechanical complexities such as the survival cycle should be implemented into the world itself somehow! But then on the other hand you have the weird tutorial system, which suggests that this game actually wanted you to be told how to do many of the things in it, and if you're going that far then why not clarify one of the most basic mechanics of the game? Baffling is the only word I have for this -- it feels like the development team for this game was split in half on how they should fundamentally approach what this game is and how it is told, and they ended up with a half-conceptualized amalgamation of two far better games.
It is undeniably true that Rain World is unique, that it is ambitious, and that much about it is deeply interesting as a piece of interactive media. I find it hard to ever be truly negative about this game because I so deeply want to be drawn into it in the ways that many other people are. But other games exist that are also brutal and obtuse and tell you nothing about them and challenge you to engage with deep and interlocking systems in order to understand what the game is and how to play it, and they succeed in making me love them by virtue of being incredibly carefully crafted and well-thought out pieces of game design. As much as I regret to say it, for me, Rain World fails to live up to what it wants to be.
Consistently and entirely brutal. Difficulty is often punishing and unfair, visuals are always brand new and overwhelming, narrative is usually obscure yet in ways direct and in tandem with visual aspects. While I think it's brutal aspects are sometimes detracting, they are mostly enhancing the feeling of prey in a predator's world. Uniquely minimal in ways that are deceptive, vast, and packed with detail and attention to achieve a look and feel unlike any other platformer I've played. A survival game in which you are destroyed.
CALL THAT SHIT BRAIN WORLD CAUSE ITS BETTER THAN HEAD!!!!
I fully respect everything about it but its not for me
Nota: 4/10
Rain World é um jogo com um conceito bastante original e interessante, além de um gráfico muito bonito. Infelizmente, problemas de game design somados a uma dificuldade injusta tornaram o jogo muito frustrante e prejudicaram muito a experiência. Além disso, é um jogo que não ensina ao jogador as próprias mecânicas, nem através de um tutorial, nem através do level design, tive que recorrer ao google várias vezes para conseguir progredir.
As ideias por trás do jogo são boas, mas a execução é ruim. Acredito que esse seja o jogo mais frustrante que já joguei e isso me levou a abandoná-lo.
Rain World é um jogo com um conceito bastante original e interessante, além de um gráfico muito bonito. Infelizmente, problemas de game design somados a uma dificuldade injusta tornaram o jogo muito frustrante e prejudicaram muito a experiência. Além disso, é um jogo que não ensina ao jogador as próprias mecânicas, nem através de um tutorial, nem através do level design, tive que recorrer ao google várias vezes para conseguir progredir.
As ideias por trás do jogo são boas, mas a execução é ruim. Acredito que esse seja o jogo mais frustrante que já joguei e isso me levou a abandoná-lo.
Outlandishly difficult, horrifically intense in the best possible way, and beautifully alive. It sets an ominous chord from the moment you slide out of a drainage pipe into the industrial wastes that hangs over your trek through the desolate, overgrown cityscape of its world. The sewers sloughing into orange dust, the mountains of garbage home to a dying ecosystem, the crypts that survive a land no longer for them. It's gorgeous and intriguing and as brutal and daunting as it can often be, it gently prods you to try again, and again, and again. I will play this game forever.
This game is really special. You may like it or hate it, but there's nothing like this out there.
This is a genuine experience like nothing you've played before. They way it makes you feel in an alien world is sublime and it also makes you know that you are part of an ecosystem that features a food chain that you are part of.
Also, the lore of this game is just nuts. Even more when you can just finish it without even realizing what the hell is going on.
And yes, this is a very controversial game. The player can find it awfully balanced and frustrating but that's how it is in the nature and the animal world.
Can't wait for Downpour DLC.
This is a genuine experience like nothing you've played before. They way it makes you feel in an alien world is sublime and it also makes you know that you are part of an ecosystem that features a food chain that you are part of.
Also, the lore of this game is just nuts. Even more when you can just finish it without even realizing what the hell is going on.
And yes, this is a very controversial game. The player can find it awfully balanced and frustrating but that's how it is in the nature and the animal world.
Can't wait for Downpour DLC.
você é insignificante porque o mundo é lindo e o mundo é lindo porque você é insignificante
Rain World is a game about embracing imperfection for the sake of moving onward, with the hope of one day breaking free of its world's endless cycles, and it does so with an approach to difficulty that took me many attempts to break through, but was more than worth it once I did.
(More words here: https://sunsetoverithaca.com/2023/02/06/in-abandoning-perfection-rain-world-finds-nirvana/)
(More words here: https://sunsetoverithaca.com/2023/02/06/in-abandoning-perfection-rain-world-finds-nirvana/)
slubcat i lov.e scugcat sbucat love this lttile fellow
I have a lot of respect for what this game sets out to accomplish its just not for me man
I wish I was a slug cat
I think maybe I just don't get it? I have no problem with a game being difficult, but this one seems to be deliberately designed to be unfun. I sunk about an hour into this before giving up for the first time; at this point I was stuck between three or four rooms filled with enemies I have no idea how to deal with and no objective to be working towards and hence no motivation to proceed. I tried to get into it again, not wanting to have given up so easily, but several hours and a fair bit of progress later I still felt no desire to push through the pain. The world seems cool and the art style is pretty, the main reason I didn't want to abandon it so early, but even that seems to be working against the game here; everything seems cluttered and half the time I don't really know what I'm looking at. Maybe I'll try it again at some point and work out how to enjoy it, but this game isn't exactly inviting...
OK, so this score is based upon me playing it for 15 minutes, hating the graphics, disliking the gameplay, and then uninstalling. Apparently its one of the best fucking games ever made if you read everyone else's reviews though, so I guess ill re-install it and give it a proper go this time.
Rain World stands in relation to previous action-adventure games the way The Legend of Zelda stands in relation to arcade-style games.
Full review forthcoming.
Full review forthcoming.
Bonito e meio difícil 👍
A fucking stupid bullshit game made by psychopaths who want to push one's psyche until they crack and have a mental breakdown over JUNGLE LEECHES
I think I love this game less for what it is, and more for what it represents. This game is far from a good fit for everyone, and you have to be in a very specific headspace to get the most out of it. It is frustrating, time consuming, and extremely monotonous at times - but it is artful, and it is beautiful. It is brutal and punishing survival as a cute, soft, fleshy little pathetic thing ... an adorable slugcat. It is a brilliant example of videogames as an artistic medium. This game legitimately changed how I view art, videogames as art, and the world as a whole in some minor way. Every element of the game comes together in such a perfect way, not to craft a necessarily "good" experience, but a valuable experience nevertheless. I feel like this game is hard to recommend, but solidly worth it for those willing to plod it out.
It's raining, it's pouring, humanity is snoring.
This review contains spoilers
Rain World is a game that doesn't like you. Not in the way that it's unfair, save for the few times you get trapped in a death-loop because a creature found its way somewhere it wasn't supposed to be. No, it throws you into the middle of a deteriorating world, where the only things lower than you on the food chain are miniscule insects. You are a slugcat, a small animal unfamiliar to your new environment, separated from your family, and your one and only goal is to survive. The world is hostile, and you - delicious.
Crawling your way through the maze of pipes and grimy suburbs, the game makes sure you feel alone. There is nothing like you in this land, and while trying to return to your family seems like a good course of action, you've no idea where you came from. Rain World's atmosphere is bleak, full of abandoned machinery and flooded tunnels, but the environment is distinctly alive, the AI given the ability to roam freely around the map. Interactions between creatures feel organic, with various context-dependent behaviours that establish their relationship within the ecosystem. Lizards are fearsome predators to you, and territorial to one another, but they quickly turn and run as soon as they catch sight of a vulture, larger and more dangerous than them. The game feels dynamic, and no day (or cycle) ever feels the same.
It is not only the animals of the land that are unfriendly, though. The world is plagued by torrential downpours, coming down with force just every few minutes and crushing everything that isn't able to hide. You are, of course, given safe spots - shelters marked with a special symbol that allow you to survive the rain, provided you have stocked up on enough food to hibernate. This limits the time the player has to explore - and I suppose, from a technical standpoint, stops the simulation from utterly breaking - but it is a genius way of forcing you to stop and take things slow, learn your environment before you can move on. The karma system you need to get through gates exemplifies the point, though it can feel stifling and trap you in spots too tough for you to progress out of. Some complain that the system feels like it punishes exploration, since unfamiliar territory often leads to more deaths and the inability to raise your karma level. No game is perfect, and Rain World is no exception to that.
This is where I will address what I think is probably Rain World's biggest issue. I adore the regions of the game, and I love the decisions made in their creation, from the three-layered map rendering system to the beautiful usage of textures and materials, the colour palettes that so clearly reflect the game's atmosphere. It has to be said, though, that the design of some areas - notably Sky Islands and Drainage System - can be classified as actively hostile to players.
Between precise parkour that requires use of a specific creature to help carry you across gaps and the constant hazard of predators knocking you off, Sky Islands is a nightmare to navigate and an even bigger nightmare to survive. This is exemplified with the game's more difficult mode - the Hunter - adding cyan lizards that easily leap the distance and snap you up in their jaws.
Drainage System, in turn, is a common newbies' trap - an easy-to-access region that leads you into a maze of waterlogged pipes, forcing you to quickly push your way through leeches and winding corridors before your breath runs out. Your way out is not any better, however, because one path will lead you through an infamous section of tubes with only small pockets of air throughout, three long rooms that lead you into a gate which mercifully has a karma requirement of one. The other route guides you down directly into the ending section of the game - the Filtration System subregion of Subterranean - and clawing your way out the way you came is nothing short of impossible, while taking the route to Farm Arrays is even moreso. As the ending cannot be reached so early without skips a new player wouldn't know about, they are often forced to bumble around the dark filtration pipes, and if they manage to find their way to the upper part of the area, they are forced to travel all the way to the east where a gate to Shoreline will put them out of their misery. This is no easy task, and many runs are reset or even abandoned just because a player feels unfairly stuck.
Another point to bring up are the screen transitions. Rain World's screens do not scroll. They are rigid, the camera angle baked into the map, and while I think this works well for the game, it can lead to unfortunate deaths. A creature just out of range can kill you as soon as you cross the boundary, and you will be none the wiser until you are already dead. This is an unfortunate part of the game that can only be avoided by carefully listening, and even then it may be too difficult to tell. This, I can concede, is not something you can properly counter.
These are not the only times Rain World can feel like too much. I said Rain World generally wasn't unfair, and I stand by that, but it has to be said that its mechanics can be discouraging to players. It isn't a game for everyone. It does not like you. It will not hold your hand, or wrap you in a warm blanket and tell you you'll be alright. It will tear into you like a wild animal, only stopping to provide you with a save point before it goes after you again. Like an oasis in the desert as a brief sanctuary from the harsh sun. Rain World is for players who like to feel hunted.
That is not to say you are powerless. The Hunter game mode lets you embody the role of a predator - though you are still soft and squishy, you are predisposed to violence, and you have more strength than the other slugcats. It is unique in several ways, mostly that the player is on an even more limited timer - not just the cycle length, but the cycle count, forcing the player to find a route that will leave them enough time to finish before the clock ticks down to zero. It is a challenge mode, and it uniquely rewards efforts at killing creatures, tallying points up at the end of your run.
This is something Rain World does not do often. While everything has a set amount of health points (or, in the code, damage resistance) that can be depleted, most of the time the player is punished, or at least not rewarded. A vulture's mask can be knocked off without killing it. You cannot do anything with a lizard's corpse. Killing a scavenger will make their tribe track and hunt you. In most of these cases, running is a much safer and more profitable option. This distinguishes Rain World from most other games, where killing enemies is desirable and gives the player more money, or power, or resources, and I think it's part of what makes the game such a unique experience.
This would not be my Rain World review if I didn't mention the music. It isn't baked into the game as a background track for specific areas, and it isn't anywhere near constant. Instead, it is split into two types. Firstly, specific rooms have triggers placed in them that play specific music, ranging from energetic, drum-filled beats to solemn ambient tracks. They serve to highlight the atmosphere of the area the player is in, and usually placed in distinct spots that have something to look at. This music is as much part of the environment as the creatures and the broken-down buildings around you.
Then, there is threat music - a feature of Rain World that is talked about more than most others, perhaps barring only the procedurally-animated creatures. Whenever danger is nearby, layers of a region-specific track are picked based on the severity of said danger. The more threatened you are, the more the music picks up, building tension and at the same time letting you know there may be something lurking just beyond the scope of your vision. It serves to warn as much as it serves to put the player on edge, to remind them that they shouldn't be comfortable. There is nothing more I could say about it that hasn't been said by everyone else.
Moving on to the game at large. While you are separated from your kind, you are not entirely on your own. A little yellow worm that projects holograms follows you around, showing you pictures of your family, pointing little arrows in a direction you're enticed to go. This isn't mandatory - Rain World isn't a linear game, and it fully lets you carve your own path barring an ending requirement or two - but it does lead you down quite an interesting path. While most of the focus is on the wilder aspect of the world, you are walking through the ruins of a civilisation, and their effects still linger on the world. Through a stormy climb - or machinery buried under a sea of water - you will find that there is more to the world than you first might've thought. The lore of this game is an abstract topic, influenced by buddhism and allergic to clearly defining its most important points. To go into it would be to write a review just about the same length, do much more research than I have time for, and still end up with more questions than answers.
There is ascension, and there are cycles. Things dissolve into the Void and never come back. The Ancients - a race long gone, leaving only echoes of their past. All little facts found in data pearls scattered across the map, crumbs of the larger story falling together to form a bigger picture. The rain is not just a natural feature of this world - it is the result of giant, living computers called Iterators, behemoths of steel and organics, built to find some way to help those less intelligent animals escape the mortal plane for good. A grueling, futile task, not even known to be possible for certain. In your path, you come across two of them - Looks to the Moon, and Five Pebbles. Now presented with odd new 'allies' and a mission you don't quite understand, your search for the ones you lost is now abandoned. You likely don't even remember the introductory cutscene.
The Iterators provide the closest thing Rain World has to a story. Through discarded data, one can find what happened before the events of the game - the Ancients' progress towards ascension, moving out of their lower cities onto the Iterators' tall cans, all disappearing one by one and leaving their creations to rot. Life created only to work at a task so that its makers did not have to try themselves, forced to try solution after solution until they deteriorated too far to continue or found a way to free themselves. Left with the remnants of a ruined world, plagued by eternal storms.
It has to be said that not every part of the game has the player stay back, external to the larger plot. In the Hunter mode, the player starts with two items - a pearl and a green neuron. These can be discarded or delivered to their recipient at will, but it does make the Hunter stand out, because against the background of the Survivor and the Monk - whose initial story is grounded firmly in nature - the Hunter is, from the start, involved in events beyond a simple animal's comprehension. Still, you are not a hero, and you aren't going to save the world. The Hunter's actions help Looks to the Moon, but on a grand scale of things it is only a brief moment of consciousness before her systems degrade again, while the slugcat itself does not seem to have such a happy ending. Whether or not they succeed in their mission does not matter, seeing as the Survivor and Monk are in the future where Moon is alive, and Hunter's ending seems to imply they are pulled back to the start if they fail. Trapped, just like everyone else.
Rain World gives you a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes - lets you learn of the Iterators' story, sends you off on a pilgrimage to the great Void Sea, letting you ascend like the Ancients once did. Even then, the rain still continues, the dissolved material falls as dust from the sky, and structures deteriorate further. You have not made a lasting mark, as tiny and insignificant as the insects you eat.
After all is said and done, you are just a rodent.
Crawling your way through the maze of pipes and grimy suburbs, the game makes sure you feel alone. There is nothing like you in this land, and while trying to return to your family seems like a good course of action, you've no idea where you came from. Rain World's atmosphere is bleak, full of abandoned machinery and flooded tunnels, but the environment is distinctly alive, the AI given the ability to roam freely around the map. Interactions between creatures feel organic, with various context-dependent behaviours that establish their relationship within the ecosystem. Lizards are fearsome predators to you, and territorial to one another, but they quickly turn and run as soon as they catch sight of a vulture, larger and more dangerous than them. The game feels dynamic, and no day (or cycle) ever feels the same.
It is not only the animals of the land that are unfriendly, though. The world is plagued by torrential downpours, coming down with force just every few minutes and crushing everything that isn't able to hide. You are, of course, given safe spots - shelters marked with a special symbol that allow you to survive the rain, provided you have stocked up on enough food to hibernate. This limits the time the player has to explore - and I suppose, from a technical standpoint, stops the simulation from utterly breaking - but it is a genius way of forcing you to stop and take things slow, learn your environment before you can move on. The karma system you need to get through gates exemplifies the point, though it can feel stifling and trap you in spots too tough for you to progress out of. Some complain that the system feels like it punishes exploration, since unfamiliar territory often leads to more deaths and the inability to raise your karma level. No game is perfect, and Rain World is no exception to that.
This is where I will address what I think is probably Rain World's biggest issue. I adore the regions of the game, and I love the decisions made in their creation, from the three-layered map rendering system to the beautiful usage of textures and materials, the colour palettes that so clearly reflect the game's atmosphere. It has to be said, though, that the design of some areas - notably Sky Islands and Drainage System - can be classified as actively hostile to players.
Between precise parkour that requires use of a specific creature to help carry you across gaps and the constant hazard of predators knocking you off, Sky Islands is a nightmare to navigate and an even bigger nightmare to survive. This is exemplified with the game's more difficult mode - the Hunter - adding cyan lizards that easily leap the distance and snap you up in their jaws.
Drainage System, in turn, is a common newbies' trap - an easy-to-access region that leads you into a maze of waterlogged pipes, forcing you to quickly push your way through leeches and winding corridors before your breath runs out. Your way out is not any better, however, because one path will lead you through an infamous section of tubes with only small pockets of air throughout, three long rooms that lead you into a gate which mercifully has a karma requirement of one. The other route guides you down directly into the ending section of the game - the Filtration System subregion of Subterranean - and clawing your way out the way you came is nothing short of impossible, while taking the route to Farm Arrays is even moreso. As the ending cannot be reached so early without skips a new player wouldn't know about, they are often forced to bumble around the dark filtration pipes, and if they manage to find their way to the upper part of the area, they are forced to travel all the way to the east where a gate to Shoreline will put them out of their misery. This is no easy task, and many runs are reset or even abandoned just because a player feels unfairly stuck.
Another point to bring up are the screen transitions. Rain World's screens do not scroll. They are rigid, the camera angle baked into the map, and while I think this works well for the game, it can lead to unfortunate deaths. A creature just out of range can kill you as soon as you cross the boundary, and you will be none the wiser until you are already dead. This is an unfortunate part of the game that can only be avoided by carefully listening, and even then it may be too difficult to tell. This, I can concede, is not something you can properly counter.
These are not the only times Rain World can feel like too much. I said Rain World generally wasn't unfair, and I stand by that, but it has to be said that its mechanics can be discouraging to players. It isn't a game for everyone. It does not like you. It will not hold your hand, or wrap you in a warm blanket and tell you you'll be alright. It will tear into you like a wild animal, only stopping to provide you with a save point before it goes after you again. Like an oasis in the desert as a brief sanctuary from the harsh sun. Rain World is for players who like to feel hunted.
That is not to say you are powerless. The Hunter game mode lets you embody the role of a predator - though you are still soft and squishy, you are predisposed to violence, and you have more strength than the other slugcats. It is unique in several ways, mostly that the player is on an even more limited timer - not just the cycle length, but the cycle count, forcing the player to find a route that will leave them enough time to finish before the clock ticks down to zero. It is a challenge mode, and it uniquely rewards efforts at killing creatures, tallying points up at the end of your run.
This is something Rain World does not do often. While everything has a set amount of health points (or, in the code, damage resistance) that can be depleted, most of the time the player is punished, or at least not rewarded. A vulture's mask can be knocked off without killing it. You cannot do anything with a lizard's corpse. Killing a scavenger will make their tribe track and hunt you. In most of these cases, running is a much safer and more profitable option. This distinguishes Rain World from most other games, where killing enemies is desirable and gives the player more money, or power, or resources, and I think it's part of what makes the game such a unique experience.
This would not be my Rain World review if I didn't mention the music. It isn't baked into the game as a background track for specific areas, and it isn't anywhere near constant. Instead, it is split into two types. Firstly, specific rooms have triggers placed in them that play specific music, ranging from energetic, drum-filled beats to solemn ambient tracks. They serve to highlight the atmosphere of the area the player is in, and usually placed in distinct spots that have something to look at. This music is as much part of the environment as the creatures and the broken-down buildings around you.
Then, there is threat music - a feature of Rain World that is talked about more than most others, perhaps barring only the procedurally-animated creatures. Whenever danger is nearby, layers of a region-specific track are picked based on the severity of said danger. The more threatened you are, the more the music picks up, building tension and at the same time letting you know there may be something lurking just beyond the scope of your vision. It serves to warn as much as it serves to put the player on edge, to remind them that they shouldn't be comfortable. There is nothing more I could say about it that hasn't been said by everyone else.
Moving on to the game at large. While you are separated from your kind, you are not entirely on your own. A little yellow worm that projects holograms follows you around, showing you pictures of your family, pointing little arrows in a direction you're enticed to go. This isn't mandatory - Rain World isn't a linear game, and it fully lets you carve your own path barring an ending requirement or two - but it does lead you down quite an interesting path. While most of the focus is on the wilder aspect of the world, you are walking through the ruins of a civilisation, and their effects still linger on the world. Through a stormy climb - or machinery buried under a sea of water - you will find that there is more to the world than you first might've thought. The lore of this game is an abstract topic, influenced by buddhism and allergic to clearly defining its most important points. To go into it would be to write a review just about the same length, do much more research than I have time for, and still end up with more questions than answers.
There is ascension, and there are cycles. Things dissolve into the Void and never come back. The Ancients - a race long gone, leaving only echoes of their past. All little facts found in data pearls scattered across the map, crumbs of the larger story falling together to form a bigger picture. The rain is not just a natural feature of this world - it is the result of giant, living computers called Iterators, behemoths of steel and organics, built to find some way to help those less intelligent animals escape the mortal plane for good. A grueling, futile task, not even known to be possible for certain. In your path, you come across two of them - Looks to the Moon, and Five Pebbles. Now presented with odd new 'allies' and a mission you don't quite understand, your search for the ones you lost is now abandoned. You likely don't even remember the introductory cutscene.
The Iterators provide the closest thing Rain World has to a story. Through discarded data, one can find what happened before the events of the game - the Ancients' progress towards ascension, moving out of their lower cities onto the Iterators' tall cans, all disappearing one by one and leaving their creations to rot. Life created only to work at a task so that its makers did not have to try themselves, forced to try solution after solution until they deteriorated too far to continue or found a way to free themselves. Left with the remnants of a ruined world, plagued by eternal storms.
It has to be said that not every part of the game has the player stay back, external to the larger plot. In the Hunter mode, the player starts with two items - a pearl and a green neuron. These can be discarded or delivered to their recipient at will, but it does make the Hunter stand out, because against the background of the Survivor and the Monk - whose initial story is grounded firmly in nature - the Hunter is, from the start, involved in events beyond a simple animal's comprehension. Still, you are not a hero, and you aren't going to save the world. The Hunter's actions help Looks to the Moon, but on a grand scale of things it is only a brief moment of consciousness before her systems degrade again, while the slugcat itself does not seem to have such a happy ending. Whether or not they succeed in their mission does not matter, seeing as the Survivor and Monk are in the future where Moon is alive, and Hunter's ending seems to imply they are pulled back to the start if they fail. Trapped, just like everyone else.
Rain World gives you a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes - lets you learn of the Iterators' story, sends you off on a pilgrimage to the great Void Sea, letting you ascend like the Ancients once did. Even then, the rain still continues, the dissolved material falls as dust from the sky, and structures deteriorate further. You have not made a lasting mark, as tiny and insignificant as the insects you eat.
After all is said and done, you are just a rodent.
rain world wrain world world rain rain world ranw orld tain world lizard rain wolr drain world scavenger rain world rain world lizard
I've never played a game like this. A game that only tells you controls and nothing else, the rest is for you to discover, a game that isn't afraid to put you in unfair situation. This game is one of the hardest games i've ever played yet I found myself absolutely loving it. You are in this world where everything is against you and you must survive and avoid danger. The game rewards you for experimenting as much as possible, it rewards you for every small success. The AI is probably the best AI I've seen in any games, animals here don't act like enemies but rather as a wild animal would. The art is simply beatiful and gorgeous and immerses you into wanting to discover this dangerous world. The only problem I had with this game was the camera, that is the only flaw i could think of. Rain world is a game that everyone should experience for themselves, definetly one of the best games i've ever played
super hard but!! little slug go flop! :D ah! so silly!
My favorite part about this buddhist suffering simulator where you play as a helpless prey animal? Eliminating the indigenous populace by way of guerilla warfare with high explosives of course.
Probably the best world building i have ever seen in a videogame. Truly magic