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.