Played on default settings with Survivor.
Rain World's.. well, world, is utterly beautiful and captivating, there's something about it that strikes me as endlessly interesting with just how diverse each region is despite what could broadly be described as "post-apocalyptic industrial"; it effortlessly outclasses many in this aesthetic genre, with a sprinkling of Buddhist theming that elevates it to masterclass status in my book. It feels like a mashup of Girls Last Tour and Made in Abyss visually. I feel like this is where the intrigue for many comes in, especially in the last couple of years or so with the cutesy Slugcat fanart and gifs people love sharing around (I did so for ages before even playing), but I feel something is miscommunicated about the game from this angle by the fandom.
When people talk about a game having disregard for a player in a good way, the vast majority of the time they're talking about Demon's Souls or sometimes Dark Souls 1, or cheap shots in mostly old PC games; but these games always give the player the tools to overcome, especially the lauded Souls franchise and adjacent. Rain World does not, or at least not really; you might be given a spear, but the amount of hostile enemies you can actually kill with it? Like, two, at least somewhat reasonably. The world does not care if you wish to walk across that bridge, there is an eldrich horror larger than you could have imagined casually feasting on one of the beasts that previously demolished you. Wait... There's your chance to get past, RUN! Jump over that rock, hurry! Scurry along you silly little Slugcat and pray the monster is still engorging itself. Finally you reach the pipe, and on the other side, another beast, instantly snaps you up.
Press [start] to continue.
So you've learned something at least, about how this ecosystem interacts; but you died, despite how hard it may have been to get where you were. You can't go back though, you know it's a dead end, the worm nudges in that same direction still. You have to push on, Survivor. So you push forward again, with that depleting Karma meter you haven't payed much attention to only a couple hours in or so. You claw and climb your way through a (to you) arduous section with some beasts and perilous jumps, until you finally reach the door and shimmy through, to be met with a Karma Gate at tier 3, but alas you are only tier 1, and hungry. Time's almost up, the screen begins shaking and the sound becomes thunder, soon you're washed away into oblivion. How utterly frustrating, I thought, how could they make the player go through all of that knowing they'd likely die and be unable to get through? There's a lot of moments like this, and an area in particular that drove me insane, I constantly asked "how would I change this?", and each time I'd conclude, simply, that I wouldn't. To fix that or place that on a cycle or something rigid would defeat the purpose or at least severely crack the game's vision. To approach these challenges from the perspective of "how would I change this for the player experience" is to directly detract from the experience of the Slugcats.
This isn't about you, this is about a Slugcat which in this game no matter how good the player may be might as well be regarded as only a couple rungs above insects. The act of killing something that could also kill you is rare, and reliant on often single-use tools you happen across. You WILL be fumbling with Slugcat's movement to the very end and it's all the better for it. Why should things be easy? The decision as well to make the game fixed-screen was also massively beneficial to selling the uneasiness in a 2D space, it places extra emphasis on immersing yourself in the soundscape, listening to every little audio cue you can to clue yourself in on what's just around the corner. It also makes the game feel even larger than it already is, while still retaining measurable distance over "samey" screens such as certain waterways or long tunnels. The sound design is also masterful, and it synergizes perfectly with the visual presentation and how it impacts progression through the game.
With the Downpour DLC came a free update that optionally adds visual cues to things such as indicators for off-screen enemies and accessibility options such as an engine slowdown similar to Celeste's; I always appreciate these sorts of updates and tweaks on principle, but I would still strongly urge trying to Survive and to only tweak downwards if you're genuinely going to drop the game over these gripes. They are in my mind what makes Rain World, Rain World, but I get it.
Ultimately Rain World represents what I believe to be the most realized vision in a video game, period. Unfaltering in its indifference to the player and their usual power-trip-seeking behavior and drip feed dopamine addictions, it has a story to tell about the cutest thing in the world simply trying to reunite in an apocalyptic world, and it refuses every step of the way to fall victim to dissonance between its gameplay and its narrative.
In one word: Primordial.
Rain World's.. well, world, is utterly beautiful and captivating, there's something about it that strikes me as endlessly interesting with just how diverse each region is despite what could broadly be described as "post-apocalyptic industrial"; it effortlessly outclasses many in this aesthetic genre, with a sprinkling of Buddhist theming that elevates it to masterclass status in my book. It feels like a mashup of Girls Last Tour and Made in Abyss visually. I feel like this is where the intrigue for many comes in, especially in the last couple of years or so with the cutesy Slugcat fanart and gifs people love sharing around (I did so for ages before even playing), but I feel something is miscommunicated about the game from this angle by the fandom.
When people talk about a game having disregard for a player in a good way, the vast majority of the time they're talking about Demon's Souls or sometimes Dark Souls 1, or cheap shots in mostly old PC games; but these games always give the player the tools to overcome, especially the lauded Souls franchise and adjacent. Rain World does not, or at least not really; you might be given a spear, but the amount of hostile enemies you can actually kill with it? Like, two, at least somewhat reasonably. The world does not care if you wish to walk across that bridge, there is an eldrich horror larger than you could have imagined casually feasting on one of the beasts that previously demolished you. Wait... There's your chance to get past, RUN! Jump over that rock, hurry! Scurry along you silly little Slugcat and pray the monster is still engorging itself. Finally you reach the pipe, and on the other side, another beast, instantly snaps you up.
Press [start] to continue.
So you've learned something at least, about how this ecosystem interacts; but you died, despite how hard it may have been to get where you were. You can't go back though, you know it's a dead end, the worm nudges in that same direction still. You have to push on, Survivor. So you push forward again, with that depleting Karma meter you haven't payed much attention to only a couple hours in or so. You claw and climb your way through a (to you) arduous section with some beasts and perilous jumps, until you finally reach the door and shimmy through, to be met with a Karma Gate at tier 3, but alas you are only tier 1, and hungry. Time's almost up, the screen begins shaking and the sound becomes thunder, soon you're washed away into oblivion. How utterly frustrating, I thought, how could they make the player go through all of that knowing they'd likely die and be unable to get through? There's a lot of moments like this, and an area in particular that drove me insane, I constantly asked "how would I change this?", and each time I'd conclude, simply, that I wouldn't. To fix that or place that on a cycle or something rigid would defeat the purpose or at least severely crack the game's vision. To approach these challenges from the perspective of "how would I change this for the player experience" is to directly detract from the experience of the Slugcats.
This isn't about you, this is about a Slugcat which in this game no matter how good the player may be might as well be regarded as only a couple rungs above insects. The act of killing something that could also kill you is rare, and reliant on often single-use tools you happen across. You WILL be fumbling with Slugcat's movement to the very end and it's all the better for it. Why should things be easy? The decision as well to make the game fixed-screen was also massively beneficial to selling the uneasiness in a 2D space, it places extra emphasis on immersing yourself in the soundscape, listening to every little audio cue you can to clue yourself in on what's just around the corner. It also makes the game feel even larger than it already is, while still retaining measurable distance over "samey" screens such as certain waterways or long tunnels. The sound design is also masterful, and it synergizes perfectly with the visual presentation and how it impacts progression through the game.
With the Downpour DLC came a free update that optionally adds visual cues to things such as indicators for off-screen enemies and accessibility options such as an engine slowdown similar to Celeste's; I always appreciate these sorts of updates and tweaks on principle, but I would still strongly urge trying to Survive and to only tweak downwards if you're genuinely going to drop the game over these gripes. They are in my mind what makes Rain World, Rain World, but I get it.
Ultimately Rain World represents what I believe to be the most realized vision in a video game, period. Unfaltering in its indifference to the player and their usual power-trip-seeking behavior and drip feed dopamine addictions, it has a story to tell about the cutest thing in the world simply trying to reunite in an apocalyptic world, and it refuses every step of the way to fall victim to dissonance between its gameplay and its narrative.
In one word: Primordial.
this is def one of the coolest games i've ever played; the slugcat is adorable and the game really sells you on the experience of playing as a living creature traversing these dangerous alien environments. but also i wasn't really like, getting anything out of it, which is a me problem more than anything the game itself is doing. maybe someday i'll be cultured enough to appreciate it on an experiential level and not just a conceptual one
I was completely ready to rank this as my favorite game only a few hours in, but after beating it, Rain World has solidified itself even more as such. If you’re at all interested in the game, stop reading and play it. It is absolutely best experienced blind, since much of its satisfaction comes from figuring out the things the game doesn’t tell you.
Rain World strives to be unique in every sense of the word. Each facet of the game oozes with originality and passion, to the gameplay, narrative, art direction, setting, music, world building... all of which blends together to create a frankly masterful work of art. It isn't common that games who try to be one-of-a-kind are, well, good, but Rain World is a different case. Sure, if you pick apart each individual gameplay quirk and inspect it under a microscope, it wouldn't seem that great. This is because, as a whole, the game is designed to be a representation of nature; a living ecosystem. It isn't fair. It doesn't hold your hand. It holds no quarter. It wasn't made to be marketable or streamlined, and instead tailors an experience unlike any other. You do not belong in this world, and it's made abundantly clear. This is accomplished by finely tuning every aspect to accentuate the ludonarrative harmony the developers were aiming to achieve, and makes for one of the most immersive worlds one could ever experience in this medium.
To start things off, you are given a short and cute intro cinematic, then plopped into the game as a creature called a slugcat. Weak and hunted by everything, you must rely on a keen eye, cunning tactics, patience, and perseverance above all else to survive in the harsh environment that is threatened to be drowned by the torrential rain. Steady amounts of food must be acquired, deadly predators must be avoided, and shelter must be found to survive just one cycle among many as you explore the regions. Death is punishing, as it delays your progression into new areas, forcing you to play well and learn your environment, as well as avoiding those who'd see the slugcat fit as a meal. Knowing how easily it is to have progress snatched away at a moment’s notice, every victory becomes immensely satisfying.
The first immediate thing that becomes apparent is the movement. It is simple on the surface, with 4 movement keys and 3 interactive buttons - jump, grab, and throw. Slugcat feels slow and clumsy to control at first, which adds to the feeling of vulnerability. However, therein exists a plethora of completely unexplained techniques and mechanics that, while not essential to master, will aid massively. Learning how to lodge spears into the ground/walls, wall jump, backflip, roll, slide, leap, and combine any of these is satisfying in both practice and application. Schmoving around the environment has never felt so rewarding, and that is due to how fundamentally limiting it is.
Said environment is extremely varied in how it's structured and designed to be interesting to navigate around in. I'll touch on the visuals later, but the way the world connects together reminds me of my enjoyment of my first Dark Souls playthrough, and makes me excited to play it again after writing this. Rain World's... world isn't static, either. The world goes on around you even when you aren't present to see it, and creatures will not be in the same spots they were last time, making for circumstances that will never mirror a previous instance. Heights are terrifying, the open sky is terrifying, tunnel mazes are terrifying, large stretches of water are terrifying. Come to think of it, it’s harsher than the aforementioned game, which I didn’t think was possible until playing this.
Creatures and predators are animated and programmed in such a way that they are always unpredictable and always scary. One example among many is the Lizards: they are aggressive and kill slugcat in one bite (like most creatures), but they are large, and will stumble as you evade them, getting visually frustrated when you get out of reach. They may potentially fight amongst themselves, providing an opportunity to sneak past. Depending on their color, they employ various hunting tactics for those they deem prey; not just the slugcat. Lizards are not at the top of the food chain though, and will flee when more dangerous predators make an appearance, shifting its focus away from the slugcat to one of self-preservation. The world's inconsistent nature, as well as the creature variety and their innate unpredictability, keeps you on your toes and creates for a consistently engaging experience.
All in all, slugcat is given equally as much world significance as every single other creature in the game. It's an ecosystem that happens around slugcat, not because of it. Just as you scour for food, each creature does as well. When the rain is imminently close to falling, animals will all but ignore you while they’re fleeing themselves. It cannot be understated how much this affects the core of Rain World's gameplay, and sets it apart from everything else.
The visuals cannot be properly described through a review, since you'd just have to see for yourself, but let me tell you they're some of the most gorgeous I've witnessed. It's pixel art at its absolute finest, and I have nothing but respect for the artist who painstakingly crafted it. It's detailed beyond belief, and the lighting system just makes everything pop out even more. Superstructures and destroyed worlds, especially if they’re combined as such, tend to elicit powerful feelings from me, so there is some bias, but I think it’s undeniable how damn the game looks. Handfuls of times I'd catch myself stopping and admiring many of the environments and vistas, two of which are my favorite in any game. They're very high up; those who know, know.
Perfectly complementing the regions’ visuals is the music. MAN, what a soundtrack this game has. It’s light on, but not devoid of, music you’d bop your head to, but there’s an emphasis on atmospheric ones. The latter usually play when transitioning between regions, or in dead-end areas, and when it does… it’s so easy to get instantaneously pulled in, is how I’d describe it. Immersed. Engrossed. Some other synonym. It’s giving me goosebumps just remembering some of the key moments and areas where their sole function is to provide immaculate vibes. On that note, something I don’t see discussed often is the amount of spots in each region that are functionally useless in normal gameplay, yet simply serve to flesh out the world. Prime environmental storytelling.
I cannot touch on the narrative and overall worldbuilding in a detailed manner because I’m frankly not super versed in the Buddhism it takes after. I will say though, the method of which Rain World slowly reveals its themes is stellar. Not a single line of dialogue; nothing is explicitly told… in the first half, at least. It’s all told through worldbuilding. You’ll have to really go out of your way to find more details. By the end, I was so friggin hooked that I’m fairly certain it has changed my brain chemistry and how I perceive life. Gazing upon the ending screens, emotions boiled over and had me crying tears of relief and joy. My life in this world flashed before my eyes as I reflected on the harrowing journey that I had endured. It was finally conquered. A truly ethereal experience this game pans out to be. I love it so much.
If there’s one thing I regret after playing Rain World is if I’ll be able to enjoy other games as much. My standards for what a game should strive to be have been raised even higher than they once were. It isn’t for everyone, though, as much as I wish every person could experience it in its entirety. It’s frustrating and obtuse as all hell - sometimes genuinely unfair - and it’ll heavily depend on whether or not that’s a good thing. For me at least, its unflinching, uncompromising resolve to portray living as a prey animal in a decrepit world’s ecosystem is what elevates it far and beyond what I’ve already played, and likely what I will ever play.
Rain World strives to be unique in every sense of the word. Each facet of the game oozes with originality and passion, to the gameplay, narrative, art direction, setting, music, world building... all of which blends together to create a frankly masterful work of art. It isn't common that games who try to be one-of-a-kind are, well, good, but Rain World is a different case. Sure, if you pick apart each individual gameplay quirk and inspect it under a microscope, it wouldn't seem that great. This is because, as a whole, the game is designed to be a representation of nature; a living ecosystem. It isn't fair. It doesn't hold your hand. It holds no quarter. It wasn't made to be marketable or streamlined, and instead tailors an experience unlike any other. You do not belong in this world, and it's made abundantly clear. This is accomplished by finely tuning every aspect to accentuate the ludonarrative harmony the developers were aiming to achieve, and makes for one of the most immersive worlds one could ever experience in this medium.
To start things off, you are given a short and cute intro cinematic, then plopped into the game as a creature called a slugcat. Weak and hunted by everything, you must rely on a keen eye, cunning tactics, patience, and perseverance above all else to survive in the harsh environment that is threatened to be drowned by the torrential rain. Steady amounts of food must be acquired, deadly predators must be avoided, and shelter must be found to survive just one cycle among many as you explore the regions. Death is punishing, as it delays your progression into new areas, forcing you to play well and learn your environment, as well as avoiding those who'd see the slugcat fit as a meal. Knowing how easily it is to have progress snatched away at a moment’s notice, every victory becomes immensely satisfying.
The first immediate thing that becomes apparent is the movement. It is simple on the surface, with 4 movement keys and 3 interactive buttons - jump, grab, and throw. Slugcat feels slow and clumsy to control at first, which adds to the feeling of vulnerability. However, therein exists a plethora of completely unexplained techniques and mechanics that, while not essential to master, will aid massively. Learning how to lodge spears into the ground/walls, wall jump, backflip, roll, slide, leap, and combine any of these is satisfying in both practice and application. Schmoving around the environment has never felt so rewarding, and that is due to how fundamentally limiting it is.
Said environment is extremely varied in how it's structured and designed to be interesting to navigate around in. I'll touch on the visuals later, but the way the world connects together reminds me of my enjoyment of my first Dark Souls playthrough, and makes me excited to play it again after writing this. Rain World's... world isn't static, either. The world goes on around you even when you aren't present to see it, and creatures will not be in the same spots they were last time, making for circumstances that will never mirror a previous instance. Heights are terrifying, the open sky is terrifying, tunnel mazes are terrifying, large stretches of water are terrifying. Come to think of it, it’s harsher than the aforementioned game, which I didn’t think was possible until playing this.
Creatures and predators are animated and programmed in such a way that they are always unpredictable and always scary. One example among many is the Lizards: they are aggressive and kill slugcat in one bite (like most creatures), but they are large, and will stumble as you evade them, getting visually frustrated when you get out of reach. They may potentially fight amongst themselves, providing an opportunity to sneak past. Depending on their color, they employ various hunting tactics for those they deem prey; not just the slugcat. Lizards are not at the top of the food chain though, and will flee when more dangerous predators make an appearance, shifting its focus away from the slugcat to one of self-preservation. The world's inconsistent nature, as well as the creature variety and their innate unpredictability, keeps you on your toes and creates for a consistently engaging experience.
All in all, slugcat is given equally as much world significance as every single other creature in the game. It's an ecosystem that happens around slugcat, not because of it. Just as you scour for food, each creature does as well. When the rain is imminently close to falling, animals will all but ignore you while they’re fleeing themselves. It cannot be understated how much this affects the core of Rain World's gameplay, and sets it apart from everything else.
The visuals cannot be properly described through a review, since you'd just have to see for yourself, but let me tell you they're some of the most gorgeous I've witnessed. It's pixel art at its absolute finest, and I have nothing but respect for the artist who painstakingly crafted it. It's detailed beyond belief, and the lighting system just makes everything pop out even more. Superstructures and destroyed worlds, especially if they’re combined as such, tend to elicit powerful feelings from me, so there is some bias, but I think it’s undeniable how damn the game looks. Handfuls of times I'd catch myself stopping and admiring many of the environments and vistas, two of which are my favorite in any game. They're very high up; those who know, know.
Perfectly complementing the regions’ visuals is the music. MAN, what a soundtrack this game has. It’s light on, but not devoid of, music you’d bop your head to, but there’s an emphasis on atmospheric ones. The latter usually play when transitioning between regions, or in dead-end areas, and when it does… it’s so easy to get instantaneously pulled in, is how I’d describe it. Immersed. Engrossed. Some other synonym. It’s giving me goosebumps just remembering some of the key moments and areas where their sole function is to provide immaculate vibes. On that note, something I don’t see discussed often is the amount of spots in each region that are functionally useless in normal gameplay, yet simply serve to flesh out the world. Prime environmental storytelling.
I cannot touch on the narrative and overall worldbuilding in a detailed manner because I’m frankly not super versed in the Buddhism it takes after. I will say though, the method of which Rain World slowly reveals its themes is stellar. Not a single line of dialogue; nothing is explicitly told… in the first half, at least. It’s all told through worldbuilding. You’ll have to really go out of your way to find more details. By the end, I was so friggin hooked that I’m fairly certain it has changed my brain chemistry and how I perceive life. Gazing upon the ending screens, emotions boiled over and had me crying tears of relief and joy. My life in this world flashed before my eyes as I reflected on the harrowing journey that I had endured. It was finally conquered. A truly ethereal experience this game pans out to be. I love it so much.
If there’s one thing I regret after playing Rain World is if I’ll be able to enjoy other games as much. My standards for what a game should strive to be have been raised even higher than they once were. It isn’t for everyone, though, as much as I wish every person could experience it in its entirety. It’s frustrating and obtuse as all hell - sometimes genuinely unfair - and it’ll heavily depend on whether or not that’s a good thing. For me at least, its unflinching, uncompromising resolve to portray living as a prey animal in a decrepit world’s ecosystem is what elevates it far and beyond what I’ve already played, and likely what I will ever play.
This review contains spoilers
I can't think of a game that confuses me more than Rain World, to the point that I doubt I can honestly give it any score at all. It defies measurement, for good and ill.
tl;dr – Rain World is a po-faced “Shaggy Dog” story in video game form that I can't quite leave alone even though I hate every moment.
First let's get what I like out of the way. It is an aggressive middle finger to the metroidvania genre (always a cause to celebrate). No upgrades, no cracked walls, no “that-ledge-is-too-high-when-do-I-get-the-double-jump,” and no Fisher-Price lock-and-key obviousness. Oh you think you'll find a treasure chest in the far-flung corner? NOPE SCREW YOU – only rain and death await thee, LOL.
Though I hate the “crapsack world” theme (more on that later), I can't deny that the world feels – alive. You don't know what it's going to do. You don't know where enemies will show up. Or how many. Are the scavengers dangerous? What about the giant bugs? There's a flicker of Subnautica's awe and fear with each encounter – that delicious tension of split-second decision: friend or foe?
The game doesn't care if three white lizards decide to park in the only viable path forward with no weapons available. This is frustrating as hell – but it's kinda real. No one designed this beyond some spawn points. It's just how it happened. I must admit this is compelling even though I'm tearing my hair out. I wish more games at least toyed with this beyond the rogue-like genre.
But Rain World's pros come with flip-side cons. What I dislike:
The rain cycle. Yes the thing in the title. It just ruins what the game has going for it. It would be more enjoyable to wait out enemies and sneak around if you didn't have a damnable ticking death clock of irregular length to stress you out. It sucks half the fun out of exploration. Why go looking into a far off corner if the Overseer's shelter hint is pointing the other way? The shelters are far and few between and food can be even more elusive. You've got to eat enough for hibernation and reach a shelter before the clock ticks down, all while avoiding predators more-often-than-not parked in the one path forward (see the flip-side?).
“But you're supposed to take your time, raise your karma, feel out the area, you've gotta coexist with it, like it's a real habitat!” But it's not a real habitat. It's merely a literalization, a words-become-worlds manifestation from the lips of that awful 'teacher' in Beasts of the Southern Wild: “YOU. ARE. MEAT!”
“But-but-but all the A.I., and the ecosystem – I saw YouTube videos about it, it's real!” Promise you, it's not. It's a crapsack world, i.e. 100% contrived. It's a thousand screens of intentional degradation and disrepair – a pathological bludgeoning of post-apocalyptic mind-numbing sameness. Yes, it's all rendered very strikingly and no doubt lovingly by the artists, and at least the color-palettes change, but whether it's the yellow-sky farm array or the pitch-black citadel, it's a dead place out to get you and there's no way to live in it. There's no welcoming Elysian field to balance the rot. At best you kind of make peace with the decay and move on before the next rain.
For all the tool-savvy smarts of your controllable slug-cat, there's no way to cultivate an area or make your own shelter. I'm not saying the game should be a farming sim, but if it wants you to take your time, it needs to let you leave your stamp. It needs a Resident-Evil typewriter room. A place with a pensive tune and a trunk. A place that lets you catch your breath before heading back into hell. And the rain shelters ain't it.
Finally, Shaggy Dog time. What I loathe:
The game's story sells you a bill of goods. Your character slips from the saving grip of its slugcat family, falling down (supposedly) into the land of Rain World. Then you start the game. What do you assume your goal is? To get back to your sluggycat family of course!
This. Never. Happens.
There's not a pip or squeak about your family for the rest of the game. The intro cinematic is a lie. It feels like the developers, upon play-testing, found that players had little motivation to progress through the game (due to all the disincentives already listed), so they felt the need to set up a false motivation at the beginning.
You can speculate all you want about the fate of the family, but it's in vain. Are they alive, somewhere in Rain World? Are they in a land far above it, where your sluggy fell from? Does each hibernation or death cycle pass just a day, a month, or a year? Or is it years? Decades? Eons? Has your slugcat family been dead since the first cycle? Are they rebirthing somewhere else? Is it just the regions of Rain World that are subject to the reincarnation cycle or is it the entire fictional planet? Does any of this even matter? Apparently NOT – the slugcat family is a red herring for which you will get no satisfaction.
“But the ascended host of faceless slugcats at the end – that's kind of like your family!”
This takes us, perhaps, to what I loathe most about Rain World.
I'm not a Buddhist by any stretch, but I have a healthy respect for the psychology of the chakras, and in my opinion, the chakras are poorly used and represented in this game. What does filling your stomach and surviving rain cycles have to do with ascension? Why does becoming prey reduce your level? In my readings, the chakras are all about enlightenment and state of mind – not food chain scoreboards.
The game is a one-sided cynic's reading of Buddhist Hinduism. All self-immolation, detachment, void, and darkness – it has no room for love, home, progress, and light. No, the cute pearl quests for Looks-To-The-Moon don't fix this. A glowing tree of ascended slugcats, shown for all of five seconds, doesn't balance the overwhelming Eldritch entity reducing you to a string of gray nothingness. That's the real heart of the game (and the developers): Lovecraftian horror.
This is why I hate Rain World.
It is a twenty-hour monument to despair.
tl;dr – Rain World is a po-faced “Shaggy Dog” story in video game form that I can't quite leave alone even though I hate every moment.
First let's get what I like out of the way. It is an aggressive middle finger to the metroidvania genre (always a cause to celebrate). No upgrades, no cracked walls, no “that-ledge-is-too-high-when-do-I-get-the-double-jump,” and no Fisher-Price lock-and-key obviousness. Oh you think you'll find a treasure chest in the far-flung corner? NOPE SCREW YOU – only rain and death await thee, LOL.
Though I hate the “crapsack world” theme (more on that later), I can't deny that the world feels – alive. You don't know what it's going to do. You don't know where enemies will show up. Or how many. Are the scavengers dangerous? What about the giant bugs? There's a flicker of Subnautica's awe and fear with each encounter – that delicious tension of split-second decision: friend or foe?
The game doesn't care if three white lizards decide to park in the only viable path forward with no weapons available. This is frustrating as hell – but it's kinda real. No one designed this beyond some spawn points. It's just how it happened. I must admit this is compelling even though I'm tearing my hair out. I wish more games at least toyed with this beyond the rogue-like genre.
But Rain World's pros come with flip-side cons. What I dislike:
The rain cycle. Yes the thing in the title. It just ruins what the game has going for it. It would be more enjoyable to wait out enemies and sneak around if you didn't have a damnable ticking death clock of irregular length to stress you out. It sucks half the fun out of exploration. Why go looking into a far off corner if the Overseer's shelter hint is pointing the other way? The shelters are far and few between and food can be even more elusive. You've got to eat enough for hibernation and reach a shelter before the clock ticks down, all while avoiding predators more-often-than-not parked in the one path forward (see the flip-side?).
“But you're supposed to take your time, raise your karma, feel out the area, you've gotta coexist with it, like it's a real habitat!” But it's not a real habitat. It's merely a literalization, a words-become-worlds manifestation from the lips of that awful 'teacher' in Beasts of the Southern Wild: “YOU. ARE. MEAT!”
“But-but-but all the A.I., and the ecosystem – I saw YouTube videos about it, it's real!” Promise you, it's not. It's a crapsack world, i.e. 100% contrived. It's a thousand screens of intentional degradation and disrepair – a pathological bludgeoning of post-apocalyptic mind-numbing sameness. Yes, it's all rendered very strikingly and no doubt lovingly by the artists, and at least the color-palettes change, but whether it's the yellow-sky farm array or the pitch-black citadel, it's a dead place out to get you and there's no way to live in it. There's no welcoming Elysian field to balance the rot. At best you kind of make peace with the decay and move on before the next rain.
For all the tool-savvy smarts of your controllable slug-cat, there's no way to cultivate an area or make your own shelter. I'm not saying the game should be a farming sim, but if it wants you to take your time, it needs to let you leave your stamp. It needs a Resident-Evil typewriter room. A place with a pensive tune and a trunk. A place that lets you catch your breath before heading back into hell. And the rain shelters ain't it.
Finally, Shaggy Dog time. What I loathe:
The game's story sells you a bill of goods. Your character slips from the saving grip of its slugcat family, falling down (supposedly) into the land of Rain World. Then you start the game. What do you assume your goal is? To get back to your sluggycat family of course!
This. Never. Happens.
There's not a pip or squeak about your family for the rest of the game. The intro cinematic is a lie. It feels like the developers, upon play-testing, found that players had little motivation to progress through the game (due to all the disincentives already listed), so they felt the need to set up a false motivation at the beginning.
You can speculate all you want about the fate of the family, but it's in vain. Are they alive, somewhere in Rain World? Are they in a land far above it, where your sluggy fell from? Does each hibernation or death cycle pass just a day, a month, or a year? Or is it years? Decades? Eons? Has your slugcat family been dead since the first cycle? Are they rebirthing somewhere else? Is it just the regions of Rain World that are subject to the reincarnation cycle or is it the entire fictional planet? Does any of this even matter? Apparently NOT – the slugcat family is a red herring for which you will get no satisfaction.
“But the ascended host of faceless slugcats at the end – that's kind of like your family!”
This takes us, perhaps, to what I loathe most about Rain World.
I'm not a Buddhist by any stretch, but I have a healthy respect for the psychology of the chakras, and in my opinion, the chakras are poorly used and represented in this game. What does filling your stomach and surviving rain cycles have to do with ascension? Why does becoming prey reduce your level? In my readings, the chakras are all about enlightenment and state of mind – not food chain scoreboards.
The game is a one-sided cynic's reading of Buddhist Hinduism. All self-immolation, detachment, void, and darkness – it has no room for love, home, progress, and light. No, the cute pearl quests for Looks-To-The-Moon don't fix this. A glowing tree of ascended slugcats, shown for all of five seconds, doesn't balance the overwhelming Eldritch entity reducing you to a string of gray nothingness. That's the real heart of the game (and the developers): Lovecraftian horror.
This is why I hate Rain World.
It is a twenty-hour monument to despair.
Man I love having to cover a super-long and distance with no food, unprecise controls, dangerous ennemies and a time limit.
I really love some elements of this game, and I get why so many people love it : the environments are gorgeous, the atmosphere on point, and the concept of a "metroidvania" with a living ecosystem where you play as your own part of the food chain is simply brilliant.
Unfortunately the frustrating controls, inherent unfairness and obscure mechanics all combined prevent me from appreciating this game as much as I'd like to, and that second trip to the Shaded Citadel was the last straw (pretty huge straw I must admit).
I'd still recommand it if it looks interesting to you but it truely saddens me that it wasn't for me.
I really love some elements of this game, and I get why so many people love it : the environments are gorgeous, the atmosphere on point, and the concept of a "metroidvania" with a living ecosystem where you play as your own part of the food chain is simply brilliant.
Unfortunately the frustrating controls, inherent unfairness and obscure mechanics all combined prevent me from appreciating this game as much as I'd like to, and that second trip to the Shaded Citadel was the last straw (pretty huge straw I must admit).
I'd still recommand it if it looks interesting to you but it truely saddens me that it wasn't for me.
Rain World is something larger than life itself. I have my own gripes about this game, and its ending (it is still an excellent ending, just feels like it could represent some things better), but when we look at our lives beyond the little scopes and cycles we go through, our own gripes can be lost in it all and at the end of the day are something that we should strive to let go. In Rain World, we go straight back to the basics of life, and live to live another day. We continue to go through our cycles of death and life as the unwavering oppression of our world rains down upon us, despite it all, we continue our lives, repeat our own cycles in these lives. Rain World provides its Buddhist themes beautifully, and even if I personally felt it wavered at points, but it is not in the name of Buddha to hold on to those grievances.
I am not a Buddhist, and probably will never be, but it is easily the philosophy I can relate to the most. I cannot describe exactly how I relate to it, but reading through piece after piece adjacent to Buddhism, I can't help but be entranced and work myself to be a better person. Rain World did the same for me, and I think that is a feat for any game, with the only games I can say that did the same for me being Outer Wilds and Library of Ruina. This game feels so different and yet it brings me to the same conclusions I have after witnessing those masterpieces (but shouldn't be compared directly as this is still a vastly different game). This game is a beautiful, atmospheric, spiritual, and philosophical journey that I think will really stick with me for a while. This whole review has just been me really sitting to think about the whole game after completion, no real structure and just a flow of thoughts. Always happens with these games that I truly adore, just as if these cycles always end with this same flood of rain.
I am not a Buddhist, and probably will never be, but it is easily the philosophy I can relate to the most. I cannot describe exactly how I relate to it, but reading through piece after piece adjacent to Buddhism, I can't help but be entranced and work myself to be a better person. Rain World did the same for me, and I think that is a feat for any game, with the only games I can say that did the same for me being Outer Wilds and Library of Ruina. This game feels so different and yet it brings me to the same conclusions I have after witnessing those masterpieces (but shouldn't be compared directly as this is still a vastly different game). This game is a beautiful, atmospheric, spiritual, and philosophical journey that I think will really stick with me for a while. This whole review has just been me really sitting to think about the whole game after completion, no real structure and just a flow of thoughts. Always happens with these games that I truly adore, just as if these cycles always end with this same flood of rain.
I got this game because a friend really wanted me to play it and go in completely blind. I'm only 3 cycles in right now and nothing could've prepared me for how scared shitless I'd become while playing this. It's probably one of the few games out there that makes being at the bottom of the food chain a genuinely horrifying experience.
Not only are you trying to hunt lesser creatures for survival, but you also have to deal with bigger eldritch horrors hunting you relentlessly for their own survival. It's fucked up.
Not only are you trying to hunt lesser creatures for survival, but you also have to deal with bigger eldritch horrors hunting you relentlessly for their own survival. It's fucked up.
The idea of a living and breathing metroidvania sounded so intriguing to me but unfortunately I can't like it a bit.
In the 1 hour or so of playing I didn't feel any joy and I am at that point in life where I can't push myself to play something just to see if it will get any better.
The atmosphere and the art style are pretty cool but the gameplay feels clunky and not very fluid.
I'll watch some videos about the ecosystem of the game and how it was created as a coping mechanism.
I know it's not my cup of tea but I can understand why others can enjoy it and maybe will recommend it to platformers/metroidvania fans.
In the 1 hour or so of playing I didn't feel any joy and I am at that point in life where I can't push myself to play something just to see if it will get any better.
The atmosphere and the art style are pretty cool but the gameplay feels clunky and not very fluid.
I'll watch some videos about the ecosystem of the game and how it was created as a coping mechanism.
I know it's not my cup of tea but I can understand why others can enjoy it and maybe will recommend it to platformers/metroidvania fans.
I wish I was a slug cat
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 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.
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.
I really couldn't get into this game. Maybe I'll circle back round, but it's so unclear what you need to do you just die over and over.
I'm all for not hand-holding, but this is too much of a barrier to getting into this game. Sadly, I can imagine Rain World probably loses a lot of potential players this way.
The people that stick it out seem to love it, but I just can't apply so much time to the game in the hopes I enjoy it later.
I'm all for not hand-holding, but this is too much of a barrier to getting into this game. Sadly, I can imagine Rain World probably loses a lot of potential players this way.
The people that stick it out seem to love it, but I just can't apply so much time to the game in the hopes I enjoy it later.
This review contains spoilers
Throughout my playthrough, I constantly found myself repeating the same phrase- “rain world moment…”
I find myself fascinated by this phrase. Imagine if this review was a single sentence that said, “Rain World is a game full of rain-world-moments.”
If you have not played Rain World, then that sentence will seem like a pointless tautology. If you have played Rain World, then I know we understand each other.
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Try asking a rain-world fan to describe this game to you. If you enjoy watching people struggle, prevent them from saying the words “special, unique or one-of-a-kind”.
Capturing Rain World’s identity with words is a task almost as difficult as the game itself. It’s certainly a struggle for me, despite my 70 hours of Rain World experience, my vast knowledge of games, my skill as a game designer and practice writing game critique.
I’ve already thrown away countless paragraphs of this writing. How many more hours until I find the words that solve this challenge? Do such words exist? Would I be able to write them?
What if I stopped treating my failed attempts as worthless? If I keep pursuing the perfect essay, then I’ll never be free. What if each time I wanted to restart, I just kept going and used these funky vertical ellipses.
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One of the things holding me back is that I keep trying to write a review, especially one that includes a spoiler-free summary for those who have not played the game. That is the wrong approach. I’ll go ahead and use this attempt to inelegantly get it out of my system.
Rain World is one of my favorite games. It’s an absolute masterpiece. The quality is mind-blowing. There are multiple things that Rain World does well in a way which few games rival. It’s especially worth pointing out how much this game excels in exploration, discovery, and dynamic situations. This is one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had. There really is nothing else like Rain World.
Rain World’s confidence in its intent is a double-edged sword- it’s part of what sets it apart and part of what will drive people away.
Even if you are the target audience for Rain World, there’s still a solid chance that you will bounce off the game. There will be many people who love what the game is going for but consider some part to be crossing a line or the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Rain World is best experienced as blind as possible yet is frustratingly negligent in its explanations. This is an unforgivable contradiction. If you play this game with no external help, then you will miss countless life changing pieces of knowledge that would have drastically improved your experience. There are many ways to play Rain World wrong, but the game has little interest in preventing you from falling into them.
I played the game by streaming it to my best friend, who is an experienced Rain World fan. Without playing the game in this context I probably would be a lot more negative on Rain World. {Maybe I would have dropped it… even had I preserved on my own the resulting experience would have been much worse.} In many ways, they did the work the game fails to do, and that was while respecting my incredibly low tolerance for spoilers and insight.
I have no idea where I draw the line between design decisions that are worthwhile and ones that are too costly. All I know is that Rain World crosses the line in some places and expertly approaches the line in others. It feels wrong to say all the places where the line is crossed are mistakes and it feels equally wrong to say all the places where the line is crossed are necessary for Rain World to be true to itself.
Obviously, this “line” is incredibly subjective and fickle, places where some people think the game is shooting itself in the foot others will argue are a strength core to the game.
I cannot emphasize enough how much the Remix options turned the tides for this frustration line. I personally consider the extra tutorials, loading screen tips, visual breath meter, and stronger bottomless pit indicators options essential to enable.
To repeat, Rain World is one of the best games I have ever played, but when people are negative on it, that just naturally makes sense to me. This is something I can only say for one other videogame in my top 20 {Shenzhen I/O}
Anyway, this concludes the section of my thoughts that you are allowed to read if you have not played Rain World—if that’s you, I suggest you get lost (in Rain World).
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It almost feels wrong to be writing a review of an experience that I am nowhere near done with. Right now, I’ve only finished the survivor campaign- anything that appears there will be fair game for me to casually spoil. I plan to add on to these thoughts once I’ve finished hunter and the downpour slugcats.
It feels like I am at the top of the mountain, when in reality I am at the tip of the iceberg. Yet my experience with this game feels so complete… it would be tragic to wait until after I finish Downpour to write out my thoughts. I’m also not going to wait until I finish Hunter, who knows when I’ll manage that lmao.
I played survivor for longer than most people do. I dideverything I could think of doing- all passages, all pearls, all echoes, and I even tried to make a point of travelling through every gate.
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Rain World is a Tsundere game. It would like you to believe that it doesn’t care about you, that the world is neither benevolent nor hostile to you specifically.
In many ways, the game sells this illusion. Other creatures don’t exist strictly as enemies- they’ll get distracted, have other concerns, and move through the world with no relation to you. There is a fundamental chaos to the world that has nothing to do with your agency. The level design is full of things that might seem pointless to a gamer conditioned brain.
Overwhelmingly, exploring these environments evokes a sense of existing in a place that is not built for you. This is one of the strongest parts of Rain World’s identity… yet I can’t help but notice the design work done specifically for the player.
Perhaps this is from my perspective as a game designer, I see so many of the places where the developers made very intentional decisions in service of the player experience. If Rain World truly cared little for your slugcat experience, then it would not be nearly as good a game.
Why are the things you need to traverse an environment always found within it? Sky Island has wide jumps- good thing there’s squidcadas. Farm Arrays has raindeer- good thing there’s sporepuffs. Drainage System has leeches- good thing there’s snails. The leg is tall and has enemies that can sense when you touch a surface- good thing there’s a healthy supply of grapple bugs.
It sure is convenient that there’s grapple bugs that chill outside of most of the shelters of the leg- so it hard for you to be locked into a situation where you don’t have access to them. It sure is convenient that there usually happens to be sticks near where you would need to throw them in a wall to get somewhere. It sure is convenient that flashbang plants grow in well-spaced intervals so that you are equipped to deal with migrating miros birds.
No matter how good Rain World is at selling its world, that popcorn plant was intentionally placed, those poles were positioned so you could traverse the room, many screens exist to teach you things.
To be clear, none of these are complaints. They make Rain World a much better game. A truly hostile game wouldn’t have nearly the appeal Rain World does. The way this world is designed for you to master is one of the best parts of the experience.
I’ve noticed that a lot of critical analysis of Rain World focuses on how it feels like the world doesn’t exist in service to the player. Personally, I consider this a disservice to the fantastic level design. There are so many interesting situations that occur due to room layouts, so many decisions made in favor of the player experience, so much communication between designer and player. This isn’t a world that simply exists for its own sake.
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Rain World is the definitive “lmao skill issue” game.
A lizard falls from the sky onto a tasty slugcat- Skill issue lol
Scavengers are fighting around you and one of them throws a bomb that hits you as collateral damage-Skill issue lol
The wonderful part here is that Skill Issue (derogatory) and Skill issue (ironic) both apply. A Rain World playthrough is packed with deaths that genuinely aren’t your fault, even an experienced player will still encounter crazy moments that would be miraculous to survive. {Calling these moments skill issue is a joke that never gets old.}
Yet even in a world this unfair- the majority of failure is genuine skill issue.
The skill ceiling here is higher than the apex of Five Pebbles.
slaps roof of slugcat- this bad boy can fit so much movement tech. The core player to game interaction of Rain World is simply superb. There is so much room for expression and mastery in how you control your movement.
I suspect that mastering some of these techniques would drastically change my relationship with the world. Personally, I was never able to get the hang of slides and rolls, but I did develop a great feel for “intermediate” movement generally. The arc of mastery I have experienced so far has been incredibly satisfying- the way I move through the world now is quite different from how I started.
There is a noticeable skill barrier in Rain World. On one side, the game is relentlessly punishing, cross the barrier and the game becomes much more lenient. The cursed part is that you start on the punishing side-the lenient side is your reward for spending time with the game.
There are many powerful feedback loops associated with a player’s experience level.
Consider food. When you are struggling to safely traverse the world, food is a pressing priority that often demands slight time sacrifices and risky detours. Yet once you reach the level where you can traverse an entire area in a cycle, it’s hard not to find food.
Consider Karma shield flowers. They’re a win more mechanic if I’ve ever seen one. A new one only spawns if you died while protected by one. It is laughably easy for someone who dies frequently to lose a relationship with this flower- and it is quite reasonable for someone who dies infrequently to always have a Karma shield.
From the perspective of a leniency mechanic, this is completely reversed from how it should be. The people who lose the most karma have the least access to this mechanic. The people who could easily recover their karma on their own have the most access to this mechanic.
As a game designer, one of my focus areas is analyzing feedback loops. I consider it one of my sacred duties to prevent things like getting trapped in valleys or snowballing. Meanwhile Rain World is a game where deep valleys and steep hills are a fundamental aspect of the design.
I am incredibly sensitive to repetition in games. I consider repeating something the most terrible punishment a game can give – being forced to redo a large swatch of content is something I consider a fatal flaw. The more similar each attempt is the worse I perform- my attention atrophies if I find myself doing things that I’ve already done.
I had several sessions where I spent hours just trying to escape one region, or even just the vicinity of a specific shelter. In many other games, this would be a damning experience that leads me to hate the game.
I think I’ve provided enough personal context to give the following statement impact.
Karma is one of the best mechanics in Rain World.
It is a core pillar that supports the rest of the design. It elevates the player’s experience in so many ways. I cannot believe that I have this opinion, since this system is a fundamental defiance to my principles.
It’s a system that is rough on new players while being something that only occasionally slows down experienced players. Again, my kneejerk reaction is that these experiences are reversed from how they should be, but that would be the wrong way to look at this.
The feedback loops here are working exactly as intended. You’re meant to get trapped… that’s how they build up the significance of escaping.
From a thematic perspective, Karma is a slam dunk. Isn’t it interesting that fixating on getting enough Karma is a great way to get trapped in a rut? Isn’t it interesting that temporarily abandoning your investment in your karma is the superior way to apporach a new area? Isn’t it interesting that passages restore you to max Karma?
Karma gates are a fascinating communication to the player. The sanest route through this game is telegraphed by the requirements on Karma gates. I love how most gates have differing requirements depending on the direction. Gates that require 5 Karma feel like an ominous warning. I remember spending 15 minutes debating whether I wanted to sleep in a shelter next to a certain gate in Drainage System. I found the decision proposed by this 5-Karma-Gate sitting at the end of a long and cursed section quite fascinating. This is a kind of exploration decision other games don’t offer- a decision space that is amplified by the Karma system.
Often in Rain World, you will make decisions that decide how the next few hours of your life are going to go. This is a lot to put on the player, but I enjoy this burden. Usually this isn’t an informed decision, yet it is one of greatest opportunities for player expression.
Eventually I reached the point of experience where travelling through gates became an informed decision, and that felt incredibly rewarding. I loved going from exploring like a (bad) search algorithm to evaluating the optimal path to my destination.
One of my favorite parts of Rain World is my relationship with the world. In part this relationship was built from the way Karma gates shifted my usual interaction with video games worlds. I was forced to linger in many places longer than I would have otherwise.
My expeditions into new areas were incredibly memorable, especially because of the intentionality with which I started them. In Rain World, I make an active decision to leave, that’s not something I’m used to doing. Normally in games, you finish content and then naturally move onwards. To put the question of “Am I satisfied with leaving this area right now” to me is incredibly intriguing. This question has weight to it since you can’t just freely flow between regions. I loved engaging with the weight of this decision.
There were many places that felt incredibly satisfying to leave, and putting the novelty of a new area on top of that is just icing on the cake. The first time I left Shaded Citadel, Drainage System, and Farm Arrays all felt worthy of celebration.
Karma loss feels like a surprisingly fair punishment for death (along with respawning back at the beginning of the cycle of course). It’s just significant enough to add extra weight to staying alive, but also light enough that it rarely feels like a truly frustrating setback. It hurts the most when I’m trying to grind up to escape an area, but this didn’t end up feeling like a significant complaint in my grand scheme experience with the game.
The fact that the game tests your consistency is essential to the experience. Otherwise, progress would be more subject to the whims of fate and luck. In a game so interested in unfairness, it’s critical that the player escapes by virtue of their own strength. In many ways, Karma is what sells the fantasy of getting good. There definitely were cycles where I was bored in an unideal Karma grind, but from my perspective now that’s just skill issue lmao.
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Rain World is full of epiphanies and discoveries, your knowledge is checked just as much as your skill. It’s in the same genre as games like Outer Wilds, Tunic and Toki Tori 2
This genre is hard to talk about… I hope to see more games join its ranks Honestly Rain World earns points just from being a good game in this developing space.
I think it’s worth analyzing Rain World through this lens of “discovery-exploration” games.
I’ll define the macro-verbs of this genre: Explore, Experiment, Receive (knowledge), Observe, and Answer.
Outer Wilds and Tunic are both fundamentally designed around receiving knowledge as a reward for progress, Rain World is distinct in how it rejects the receive verb. You don’t climb a tower and learn the secret to getting past kelp. Rain World rarely treats mechanical epiphanies as a reward for passing a trial.
This game is also quite sparing with its direct displays of tutorial. Anytime white text explaining a mechanic appears, I can feel the frustration of a developer who probably snapped after watching the 47th playtester completely miss it.
Remix is happier to actually tell you things. This could be interpreted as a relaxation of Rain World as a discovery game, but I don’t agree. Overall, the added tutorial messages and loading screen tips expose things that simply make your life easier. It’s nice that the wealth of movement options gets at least some in-game explanation. Many of the most interesting things you still need to learn yourself. Perhaps a small portion of loading screen tips do actually spoil something that I personally think they shouldn’t have- but I consider them an overall net positive.
Rain World is in an odd spot because it demands a core competency in order to not get frustrated with the game. The value the loading screen tips add towards establishing this baseline skill far outweighs any slight value loss in the discovery core of the game. The fact that some of these insights must be shown here is a symptom of how much the game fails at explaining.
If Rain World was a better discovery game, then it wouldn’t have the problem loading screen tips exist to solve. There must be some way to make it easier to learn these things through the other core macro verbs. It’s hard to imagine a Rain World that doesn’t have this issue, but I think this is still a criticism worth making.
Rain World’s greatest failing as a discovery game is its apathy towards the player obtaining its cool realizations. I believe it is possible for Rain World to be designed to peddle its secrets without compromising its identity. I refuse to accept that this fundamental flaw is an inescapable side effect of the game Rain World wants to be.
Anyway, I want to talk about the other macro verbs I listed.
I’ll start with Explore. Rain World is simply top-class here. Both chasing away each region’s fog of war and entering new regions are incredible experiences.
I am blown away by the intrinsic motivation I had to see each room. Long before I travelled the corners of the world in pursuit of lore, I was driven to wander. Had this just been a game about the joy of visiting each region, it would still probably be one of my favorites.
The abrupt and discrete screen transitions are one of the best aspects of this experience. It’s like the wonder of turning the page in a comic book. I love having to react to an unfamiliar environment immediately. I’m quite bothered by all the people who consider this a frustrating laziness from the devs and think continuous scrolling or follow-the-slugcat-camera would be an essential fix. To me this is like thinking the fixed camera in the original Resident Evil needs to be “modernized”
The way that you are not centered on the screen does massive work in selling the scale of what you are exploring. It makes you appreciate and observe the environments around you- most of the time slugcat is not the most relevant information on screen. A Continuous camera would train the player to see the world with the same perspective as someone driving a car…that would be a poor fit for this game.
Rain World is a game about observing. Sometimes this means carefully studying your environment, sometimes this means quickly reading the situation before that vulture grabs you. What I love about the screen transitions here is how much they force you into the latter situation.
Even the most experienced players will be suddenly thrust into hectic situations that they could not see coming. You can’t reach a level of skill where this part of the game fades away. I love being jump scared by a new screen, and I think these moments are one of the best tests of player skill.
There are some screen transitions in this game that are incredibly cursed. Yes, even as the #1 defender of the camera system here, I consider these unforgivable. Yet I don’t consider these instances proof that the system sucks, they’re just painful mistakes that the devs didn’t fix.
I remember the first time I met a brother-long-legs. It was early in my playthrough while exploring garbage wastes. I was in one of the big horizontal rooms with a transition halfway through. For some reason I can’t recall, I messed around in the left half of this screen for a while. Then I started to go onwards and instantly was greeted with a BLL violating social distancing guidelines. I remember the sheer impact of realizing I’d been in critical danger that whole time- the jarring effect of realizing this abomination had been right in front of me the entire time.
If Rain World had a continuous camera, that wouldn’t have happened. The camera implementation created many moments like this that I treasured.
The creature behavior in this game does a lot to make observation interesting. There’s micro-observation: So much of the moment-to-moment gameplay is paying attention to the positioning of other agents. There’s also macro-observation, the process by which you make discoveries by noticing details.
There’s no pearl that tells you the Daddy Long Legs are blind and sense vibrations. Instead you learn this through interactions with them- by observing their behavior. Noticing and getting a feel for the differences in various types of lizards is another great example of this aspect of the game.
I love how you can observe even after you die. It’s great to track the journey of the lizard that ate you. The neat part is that this is actually the safest way to observe rooms you haven’t been to yet, that’s a nice compensation for dying. It is also incredibly amusing to watch how a chaotic fight plays out long after it no longer involves you. Perhaps the best part of this mechanic is how you will sometimes be dealt a second chance. Any moment where this happens feels incredible. Witnessing a “Rain-World-moment” that saves you from certain death is one of the greatest highs the game offers.
Rain World’s experimentation is a bit weaker than its exploration and observation. The possibility space is small enough that the process of experimenting doesn’t have much meat to it. Consider the microverbs of the game: move,throw (or drop), grab,eat, and impale with stick. Almost every interesting mechanical interaction is a result of one of these.
To be clear, this alone isn’t the problem. Many games in this genre have a small set of verbs like this, and that’s often a benefit. The problem is that almost all of your experimentation in this game is simply a matter of throwing this arsenal of actions at everything you encounter. This is much closer to iterating through a checklist than meaningfully experimenting.
Drainage System was the first area I visited. My initial journey through here got me excited to engage with the experimentation layer of the game. How can I use these snails? What changes when I eat these mushrooms? Do I have any way to influence whether lizards appear to block my path? It was exciting to play around with snails, and eventually realize that they neutralize leeches. {I also discovered some VERY inconsistent movement tech that utilizes snails}. I even had a moment where I theorized that eating mushrooms subtly repelled lizards (I knew this was a dumb idea, but I happened to run into some coincidences that created this correlation in my mind).
This exciting scientific momentum declined as I played more of the game. Drainage System was the place where I did the most mechanical theorization. At some point I noticed that it’s usually pretty obvious how tools are placed in environments. Spore puffs, flashbangs, snails, they’re all there as a direct answer to the noteworthy creature of their respective region. The level designers play show too much of their hand and the experience of experimentation suffers as a result. It’s like when you learn how a puzzle designer thinks and automatically use that as heuristic to solve new levels.
There were also quite a few of these experimental discoveries that I was backseated into making. I don’t mean this as a complaint regarding my friend who watched me play. The more I think about this, the more I consider it a flaw with the game. Just like the remix loading screen tips, the fact that these backseat moments were obviously the correct decision is a symptom of a greater failing in the game. Even though I know some things are on me for not noticing, I overwhelmingly feel that the game fails to encourage discovery.
The problem here is so vague and fundamental to the game that it’s hard to elaborate on. I think I can pin down my main issue though. In Rain World, the player’s accumulation of discoveries directly correlates to how they are able to enjoy the game. In most other games, making discoveries is instead directly linked to progress. There’s several cursed ramifications of not following this trend: players will not always realize there is something to discover, players can continue for hours without realizing something important, players can never realize something, and it’s easy to become upset that you didn’t discover something sooner. Binding discoveries and game progress is a good way to avoid all these pitfalls. Many people find it cool that so much of the knowledge in Rain World is noncritical- that you can beat the game and travel through areas without obtaining it. Personally, I don’t find this worth the cost of falling into the above-mentioned pitfalls.
I have a friend who did not realize how to use grapple bugs until they had already suffered climbing through most of the exterior without them. That region is one of the worst experiences they had on their journey. Meanwhile, after my first 15 minutes of struggling in exterior, I was informed on how to use grapple bugs. The exterior is one of my favorite regions in the game. It’s cursed how grapple bugs require trying something that isn’t particularly intuitive to try. In order to swing with them you must push the jump button while in the air- this is something that doesn’t follow the game’s established language of verbs and isn’t is intuitive to try. Why would I assume that pressing jump again triggers what I’m holding?
The fact that it is technically possible to go through exterior without understanding this actually makes it so much worse. Instead of realizing that I am a knowledge barrier, I assume I’m at a skill issue barrier (or if my experience really sours, then now I think the level design is awful). There’s a value in putting hard knowledge checks to gate progress.
Speaking of progress gates, the last verb I have to talk about is answer. There are actually a few of these knowledge checks in the game. The best example is the series of kelp guarding the entrance to memory crypts.
Shoutout to kelp! I love how multiple areas make use of them, it’s one of the few places where you can learn the answer to a question in a different area. The kelp is subterranean taught me to pay “the stick tax”, to get past them. One of my favorite moments of my playthrough was stumbling into the 2nd answer for kelp- slowly drifting past them in water. I adore when games make you think you’ve figured something out, only to be hiding an even more satisfying answer beyond that.
Almost every organism in Rain World is either a question or an answer. Most big things are questions, most small things are answers. It’s interesting to consider the exceptions to this dichotomy.
For example, Raindeer are both a question and an answer. They’re the answer to crossing the wide stretches of red worm grass in farm arrays. The question is WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THESE DESERVED TO EXIST?! Yeah, we’re finally here, it’s time for the Raindeer hate.
The real question that they represent is “how do I travel on these and have their assistance when I need it.” The problems start rolling in once you’ve found the answers to these questions, and they still behave with the consistency of a college student. Raindeer are frustrating because of their unmatched levels of jank- even when you’ve passed the knowledge checks.
I spent HOURS trying to get through the Raindeer sections of farm arrays- and that was with my friend instructing me on tricks to make them more consistent. Nothing else in this game was an assault on my sanity like Raindeer were. I had to resort to putting on an external playlist of banger music to keep my morale up.
Raindeer ruined my experience with farm arrays, it’s the only region in the game I despise. {I’ve been finding it hard to start hunter because of how I loathe Farm Arrays}
Of course, for some baffling reason they’re mandatory to get to certain places. I gathered every colored pearl myself, but I was on the edge of simply giving up on the red Raindeer one. {Like literally about to hit my hard stop point before I finally got it. I listened to 2 music albums and decided to commit to stopping all attempts after the 2nd one finished. The last song played right as I picked it up and I miraculously made it to shelter in that run.}
It is hard for me to truly despise something in a game. Raindeer join the ranks of Tis100’s sequence sorter and Dicey Dungeon’s Witch elimination round.
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I explored the regions in the following order: outskirts, drainage system, garbage wastes, industrial complex, chimney canopy, shaded citadel, shoreline, look to the moon, subterranean, filtration system, the depths, sky islands, farm arrays, memory crypt, the exterior, and then five pebbles.
In other words, the only place I had not been by the time I reached Five Pebbles was the Wall. This is kind of cursed- I had already been on the journey he suggested. {Depths is quite unsatisfying to explore early, it’s hard to navigate without light and you just end up getting yeeted by ancients who won’t let you pass}
Additional Sidenote: I would have gone to the wall from canopy had my friend not interfered. The fact that you can first go to Five Pebbles from this direction just by using some stick jumps is something I consider a mistake. Yes, having multiple routes is in the spirit of the game. Yes, taking that route on additional playthroughs is incredibly satisfying. {I just did this in Monk today actually}. It’s not worth it because of the chance of a first-time player taking this objectively worse path. Coming into Five Pebbles from the wall utterly ruins the arc of the area. The gate from this direction doesn’t even need 5 Karma which is simply baffling to me. Even if a player doesn’t realize they can stick jump here, skipping the buildup of climbing the leg is just tragic.
My journey was split into 2 halves. Before encountering Five Pebbles, Rain World was one of the best games I’ve ever played… afterwards it was something greater.
First of all, Five Pebbles is an absolutely rad area. It’s so cool… it renders the question “What is your favorite Rain World region” pointless. FP is visually fascinating, structurally fascinating, and mechanically fascinating. [It feels so strange to explore an environment without the dynamic threats + pressure you’re used to, and moving around in 0g is quite interesting]
I loved the way my curiosity compounded here (wtf do you mean this area is called 5 pebbles???). The payoff for this buildup is incredible. The realization that I was exploring a computer super structure was awesome (especially since I’m a computer science person and I really enjoy when fantasy stories introduce a unique take on computing).
Many journeys in Rain World do not have any extrinsic reward. Playing this game is a vast lesson in pursuing intrinsic value. The world does not care about the gauntlets you pass and refuses to dish out player-state changes. Until 5 pebbles that is.
Now that is some reward. Now this game has writing. Now you have a clear end-goal. Now you have double the karma ranks. Now you glow in the dark {yes, I know this happens along the way after you eat a neuron-fly}. So much has changed after you leave Five Pebbles.
This is quite a significant contrast to my first encounter with Moon, which feels like it should be special, but nothing happens. {except for the fact that you can harm her without understanding what you are doing which is an egregious mistake on the game devs part- a betrayal to the expected safety of experimentation and an arbituary way to lock players out of something incredibly impactful}
There’s a part of me that feels this intended order of meeting iterators is silly. Was the excitement I got to return to Moon worth the way the encounter initially fell flat?
Five Pebbles was a significant divide in my relationship with the world. Before FP I wandered, after I travelled. As I finished climbing down the wall, I was no longer an explorer- instead now I was a conqueror.
The fundamental appeal of the game also changed for me around this time. The world started as an interesting setting to explore and struggle in. Then it became a place which contains 16 colored pearls (and 5 echoes).
These colored pearls are the greatest collectable object that has ever been put in a video game. Bringing them to Moon is incredibly rewarding (and this sure is quite an endeavor. This was the main focus of my last 25 hours with survivor- that was with key item movement from passages. )
Seeking out more lore is the goal that excited me the most in my time with Rain World.
There are 2 reasons these pearls are a highlight. Firstly, the worldbuilding is incredibly interesting. Secondly, their writing is unbelievably dense. These pearls have so much packed into them. Perhaps this game has about 5 fantasy novel pages worth of text… I’ve read many epic fantasy novels that feel like they do less with literally 100x as many pages.
Some pearls are “minor”, describing some small detail or aspect of life. Then some pearls are just a story shattering bombshells that arrive, slightly elaborate, then leave. Rain World’s writing loves to rip open questions, but crucially it’s not afraid of answering them either. The text in this game is disorienting, strange and starts making a lot more sense as you gather context… but it does not make the mistake of being impenetrably cryptic.
I love some of the jarring first principles this world is derived from. The pearl where some ancients mention being blessed with an ever-dwindling population is the first one I read and that sure caught my attention. I love when fantasy is concerned with problems that are completely different to what we face in reality.
The writing uses non-linearity very well, each pearl also makes every pearl you’ve already read make more sense. I enjoy when stories make me work to find my bearings – arguably this is one of the core pillars of Rain World as a game generally. It’s not just that Rain World is unique and alien, so much of its power comes from the confidence in which it expects you to keep up.
One unfortunate misstep in the UX is the fact that dialog text auto advances. It really should advance only on player prompt, especially because of the work that goes into comprehending each line. I can see the argument that the slugcat is just listening and cannot participate, but hollow knight has the same deal –player paced conversations are fine there.
I am a very fast reader, so these automatic text advances hurt me much less than they would most people. Yet I still consider this an issue worth complaining about, for me it’s an annoyance for others it’s a frustrating accessibility issue. I also imagine it’s hard for people to be vocal or informed about this, given that it’s a spoiler that conversations appear in this game. Accessibility issues for things people could not possibly know appear in a game are so much more egregious.
Back to my personal experience, I have one reading speed and that’s full steam ahead. Rain World is one of the only times in my life when I’ve wanted to slow down- it is deeply tragic that the game will not let me. Pearls are a little more forgivable because they are repeatable, the main five pebbles conversation and echo dialogs are tragically unrepeatable. This issue was resolved by my friend simply posting each dialog into our discord DMs. I cannot overstate how much this improved my experience, both for initial clarity and revisiting text once I had more understanding.
Another UX tragedy is the visibility of the pearls themselves. They can be quite well hidden. There were many screens where I did not spot them until their presence was pointed out to me. They’re shiny colored pearls for gods sake, why are some of them camouflaged so well If they were just some random collectible this would be barely excusable, but the idea that something so cool is so easy to miss upsets me.
My favorite pearl is the one concerning sliver of straw. The whole deal with the iterators is an interesting setup already, but this just takes it up another step. The idea of broadcasting the triple affirmative and then dying before she can elaborate is incredible. This is such a fascinating conflict to explore. If the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of this pearl were the blurb on the back of a fantasy novel, I would be rushing to read it.
Yet this pearl doesn’t stop there, then it goes into the theories. I love when stories explore how people disagree and interpret things differently. Whenever I write notes for magic systems, I always try to find interesting places where various in-world people could have different takes on it. I love appreciating the possibility space of ideas that are intentionally left open.
I also love the naming scheme the ancients use. The format of {count-object} was endlessly fascinating to me. It’s quite distinctive and evocative. The way they treat titles was a detail my mind kept returning to. It’s quite fitting for their names to feel like excerpts from poems-complete with strong imagery. It’s neat how iterator names feel like incomplete versions of these naming schemes.
I love the characterization of iterators. Five Pebbles and Moon are both incredibly compelling characters, especially once you approach understanding the full picture.
Mechanically, Moon is a vending machine that takes in pearls and dispenses LORE. Despite that, it still feels like there’s an impactful connection being built from your interactions with her. The few lines she does get feel well used and feel surprisingly meaningful. If I was someone who experienced emotional resonance and formed connections with characters, then surely I’d find this very powerful
It's interesting whenever you get a pearl and Moon is like “well apparently I was a part of this”. You get a great picture of her compassion and care for other iterators here. I especially like her discord username: big sis moon and how she argues that sliver of straw should be left in peace.
The Sky Island pearls that show chat logs between iterators are incredible. The fact that only 2/5 randomly spawn per playthrough is tragic {I went ahead and read them all in order after bringing my 2 to moon.} The arc of reading these in sequence is so excellent that I find their in-game implementation quite disappointing. These are what do the heavy lifting for Five Pebbles’ characterization, show why both iterators you meet are in the state they’re in, and are full of entertaining dialog to top it off.
I loved making the connection of figuring out who erratic pulse was. If you have the context of all 5 logs, then it’s quite satisfying to notice how weak the pseudonym attempt is. I like my interpretation that Five Pebbles was trying to overwrite their self-destruction taboo, moon interrupting him led to the “unfortunate developments” on Five Pebbles. The pearl that ends with moon saying “and now here I am, to my waist in water and getting drowned on the regular” has a powerful impact and deeply appreciable irony. It’s an effective tragedy.
This tragedy is made even better through the perspective from which you experience it. Most of these types of stories deal out their grand cosmic punishments and cruel fates as part of the climax. Here they are simply the context of the current reality, results of long past events. You get to walk around in the consequences.
Then there’s the fundamental toil and pain inherent to the very concept of iterators. Imagining this existence is something that terrifies me. This is one of the few narrative elements in a story that has ever truly resonated with me.
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“What goes up comes down again.
One moment you’re on top,
the next you’ve been laid low.
But for every turning wheel,
there’s an axle that doesn’t move at all.”
-Fortune’s Foundation Major Arcana #10- The Wheel
I have the type of depression where I blame myself for every problem. Something went wrong? SKILL ISSUE. I just need to stop failing to do things. I just need to stop messing everything up. Why can’t I just do what I need to?
Lately I’ve started to change my tune. Of course my existence is hard, the world isn’t designed for people like me. All I can do is appreciate the value of myself and the world, even when they effortlessly crush me.
There’s a comfort in knowing that life is simply unfair. That even if I was the type of person who could have things under control, sometimes a vulture just flies down from the sky. It is strictly wrong to blame myself for every misfortune.
It is also strictly wrong to ignore the power of my agency. My actions influence the outcome, even in unfair situations. Life isn’t simply a series of events that are handed to me.
Both Skill Issue & Luck control my fate. To ignore either half is a mistake. As someone who has spent so long focusing on my failures there is a certain strange value in embracing the unfairness of reality
Sometimes things go well, sometimes things go poorly. Sometimes that’s my fault, sometimes it’s not. Regardless, I will continue to exist, continue to struggle.
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I spend most of my time thinking. When I am myself, my thoughts are free;I jump from idea to idea; I enjoy getting lost in overwhelming complexity. When I am depressed, my brain hyperfocuses. All resources are dedicated to finding a solution… I become an iterator.
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I hate focusing. It’s painful to bind the power of my attention to one thing. I can’t stand having an objective for my thoughts. I am meant to explore, not search.
It is tragic to treat the world’s complexity as an obstacle. It is tragic to ignore things that aren’t relevant.
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Unimaginable computation resources, unparalleled feats of engineering, unique lives… all treated as bugs in a maze- as draws in an impossible lottery. Imagine what value they could have had if they weren’t trapped in an existence of such a singular purpose. The ancients didn’t just force the iterators into a cruel existence, they wasted their potential.
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Rain World is great in any genre I can think to put it in
Rain World is an excellent action game. Fights are chaotic, expressive, and satisfying. I love the way combat is focused on improvisation. It’s a joy to constantly react to unexpected situations and overwhelming threats. In some fights I feel like a deliberate hunter, in some I’m desperately fighting for my life. Managing held items, enemy positioning, and player movement is a simple foundation that in practice leads to incredibly fun gameplay and skill potential. Stick throwing is a solid core combat mechanic.
Normally I like my action systems to be lenient on mistakes, Rain world is a wonderful exception. This is probably the most punishing combat system that I love. Often one large mistake is enough to kill me, but it’s also quite surprising what I can get away with.
There are so many rooms that make for excellent arenas. Environmental complexity does a lot of heavy lifting to make fights interesting. There’s often interesting geometry to consider and plenty of traversal options, this does a great job of emphasizing the positioning aspect of battle. I really enjoy when games emphasize verticality and sudden changes in location.
I purposefully started a lot of fights throughout my journey, even in many places where they could have been avoided. The outlaw passage is very fitting for how I generally played the game (it’s the first one I got after survivor). I partially formed the habit of randomly starting fights as practice (so that I’d be less scared of other creatures), but mostly I just loved the action.
Rain World is an excellent stealth game. These rooms are packed with possible routes and corners to hide in. The abundance of vents and pipes is one of the most distinctive parts of this world’s design and they shine especially here. One of the beautiful parts of this traversal layer is that you aren’t the only one who can use it.
Many games that aren’t exclusively focused on stealth either struggle to motivate it or fail to match its fun with its power. Rain World makes neither of these mistakes. The game both forces caution and prevents it from being the singular answer. If you fight everything you will die. If you fight nothing, you will die. The fact that finding this balance is part of the player’s agency is incredible. Failure transitions into death or frantic action, I much prefer that to the mistake-hide-wait cycle I’ve seen in some other games. Enemies in Rain World rarely go “it must have been the wind”, it’s more like “heck this, I have better things to do” or “I guess this vulture is my bigger priority right now.”
What sets Rain World apart even from dedicated stealth games is the joy of its dynamic nature. There’s an inherent unpredictability to the threats you face that forces you to give them respect. Slow methodical gameplay doesn’t get tiresome as fast due to the uniqueness of each moment. The real highlight is the way “situations” can occur out of nowhere- calm can turn into chaos very fast. Additionally, the push & pull of patience and pressure is incredibly solid here. Stealth isn’t a genre I’m overly fond of, these changes are what make me enjoy it in Rain World.
In my opinion, the most important Rain World skill is the art of pipe jukes. It’s a powerful technique, one that almost feels broken. Once I got in the habit of utilizing it, my relationship with the world was forever changed. It’s the answer to a surprising number of situations. There is a certain satisfaction and humor to harmlessly passing by other creatures in a vent… but I wish it wasn’t such a silver bullet. Learning the magic of pipe juking is one of the easiest ways to stop having skill issue.
Rain World is a stand-out open world game. It passes the most important test: the game world isn’t merely a container for various pieces of content, it is itself the content. I don’t think I’ve spent enough time emphasizing how awesome this world is. Every region is incredibly memorable; The setting is rad; There’s an incredible sense of scale; It’s packed with breathtaking sights; You have great freedom in how you explore it; Just like the game itself, this world feels completely distinct from all other game worlds. Many games go for depicting a post-civilization world, nobody nails it like Rain World does.
The scale of this world is mind-blowing. They could have gotten away with having less regions, given all the incredible innovation that’s going on here. Yet we get a world like no other, and a lot of it. There sure are a lot of screens in this game, the regions feel huge, looking at the map is beautifully overwhelming.
Shoutout to the in-game map. It’s my favorite map screen of all video games. It’s a fascinating mix of abstraction and detail. I love how it focuses just on geometry and connections. Even as a pure distillation of functionality, it’s awesome to look at. I spent so much simply appreciating the map- it has a level of ambition that’s fitting for the world it depicts. What’s truly wild is the way it commits to depicting differing layers in the levels. It’s cool how they superimpose lines on top of each other to represent the 3D nature of the world. Despite all the interesting stuff in this game, opening the map always felt like the biggest reminder of how special a game I was playing.
Iggy Is a strange inclusion. The way it points out danger, shelters, food, and gives directions towards iterators feels like a strange compromise. It’s jarring in a game that’s so intent on not telling you things. Surely they’re a net positive for the player experience, since it helps people stay under the frustration line, but this feels so out of place. I found the shelter indicators nice and helpful, occasionally the danger indicators saved my life, and I think the food indicator is not necessary.
What I really hold a grudge against is Iggy’s directions. It sucks at guiding you to places- it chooses strange paths, doesn’t give input frequently enough, and is often hard to interpret. One of the reasons I visited Five pebbles last is the way Iggy failed in guiding me to them- so I ended up backtracking and trying gates I remembered in previous areas. It’s also pretty unintuitive that Iggy’s presence is region dependent, (I forgot it was even a thing while I was in Subterranean). Their symbology can be quite hard to interpret, especially due to how briefly you see it. Good luck figuring out Iggy’s endgame. Apparently, it wants you to bring neuron flies from FP to Moon. I guess the devs couldn’t resist making this mechanic unintuitive, even when it’s explicitly to help players who are struggling with things being unintuitive.
I don’t think the idea of “this is moon’s overseer taking an interest in slugcat” lands well. They feel more like a partner spirit that is only occasionally interested in helping you. I can’t decide if it’s a worthwhile inclusion. Like plenty of people complain about a lack of guidance even with Iggy in the game. There’s a part of me that wanted them to commit more to making something that actually helps players and explains the game. There’s a part of me that thinks the journey should be lonelier until you mean an iterator. Then there’s the part of me that thinks Iggy has a net positive effect on the player experience and doesn’t get annoying-so mission accomplished?
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Rain World is a beautiful game. Every screen is gorgeous. The art style is incredibly distinct and evocative. There’s an overwhelming detail crammed into these pixels. Lighting and Shadows aren’t normally something I appreciate in games, but wow here they blew me away. Visually, my favorite areas are Five Pebbles, Sky Islands, The exterior, Shoreline, The Depths -shoot that’s about half of them. I love the aesthetic of Rain World, it’s amazing how they take a setting that is full of decay and inject so much life into it.
Then there’s the dedicated art screens- passages, region title screens, the intro, early hibernation scenes. All of these are amazing- playing Rain World has blessed me with 20 new wallpapers 😊.
Even the symbols of the game look awesome. I love the Karma and passage glyphs. They add so much to the vibe of the game. How many other games would have just used Arabic or Roman numerals here?
I’ve played my fair share of games that invent writing systems- Rain World’s is one of the more interesting ones, even with only the tiny subset of it that is visible in game.
Then there’s the matter of the fantastic soundtrack. It’s full of jams, beauty, and fascinating strange sounds. I’d love it if I got to hear it more when playing the game. I despise the way the music is implemented in this game; it probably is legitimately my biggest flaw with the game.
Imagine you’ve walked into a cool new area. The best track you’ve ever heard starts playing and the vibes are off the charts. Then you die to a lizard. Congrats, you’ve just lost your opportunity to hear the music- hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. This is the 3rd punishment for death that I didn’t mention before, and it’s the cruelest. Most of my deaths in Rain World I was able to take stride, but whenever this happened it really bothered me.
So that was a specific grievance, but I want to continue to make the overall point that I didn’t get to hear the music enough. The way in which music plays feels designed for people who can travel through the world in continuous journeys and travel between regions with the consistency of a commuter. The time when I’d want to hear the music the most is when I’ve been trapped in a region for a while, that’s the situation where you’re least likely to hear area themes. It seems like a lot of tracks only play when you pass through specific rooms, and if something happens after that trigger then it will be a while before you hear it again (if at all). I’ve listened to the soundtrack on its own many times now so it’s hard to tell, but it feels like I barely heard quite a few of these tracks.
I’m not a silence or even ambiance enjoyer. I generally prefer to hear distinct music playing. That said, I can still appreciate a game that goes against my tastes and does it well- like Breath of the Wild. Rain World is way over the line of doing this well. It hoards its music. Some silence would have been a great way to enhance the feeling of loneliness and impact of when tracks do play, but the game goes much too far. I probably could have dealt with this, given how cool it is when exploration tracks do finally play. Yet the way you have “one-shot” to hear them which can be easily interrupted shatters my tolerance.
The threat-music doesn’t suffer from this problem, although I wish the threshold for hearing an area’s specific threat music was a little lower- instead of only playing when you’re in “max” danger.
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For a game titled RAIN world, it sure feels easy to forget about the rain. I played in mostly 3 hour sessions, during which I’d only see the downpour 1-3 times. Usually either something else would get me first or much more rarely I would make it to a shelter. It feels like without fail every session I had a moment where I went “oh yeah the rain is a thing”. In some ways this was a gift that kept on giving. I consistently entered periods where the Rain had not been relevant for a while, only to have an incredibly memorable cycle where I was rudely reminded that it exists.
I’m not in a rush to call this a mistake. It’s just odd given how much the rain is advertised as part of the core concept of the game. It’s like calling your game Legend of Zelda and then giving her 15 minutes of screentime.
I love how the Rain is not an instakill mechanic. It was always fun to enter a mad rush when I got blind-sided by a cycle ending.
There’s a build up that gives a window of opportunity to make it to a shelter, even when you had lost track of time. This created several spicy close calls, failures that were mere centimeters away from safety and successes that were seconds away from death.
I also like the brief “twilight” period in which all creatures go to hibernate before the rain comes. It’s both a helpful warning and useful opportunity. I love that even green lizards are better at keeping track of time than me. I don’t know how many times I went “wow what a lucky miracle that everything is leaving, that probably saved my life…. oh shoot I need to GO”
Of course, it’s a bit silly to focus only on the moments where I actually saw the rain. The real value is its omnipresent pressure. This threat is one of the core pillars of Rain World’s game essence. It’s a mechanic that makes everything else in the game work better. It makes gathering food interesting instead of tedious. It forces the player to balance their pace and safety. It leads players to utilize their map knowledge to plan routes. It divides the play experience into chunks where it is easy to take breaks.
Random cycle length is an interesting decision. I appreciate it as a measure to diversify cycles. It also simply makes much more sense -it would be weird if weather patterns were precisely consistent. I bring it up because it definitely has a noticeable effect on the gameplay experience- sometimes there’s dud cycles which aren’t particularly fun.
One of my favorite games makes players precisely aware of the length of 22 minutes. The more I played that game, the more that period of time became intuitive. Rain World is the opposite, I never developed a good sense of timing. It felt like I was always reacting (and glancing at the cycle timer when I remembered that mattered). I’m not the type of player who can look at my cycle length and think “this is how far I should plan to make it”, I just make decisions based off how much time I have left (If I’m paying attention to it of course).
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The main characters of Rain World are the lizards. Equally deadly and silly, they steal the show. They’re the bread-and-butter threat of the game, and that sure works well.
The Dragon Slayer is my favorite passage, I went on quite the journey regarding how I interacted with lizards. First, I was scared of them. Then I learned how to outmaneuver these oppressive obstacles. Eventually, something snapped in me and I decided to impulsively attack one. One dead green lizard later and now I was done respecting lizards. My hubris was rewarded with many more deaths, but now I’m the one who should be feared. I love the way Dragon Slayer changed how I think, my first reaction upon seeing any new lizard was “Oh is this a type I haven’t killed yet? Sweet!”
Green lizards are my favorite, purely due to the nonsense I can get away with… I give them absolutely no respect and somehow still don’t die It’s fun to watch them be goofy, especially since I once feared them. Pinks and Blues are quite fun to fight. Oranges are an incredibly interesting threat- they often appear in rooms fun level design and force you to deal with squad tactics. Let one see you and there’s a great “now all of China knows you’re here” moment.
Then of course, there’s the white lizards. They feel like a jack of all trades, master of all. They’re fast, can climb walls, have incredibly powerful tongues, and oh yeah small detail they can turn invisible :). I lost count of how many times the game got me with a camouflaged lizard, a joke almost as funny as pole plants.
Normally, I’m quite detached from the games I’m playing. Rain World on the other hand, is able to get strong reactions out of me. There’s nothing like –“oh god there’s a lizard there”- or grabbing onto a pole- only to be reminded of some very important information concerning its nature. Normally I’m not a big fan of mimics in games, but I found them hilarious here.
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The ending didn’t hit as hard for me as it seems to have for others. It’s a cool sequence, especially visually, but it didn’t feel that meaningful. Transcending felt like a formality- a long and fitting ceremony to cap off my time with survivor.
Even here, Rain World does not yield. You must hold down for an uncomfortably long time. It feels like the void sea goes on and on- one final struggle, even if it’s trivial.
Overall, this feels like a journey before destination experience. The real meaning was the friends we made along the way (ironically, I tamed a pink lizard as the very last thing I did before returning to depths. They followed my passage into filtration system, only for me to abandon them forever. Now that I think about it I also (accidentally) trapped a jet eel in the entrance of LTTM … each time I visited Moon, I was reminded of the cruel existence I had created.}
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The echo conversations are pretty neat. They’re not quite as interesting as the pearls, and quite a bit more cryptic, but they make up for it with vibes. Each one is an incredibly memorable moment.
I wonder if the original intent for the endgame was to go on a pilgrimage and visit each echo to get 10 Karma. I’m not sure how I feel about Five Pebbles skipping this for you. On the one hand it feels counter to the intended thematic nature of struggle and escape. On the other hand, it’s a pretty delicious irony that slugcats treat FP as an ascension directions machine- he’s still serving some shadow of his purpose despite failing to find an answer.
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I’m starting to run out of steam. I’ve spent almost all of my free time in the past 2 weeks writing these thoughts. It’s been an unhealthy hyper fixation. Every time I try to do something else, I start to think about how much I want to finish this. This has become quite the time-sink.
10,000 words; 35 pages; Countless hours. Have I even captured what I wanted to say about this game? Is there value in all these words? I still have too much to say.
I didn’t talk about how much I love passages- how interesting they are to pursue and how special using each one feels.
I didn’t write 47 paragraphs about how fun grapple bugs are or tell the story of the grapple bug I smuggled across the world.
I barely even chronicled my experiences with the various regions in the game. Each one surely deserves its own section.
I didn’t go off into a weird side tangent on how interesting the environmental ramifications of iterator placement are.
I didn’t complain enough about Raindeer.
I couldn’t find the correct way to write the personal section. That was supposed to be the highlight that brought everything together.
I failed to explain why I find iterators so interesting.
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I find myself fascinated by this phrase. Imagine if this review was a single sentence that said, “Rain World is a game full of rain-world-moments.”
If you have not played Rain World, then that sentence will seem like a pointless tautology. If you have played Rain World, then I know we understand each other.
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Try asking a rain-world fan to describe this game to you. If you enjoy watching people struggle, prevent them from saying the words “special, unique or one-of-a-kind”.
Capturing Rain World’s identity with words is a task almost as difficult as the game itself. It’s certainly a struggle for me, despite my 70 hours of Rain World experience, my vast knowledge of games, my skill as a game designer and practice writing game critique.
I’ve already thrown away countless paragraphs of this writing. How many more hours until I find the words that solve this challenge? Do such words exist? Would I be able to write them?
What if I stopped treating my failed attempts as worthless? If I keep pursuing the perfect essay, then I’ll never be free. What if each time I wanted to restart, I just kept going and used these funky vertical ellipses.
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One of the things holding me back is that I keep trying to write a review, especially one that includes a spoiler-free summary for those who have not played the game. That is the wrong approach. I’ll go ahead and use this attempt to inelegantly get it out of my system.
Rain World is one of my favorite games. It’s an absolute masterpiece. The quality is mind-blowing. There are multiple things that Rain World does well in a way which few games rival. It’s especially worth pointing out how much this game excels in exploration, discovery, and dynamic situations. This is one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had. There really is nothing else like Rain World.
Rain World’s confidence in its intent is a double-edged sword- it’s part of what sets it apart and part of what will drive people away.
Even if you are the target audience for Rain World, there’s still a solid chance that you will bounce off the game. There will be many people who love what the game is going for but consider some part to be crossing a line or the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Rain World is best experienced as blind as possible yet is frustratingly negligent in its explanations. This is an unforgivable contradiction. If you play this game with no external help, then you will miss countless life changing pieces of knowledge that would have drastically improved your experience. There are many ways to play Rain World wrong, but the game has little interest in preventing you from falling into them.
I played the game by streaming it to my best friend, who is an experienced Rain World fan. Without playing the game in this context I probably would be a lot more negative on Rain World. {Maybe I would have dropped it… even had I preserved on my own the resulting experience would have been much worse.} In many ways, they did the work the game fails to do, and that was while respecting my incredibly low tolerance for spoilers and insight.
I have no idea where I draw the line between design decisions that are worthwhile and ones that are too costly. All I know is that Rain World crosses the line in some places and expertly approaches the line in others. It feels wrong to say all the places where the line is crossed are mistakes and it feels equally wrong to say all the places where the line is crossed are necessary for Rain World to be true to itself.
Obviously, this “line” is incredibly subjective and fickle, places where some people think the game is shooting itself in the foot others will argue are a strength core to the game.
I cannot emphasize enough how much the Remix options turned the tides for this frustration line. I personally consider the extra tutorials, loading screen tips, visual breath meter, and stronger bottomless pit indicators options essential to enable.
To repeat, Rain World is one of the best games I have ever played, but when people are negative on it, that just naturally makes sense to me. This is something I can only say for one other videogame in my top 20 {Shenzhen I/O}
Anyway, this concludes the section of my thoughts that you are allowed to read if you have not played Rain World—if that’s you, I suggest you get lost (in Rain World).
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It almost feels wrong to be writing a review of an experience that I am nowhere near done with. Right now, I’ve only finished the survivor campaign- anything that appears there will be fair game for me to casually spoil. I plan to add on to these thoughts once I’ve finished hunter and the downpour slugcats.
It feels like I am at the top of the mountain, when in reality I am at the tip of the iceberg. Yet my experience with this game feels so complete… it would be tragic to wait until after I finish Downpour to write out my thoughts. I’m also not going to wait until I finish Hunter, who knows when I’ll manage that lmao.
I played survivor for longer than most people do. I dideverything I could think of doing- all passages, all pearls, all echoes, and I even tried to make a point of travelling through every gate.
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Rain World is a Tsundere game. It would like you to believe that it doesn’t care about you, that the world is neither benevolent nor hostile to you specifically.
In many ways, the game sells this illusion. Other creatures don’t exist strictly as enemies- they’ll get distracted, have other concerns, and move through the world with no relation to you. There is a fundamental chaos to the world that has nothing to do with your agency. The level design is full of things that might seem pointless to a gamer conditioned brain.
Overwhelmingly, exploring these environments evokes a sense of existing in a place that is not built for you. This is one of the strongest parts of Rain World’s identity… yet I can’t help but notice the design work done specifically for the player.
Perhaps this is from my perspective as a game designer, I see so many of the places where the developers made very intentional decisions in service of the player experience. If Rain World truly cared little for your slugcat experience, then it would not be nearly as good a game.
Why are the things you need to traverse an environment always found within it? Sky Island has wide jumps- good thing there’s squidcadas. Farm Arrays has raindeer- good thing there’s sporepuffs. Drainage System has leeches- good thing there’s snails. The leg is tall and has enemies that can sense when you touch a surface- good thing there’s a healthy supply of grapple bugs.
It sure is convenient that there’s grapple bugs that chill outside of most of the shelters of the leg- so it hard for you to be locked into a situation where you don’t have access to them. It sure is convenient that there usually happens to be sticks near where you would need to throw them in a wall to get somewhere. It sure is convenient that flashbang plants grow in well-spaced intervals so that you are equipped to deal with migrating miros birds.
No matter how good Rain World is at selling its world, that popcorn plant was intentionally placed, those poles were positioned so you could traverse the room, many screens exist to teach you things.
To be clear, none of these are complaints. They make Rain World a much better game. A truly hostile game wouldn’t have nearly the appeal Rain World does. The way this world is designed for you to master is one of the best parts of the experience.
I’ve noticed that a lot of critical analysis of Rain World focuses on how it feels like the world doesn’t exist in service to the player. Personally, I consider this a disservice to the fantastic level design. There are so many interesting situations that occur due to room layouts, so many decisions made in favor of the player experience, so much communication between designer and player. This isn’t a world that simply exists for its own sake.
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Rain World is the definitive “lmao skill issue” game.
A lizard falls from the sky onto a tasty slugcat- Skill issue lol
Scavengers are fighting around you and one of them throws a bomb that hits you as collateral damage-Skill issue lol
The wonderful part here is that Skill Issue (derogatory) and Skill issue (ironic) both apply. A Rain World playthrough is packed with deaths that genuinely aren’t your fault, even an experienced player will still encounter crazy moments that would be miraculous to survive. {Calling these moments skill issue is a joke that never gets old.}
Yet even in a world this unfair- the majority of failure is genuine skill issue.
The skill ceiling here is higher than the apex of Five Pebbles.
slaps roof of slugcat- this bad boy can fit so much movement tech. The core player to game interaction of Rain World is simply superb. There is so much room for expression and mastery in how you control your movement.
I suspect that mastering some of these techniques would drastically change my relationship with the world. Personally, I was never able to get the hang of slides and rolls, but I did develop a great feel for “intermediate” movement generally. The arc of mastery I have experienced so far has been incredibly satisfying- the way I move through the world now is quite different from how I started.
There is a noticeable skill barrier in Rain World. On one side, the game is relentlessly punishing, cross the barrier and the game becomes much more lenient. The cursed part is that you start on the punishing side-the lenient side is your reward for spending time with the game.
There are many powerful feedback loops associated with a player’s experience level.
Consider food. When you are struggling to safely traverse the world, food is a pressing priority that often demands slight time sacrifices and risky detours. Yet once you reach the level where you can traverse an entire area in a cycle, it’s hard not to find food.
Consider Karma shield flowers. They’re a win more mechanic if I’ve ever seen one. A new one only spawns if you died while protected by one. It is laughably easy for someone who dies frequently to lose a relationship with this flower- and it is quite reasonable for someone who dies infrequently to always have a Karma shield.
From the perspective of a leniency mechanic, this is completely reversed from how it should be. The people who lose the most karma have the least access to this mechanic. The people who could easily recover their karma on their own have the most access to this mechanic.
As a game designer, one of my focus areas is analyzing feedback loops. I consider it one of my sacred duties to prevent things like getting trapped in valleys or snowballing. Meanwhile Rain World is a game where deep valleys and steep hills are a fundamental aspect of the design.
I am incredibly sensitive to repetition in games. I consider repeating something the most terrible punishment a game can give – being forced to redo a large swatch of content is something I consider a fatal flaw. The more similar each attempt is the worse I perform- my attention atrophies if I find myself doing things that I’ve already done.
I had several sessions where I spent hours just trying to escape one region, or even just the vicinity of a specific shelter. In many other games, this would be a damning experience that leads me to hate the game.
I think I’ve provided enough personal context to give the following statement impact.
Karma is one of the best mechanics in Rain World.
It is a core pillar that supports the rest of the design. It elevates the player’s experience in so many ways. I cannot believe that I have this opinion, since this system is a fundamental defiance to my principles.
It’s a system that is rough on new players while being something that only occasionally slows down experienced players. Again, my kneejerk reaction is that these experiences are reversed from how they should be, but that would be the wrong way to look at this.
The feedback loops here are working exactly as intended. You’re meant to get trapped… that’s how they build up the significance of escaping.
From a thematic perspective, Karma is a slam dunk. Isn’t it interesting that fixating on getting enough Karma is a great way to get trapped in a rut? Isn’t it interesting that temporarily abandoning your investment in your karma is the superior way to apporach a new area? Isn’t it interesting that passages restore you to max Karma?
Karma gates are a fascinating communication to the player. The sanest route through this game is telegraphed by the requirements on Karma gates. I love how most gates have differing requirements depending on the direction. Gates that require 5 Karma feel like an ominous warning. I remember spending 15 minutes debating whether I wanted to sleep in a shelter next to a certain gate in Drainage System. I found the decision proposed by this 5-Karma-Gate sitting at the end of a long and cursed section quite fascinating. This is a kind of exploration decision other games don’t offer- a decision space that is amplified by the Karma system.
Often in Rain World, you will make decisions that decide how the next few hours of your life are going to go. This is a lot to put on the player, but I enjoy this burden. Usually this isn’t an informed decision, yet it is one of greatest opportunities for player expression.
Eventually I reached the point of experience where travelling through gates became an informed decision, and that felt incredibly rewarding. I loved going from exploring like a (bad) search algorithm to evaluating the optimal path to my destination.
One of my favorite parts of Rain World is my relationship with the world. In part this relationship was built from the way Karma gates shifted my usual interaction with video games worlds. I was forced to linger in many places longer than I would have otherwise.
My expeditions into new areas were incredibly memorable, especially because of the intentionality with which I started them. In Rain World, I make an active decision to leave, that’s not something I’m used to doing. Normally in games, you finish content and then naturally move onwards. To put the question of “Am I satisfied with leaving this area right now” to me is incredibly intriguing. This question has weight to it since you can’t just freely flow between regions. I loved engaging with the weight of this decision.
There were many places that felt incredibly satisfying to leave, and putting the novelty of a new area on top of that is just icing on the cake. The first time I left Shaded Citadel, Drainage System, and Farm Arrays all felt worthy of celebration.
Karma loss feels like a surprisingly fair punishment for death (along with respawning back at the beginning of the cycle of course). It’s just significant enough to add extra weight to staying alive, but also light enough that it rarely feels like a truly frustrating setback. It hurts the most when I’m trying to grind up to escape an area, but this didn’t end up feeling like a significant complaint in my grand scheme experience with the game.
The fact that the game tests your consistency is essential to the experience. Otherwise, progress would be more subject to the whims of fate and luck. In a game so interested in unfairness, it’s critical that the player escapes by virtue of their own strength. In many ways, Karma is what sells the fantasy of getting good. There definitely were cycles where I was bored in an unideal Karma grind, but from my perspective now that’s just skill issue lmao.
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Rain World is full of epiphanies and discoveries, your knowledge is checked just as much as your skill. It’s in the same genre as games like Outer Wilds, Tunic and Toki Tori 2
This genre is hard to talk about… I hope to see more games join its ranks Honestly Rain World earns points just from being a good game in this developing space.
I think it’s worth analyzing Rain World through this lens of “discovery-exploration” games.
I’ll define the macro-verbs of this genre: Explore, Experiment, Receive (knowledge), Observe, and Answer.
Outer Wilds and Tunic are both fundamentally designed around receiving knowledge as a reward for progress, Rain World is distinct in how it rejects the receive verb. You don’t climb a tower and learn the secret to getting past kelp. Rain World rarely treats mechanical epiphanies as a reward for passing a trial.
This game is also quite sparing with its direct displays of tutorial. Anytime white text explaining a mechanic appears, I can feel the frustration of a developer who probably snapped after watching the 47th playtester completely miss it.
Remix is happier to actually tell you things. This could be interpreted as a relaxation of Rain World as a discovery game, but I don’t agree. Overall, the added tutorial messages and loading screen tips expose things that simply make your life easier. It’s nice that the wealth of movement options gets at least some in-game explanation. Many of the most interesting things you still need to learn yourself. Perhaps a small portion of loading screen tips do actually spoil something that I personally think they shouldn’t have- but I consider them an overall net positive.
Rain World is in an odd spot because it demands a core competency in order to not get frustrated with the game. The value the loading screen tips add towards establishing this baseline skill far outweighs any slight value loss in the discovery core of the game. The fact that some of these insights must be shown here is a symptom of how much the game fails at explaining.
If Rain World was a better discovery game, then it wouldn’t have the problem loading screen tips exist to solve. There must be some way to make it easier to learn these things through the other core macro verbs. It’s hard to imagine a Rain World that doesn’t have this issue, but I think this is still a criticism worth making.
Rain World’s greatest failing as a discovery game is its apathy towards the player obtaining its cool realizations. I believe it is possible for Rain World to be designed to peddle its secrets without compromising its identity. I refuse to accept that this fundamental flaw is an inescapable side effect of the game Rain World wants to be.
Anyway, I want to talk about the other macro verbs I listed.
I’ll start with Explore. Rain World is simply top-class here. Both chasing away each region’s fog of war and entering new regions are incredible experiences.
I am blown away by the intrinsic motivation I had to see each room. Long before I travelled the corners of the world in pursuit of lore, I was driven to wander. Had this just been a game about the joy of visiting each region, it would still probably be one of my favorites.
The abrupt and discrete screen transitions are one of the best aspects of this experience. It’s like the wonder of turning the page in a comic book. I love having to react to an unfamiliar environment immediately. I’m quite bothered by all the people who consider this a frustrating laziness from the devs and think continuous scrolling or follow-the-slugcat-camera would be an essential fix. To me this is like thinking the fixed camera in the original Resident Evil needs to be “modernized”
The way that you are not centered on the screen does massive work in selling the scale of what you are exploring. It makes you appreciate and observe the environments around you- most of the time slugcat is not the most relevant information on screen. A Continuous camera would train the player to see the world with the same perspective as someone driving a car…that would be a poor fit for this game.
Rain World is a game about observing. Sometimes this means carefully studying your environment, sometimes this means quickly reading the situation before that vulture grabs you. What I love about the screen transitions here is how much they force you into the latter situation.
Even the most experienced players will be suddenly thrust into hectic situations that they could not see coming. You can’t reach a level of skill where this part of the game fades away. I love being jump scared by a new screen, and I think these moments are one of the best tests of player skill.
There are some screen transitions in this game that are incredibly cursed. Yes, even as the #1 defender of the camera system here, I consider these unforgivable. Yet I don’t consider these instances proof that the system sucks, they’re just painful mistakes that the devs didn’t fix.
I remember the first time I met a brother-long-legs. It was early in my playthrough while exploring garbage wastes. I was in one of the big horizontal rooms with a transition halfway through. For some reason I can’t recall, I messed around in the left half of this screen for a while. Then I started to go onwards and instantly was greeted with a BLL violating social distancing guidelines. I remember the sheer impact of realizing I’d been in critical danger that whole time- the jarring effect of realizing this abomination had been right in front of me the entire time.
If Rain World had a continuous camera, that wouldn’t have happened. The camera implementation created many moments like this that I treasured.
The creature behavior in this game does a lot to make observation interesting. There’s micro-observation: So much of the moment-to-moment gameplay is paying attention to the positioning of other agents. There’s also macro-observation, the process by which you make discoveries by noticing details.
There’s no pearl that tells you the Daddy Long Legs are blind and sense vibrations. Instead you learn this through interactions with them- by observing their behavior. Noticing and getting a feel for the differences in various types of lizards is another great example of this aspect of the game.
I love how you can observe even after you die. It’s great to track the journey of the lizard that ate you. The neat part is that this is actually the safest way to observe rooms you haven’t been to yet, that’s a nice compensation for dying. It is also incredibly amusing to watch how a chaotic fight plays out long after it no longer involves you. Perhaps the best part of this mechanic is how you will sometimes be dealt a second chance. Any moment where this happens feels incredible. Witnessing a “Rain-World-moment” that saves you from certain death is one of the greatest highs the game offers.
Rain World’s experimentation is a bit weaker than its exploration and observation. The possibility space is small enough that the process of experimenting doesn’t have much meat to it. Consider the microverbs of the game: move,throw (or drop), grab,eat, and impale with stick. Almost every interesting mechanical interaction is a result of one of these.
To be clear, this alone isn’t the problem. Many games in this genre have a small set of verbs like this, and that’s often a benefit. The problem is that almost all of your experimentation in this game is simply a matter of throwing this arsenal of actions at everything you encounter. This is much closer to iterating through a checklist than meaningfully experimenting.
Drainage System was the first area I visited. My initial journey through here got me excited to engage with the experimentation layer of the game. How can I use these snails? What changes when I eat these mushrooms? Do I have any way to influence whether lizards appear to block my path? It was exciting to play around with snails, and eventually realize that they neutralize leeches. {I also discovered some VERY inconsistent movement tech that utilizes snails}. I even had a moment where I theorized that eating mushrooms subtly repelled lizards (I knew this was a dumb idea, but I happened to run into some coincidences that created this correlation in my mind).
This exciting scientific momentum declined as I played more of the game. Drainage System was the place where I did the most mechanical theorization. At some point I noticed that it’s usually pretty obvious how tools are placed in environments. Spore puffs, flashbangs, snails, they’re all there as a direct answer to the noteworthy creature of their respective region. The level designers play show too much of their hand and the experience of experimentation suffers as a result. It’s like when you learn how a puzzle designer thinks and automatically use that as heuristic to solve new levels.
There were also quite a few of these experimental discoveries that I was backseated into making. I don’t mean this as a complaint regarding my friend who watched me play. The more I think about this, the more I consider it a flaw with the game. Just like the remix loading screen tips, the fact that these backseat moments were obviously the correct decision is a symptom of a greater failing in the game. Even though I know some things are on me for not noticing, I overwhelmingly feel that the game fails to encourage discovery.
The problem here is so vague and fundamental to the game that it’s hard to elaborate on. I think I can pin down my main issue though. In Rain World, the player’s accumulation of discoveries directly correlates to how they are able to enjoy the game. In most other games, making discoveries is instead directly linked to progress. There’s several cursed ramifications of not following this trend: players will not always realize there is something to discover, players can continue for hours without realizing something important, players can never realize something, and it’s easy to become upset that you didn’t discover something sooner. Binding discoveries and game progress is a good way to avoid all these pitfalls. Many people find it cool that so much of the knowledge in Rain World is noncritical- that you can beat the game and travel through areas without obtaining it. Personally, I don’t find this worth the cost of falling into the above-mentioned pitfalls.
I have a friend who did not realize how to use grapple bugs until they had already suffered climbing through most of the exterior without them. That region is one of the worst experiences they had on their journey. Meanwhile, after my first 15 minutes of struggling in exterior, I was informed on how to use grapple bugs. The exterior is one of my favorite regions in the game. It’s cursed how grapple bugs require trying something that isn’t particularly intuitive to try. In order to swing with them you must push the jump button while in the air- this is something that doesn’t follow the game’s established language of verbs and isn’t is intuitive to try. Why would I assume that pressing jump again triggers what I’m holding?
The fact that it is technically possible to go through exterior without understanding this actually makes it so much worse. Instead of realizing that I am a knowledge barrier, I assume I’m at a skill issue barrier (or if my experience really sours, then now I think the level design is awful). There’s a value in putting hard knowledge checks to gate progress.
Speaking of progress gates, the last verb I have to talk about is answer. There are actually a few of these knowledge checks in the game. The best example is the series of kelp guarding the entrance to memory crypts.
Shoutout to kelp! I love how multiple areas make use of them, it’s one of the few places where you can learn the answer to a question in a different area. The kelp is subterranean taught me to pay “the stick tax”, to get past them. One of my favorite moments of my playthrough was stumbling into the 2nd answer for kelp- slowly drifting past them in water. I adore when games make you think you’ve figured something out, only to be hiding an even more satisfying answer beyond that.
Almost every organism in Rain World is either a question or an answer. Most big things are questions, most small things are answers. It’s interesting to consider the exceptions to this dichotomy.
For example, Raindeer are both a question and an answer. They’re the answer to crossing the wide stretches of red worm grass in farm arrays. The question is WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THESE DESERVED TO EXIST?! Yeah, we’re finally here, it’s time for the Raindeer hate.
The real question that they represent is “how do I travel on these and have their assistance when I need it.” The problems start rolling in once you’ve found the answers to these questions, and they still behave with the consistency of a college student. Raindeer are frustrating because of their unmatched levels of jank- even when you’ve passed the knowledge checks.
I spent HOURS trying to get through the Raindeer sections of farm arrays- and that was with my friend instructing me on tricks to make them more consistent. Nothing else in this game was an assault on my sanity like Raindeer were. I had to resort to putting on an external playlist of banger music to keep my morale up.
Raindeer ruined my experience with farm arrays, it’s the only region in the game I despise. {I’ve been finding it hard to start hunter because of how I loathe Farm Arrays}
Of course, for some baffling reason they’re mandatory to get to certain places. I gathered every colored pearl myself, but I was on the edge of simply giving up on the red Raindeer one. {Like literally about to hit my hard stop point before I finally got it. I listened to 2 music albums and decided to commit to stopping all attempts after the 2nd one finished. The last song played right as I picked it up and I miraculously made it to shelter in that run.}
It is hard for me to truly despise something in a game. Raindeer join the ranks of Tis100’s sequence sorter and Dicey Dungeon’s Witch elimination round.
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I explored the regions in the following order: outskirts, drainage system, garbage wastes, industrial complex, chimney canopy, shaded citadel, shoreline, look to the moon, subterranean, filtration system, the depths, sky islands, farm arrays, memory crypt, the exterior, and then five pebbles.
In other words, the only place I had not been by the time I reached Five Pebbles was the Wall. This is kind of cursed- I had already been on the journey he suggested. {Depths is quite unsatisfying to explore early, it’s hard to navigate without light and you just end up getting yeeted by ancients who won’t let you pass}
Additional Sidenote: I would have gone to the wall from canopy had my friend not interfered. The fact that you can first go to Five Pebbles from this direction just by using some stick jumps is something I consider a mistake. Yes, having multiple routes is in the spirit of the game. Yes, taking that route on additional playthroughs is incredibly satisfying. {I just did this in Monk today actually}. It’s not worth it because of the chance of a first-time player taking this objectively worse path. Coming into Five Pebbles from the wall utterly ruins the arc of the area. The gate from this direction doesn’t even need 5 Karma which is simply baffling to me. Even if a player doesn’t realize they can stick jump here, skipping the buildup of climbing the leg is just tragic.
My journey was split into 2 halves. Before encountering Five Pebbles, Rain World was one of the best games I’ve ever played… afterwards it was something greater.
First of all, Five Pebbles is an absolutely rad area. It’s so cool… it renders the question “What is your favorite Rain World region” pointless. FP is visually fascinating, structurally fascinating, and mechanically fascinating. [It feels so strange to explore an environment without the dynamic threats + pressure you’re used to, and moving around in 0g is quite interesting]
I loved the way my curiosity compounded here (wtf do you mean this area is called 5 pebbles???). The payoff for this buildup is incredible. The realization that I was exploring a computer super structure was awesome (especially since I’m a computer science person and I really enjoy when fantasy stories introduce a unique take on computing).
Many journeys in Rain World do not have any extrinsic reward. Playing this game is a vast lesson in pursuing intrinsic value. The world does not care about the gauntlets you pass and refuses to dish out player-state changes. Until 5 pebbles that is.
Now that is some reward. Now this game has writing. Now you have a clear end-goal. Now you have double the karma ranks. Now you glow in the dark {yes, I know this happens along the way after you eat a neuron-fly}. So much has changed after you leave Five Pebbles.
This is quite a significant contrast to my first encounter with Moon, which feels like it should be special, but nothing happens. {except for the fact that you can harm her without understanding what you are doing which is an egregious mistake on the game devs part- a betrayal to the expected safety of experimentation and an arbituary way to lock players out of something incredibly impactful}
There’s a part of me that feels this intended order of meeting iterators is silly. Was the excitement I got to return to Moon worth the way the encounter initially fell flat?
Five Pebbles was a significant divide in my relationship with the world. Before FP I wandered, after I travelled. As I finished climbing down the wall, I was no longer an explorer- instead now I was a conqueror.
The fundamental appeal of the game also changed for me around this time. The world started as an interesting setting to explore and struggle in. Then it became a place which contains 16 colored pearls (and 5 echoes).
These colored pearls are the greatest collectable object that has ever been put in a video game. Bringing them to Moon is incredibly rewarding (and this sure is quite an endeavor. This was the main focus of my last 25 hours with survivor- that was with key item movement from passages. )
Seeking out more lore is the goal that excited me the most in my time with Rain World.
There are 2 reasons these pearls are a highlight. Firstly, the worldbuilding is incredibly interesting. Secondly, their writing is unbelievably dense. These pearls have so much packed into them. Perhaps this game has about 5 fantasy novel pages worth of text… I’ve read many epic fantasy novels that feel like they do less with literally 100x as many pages.
Some pearls are “minor”, describing some small detail or aspect of life. Then some pearls are just a story shattering bombshells that arrive, slightly elaborate, then leave. Rain World’s writing loves to rip open questions, but crucially it’s not afraid of answering them either. The text in this game is disorienting, strange and starts making a lot more sense as you gather context… but it does not make the mistake of being impenetrably cryptic.
I love some of the jarring first principles this world is derived from. The pearl where some ancients mention being blessed with an ever-dwindling population is the first one I read and that sure caught my attention. I love when fantasy is concerned with problems that are completely different to what we face in reality.
The writing uses non-linearity very well, each pearl also makes every pearl you’ve already read make more sense. I enjoy when stories make me work to find my bearings – arguably this is one of the core pillars of Rain World as a game generally. It’s not just that Rain World is unique and alien, so much of its power comes from the confidence in which it expects you to keep up.
One unfortunate misstep in the UX is the fact that dialog text auto advances. It really should advance only on player prompt, especially because of the work that goes into comprehending each line. I can see the argument that the slugcat is just listening and cannot participate, but hollow knight has the same deal –player paced conversations are fine there.
I am a very fast reader, so these automatic text advances hurt me much less than they would most people. Yet I still consider this an issue worth complaining about, for me it’s an annoyance for others it’s a frustrating accessibility issue. I also imagine it’s hard for people to be vocal or informed about this, given that it’s a spoiler that conversations appear in this game. Accessibility issues for things people could not possibly know appear in a game are so much more egregious.
Back to my personal experience, I have one reading speed and that’s full steam ahead. Rain World is one of the only times in my life when I’ve wanted to slow down- it is deeply tragic that the game will not let me. Pearls are a little more forgivable because they are repeatable, the main five pebbles conversation and echo dialogs are tragically unrepeatable. This issue was resolved by my friend simply posting each dialog into our discord DMs. I cannot overstate how much this improved my experience, both for initial clarity and revisiting text once I had more understanding.
Another UX tragedy is the visibility of the pearls themselves. They can be quite well hidden. There were many screens where I did not spot them until their presence was pointed out to me. They’re shiny colored pearls for gods sake, why are some of them camouflaged so well If they were just some random collectible this would be barely excusable, but the idea that something so cool is so easy to miss upsets me.
My favorite pearl is the one concerning sliver of straw. The whole deal with the iterators is an interesting setup already, but this just takes it up another step. The idea of broadcasting the triple affirmative and then dying before she can elaborate is incredible. This is such a fascinating conflict to explore. If the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of this pearl were the blurb on the back of a fantasy novel, I would be rushing to read it.
Yet this pearl doesn’t stop there, then it goes into the theories. I love when stories explore how people disagree and interpret things differently. Whenever I write notes for magic systems, I always try to find interesting places where various in-world people could have different takes on it. I love appreciating the possibility space of ideas that are intentionally left open.
I also love the naming scheme the ancients use. The format of {count-object} was endlessly fascinating to me. It’s quite distinctive and evocative. The way they treat titles was a detail my mind kept returning to. It’s quite fitting for their names to feel like excerpts from poems-complete with strong imagery. It’s neat how iterator names feel like incomplete versions of these naming schemes.
I love the characterization of iterators. Five Pebbles and Moon are both incredibly compelling characters, especially once you approach understanding the full picture.
Mechanically, Moon is a vending machine that takes in pearls and dispenses LORE. Despite that, it still feels like there’s an impactful connection being built from your interactions with her. The few lines she does get feel well used and feel surprisingly meaningful. If I was someone who experienced emotional resonance and formed connections with characters, then surely I’d find this very powerful
It's interesting whenever you get a pearl and Moon is like “well apparently I was a part of this”. You get a great picture of her compassion and care for other iterators here. I especially like her discord username: big sis moon and how she argues that sliver of straw should be left in peace.
The Sky Island pearls that show chat logs between iterators are incredible. The fact that only 2/5 randomly spawn per playthrough is tragic {I went ahead and read them all in order after bringing my 2 to moon.} The arc of reading these in sequence is so excellent that I find their in-game implementation quite disappointing. These are what do the heavy lifting for Five Pebbles’ characterization, show why both iterators you meet are in the state they’re in, and are full of entertaining dialog to top it off.
I loved making the connection of figuring out who erratic pulse was. If you have the context of all 5 logs, then it’s quite satisfying to notice how weak the pseudonym attempt is. I like my interpretation that Five Pebbles was trying to overwrite their self-destruction taboo, moon interrupting him led to the “unfortunate developments” on Five Pebbles. The pearl that ends with moon saying “and now here I am, to my waist in water and getting drowned on the regular” has a powerful impact and deeply appreciable irony. It’s an effective tragedy.
This tragedy is made even better through the perspective from which you experience it. Most of these types of stories deal out their grand cosmic punishments and cruel fates as part of the climax. Here they are simply the context of the current reality, results of long past events. You get to walk around in the consequences.
Then there’s the fundamental toil and pain inherent to the very concept of iterators. Imagining this existence is something that terrifies me. This is one of the few narrative elements in a story that has ever truly resonated with me.
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“What goes up comes down again.
One moment you’re on top,
the next you’ve been laid low.
But for every turning wheel,
there’s an axle that doesn’t move at all.”
-Fortune’s Foundation Major Arcana #10- The Wheel
I have the type of depression where I blame myself for every problem. Something went wrong? SKILL ISSUE. I just need to stop failing to do things. I just need to stop messing everything up. Why can’t I just do what I need to?
Lately I’ve started to change my tune. Of course my existence is hard, the world isn’t designed for people like me. All I can do is appreciate the value of myself and the world, even when they effortlessly crush me.
There’s a comfort in knowing that life is simply unfair. That even if I was the type of person who could have things under control, sometimes a vulture just flies down from the sky. It is strictly wrong to blame myself for every misfortune.
It is also strictly wrong to ignore the power of my agency. My actions influence the outcome, even in unfair situations. Life isn’t simply a series of events that are handed to me.
Both Skill Issue & Luck control my fate. To ignore either half is a mistake. As someone who has spent so long focusing on my failures there is a certain strange value in embracing the unfairness of reality
Sometimes things go well, sometimes things go poorly. Sometimes that’s my fault, sometimes it’s not. Regardless, I will continue to exist, continue to struggle.
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I spend most of my time thinking. When I am myself, my thoughts are free;I jump from idea to idea; I enjoy getting lost in overwhelming complexity. When I am depressed, my brain hyperfocuses. All resources are dedicated to finding a solution… I become an iterator.
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I hate focusing. It’s painful to bind the power of my attention to one thing. I can’t stand having an objective for my thoughts. I am meant to explore, not search.
It is tragic to treat the world’s complexity as an obstacle. It is tragic to ignore things that aren’t relevant.
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Unimaginable computation resources, unparalleled feats of engineering, unique lives… all treated as bugs in a maze- as draws in an impossible lottery. Imagine what value they could have had if they weren’t trapped in an existence of such a singular purpose. The ancients didn’t just force the iterators into a cruel existence, they wasted their potential.
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Rain World is great in any genre I can think to put it in
Rain World is an excellent action game. Fights are chaotic, expressive, and satisfying. I love the way combat is focused on improvisation. It’s a joy to constantly react to unexpected situations and overwhelming threats. In some fights I feel like a deliberate hunter, in some I’m desperately fighting for my life. Managing held items, enemy positioning, and player movement is a simple foundation that in practice leads to incredibly fun gameplay and skill potential. Stick throwing is a solid core combat mechanic.
Normally I like my action systems to be lenient on mistakes, Rain world is a wonderful exception. This is probably the most punishing combat system that I love. Often one large mistake is enough to kill me, but it’s also quite surprising what I can get away with.
There are so many rooms that make for excellent arenas. Environmental complexity does a lot of heavy lifting to make fights interesting. There’s often interesting geometry to consider and plenty of traversal options, this does a great job of emphasizing the positioning aspect of battle. I really enjoy when games emphasize verticality and sudden changes in location.
I purposefully started a lot of fights throughout my journey, even in many places where they could have been avoided. The outlaw passage is very fitting for how I generally played the game (it’s the first one I got after survivor). I partially formed the habit of randomly starting fights as practice (so that I’d be less scared of other creatures), but mostly I just loved the action.
Rain World is an excellent stealth game. These rooms are packed with possible routes and corners to hide in. The abundance of vents and pipes is one of the most distinctive parts of this world’s design and they shine especially here. One of the beautiful parts of this traversal layer is that you aren’t the only one who can use it.
Many games that aren’t exclusively focused on stealth either struggle to motivate it or fail to match its fun with its power. Rain World makes neither of these mistakes. The game both forces caution and prevents it from being the singular answer. If you fight everything you will die. If you fight nothing, you will die. The fact that finding this balance is part of the player’s agency is incredible. Failure transitions into death or frantic action, I much prefer that to the mistake-hide-wait cycle I’ve seen in some other games. Enemies in Rain World rarely go “it must have been the wind”, it’s more like “heck this, I have better things to do” or “I guess this vulture is my bigger priority right now.”
What sets Rain World apart even from dedicated stealth games is the joy of its dynamic nature. There’s an inherent unpredictability to the threats you face that forces you to give them respect. Slow methodical gameplay doesn’t get tiresome as fast due to the uniqueness of each moment. The real highlight is the way “situations” can occur out of nowhere- calm can turn into chaos very fast. Additionally, the push & pull of patience and pressure is incredibly solid here. Stealth isn’t a genre I’m overly fond of, these changes are what make me enjoy it in Rain World.
In my opinion, the most important Rain World skill is the art of pipe jukes. It’s a powerful technique, one that almost feels broken. Once I got in the habit of utilizing it, my relationship with the world was forever changed. It’s the answer to a surprising number of situations. There is a certain satisfaction and humor to harmlessly passing by other creatures in a vent… but I wish it wasn’t such a silver bullet. Learning the magic of pipe juking is one of the easiest ways to stop having skill issue.
Rain World is a stand-out open world game. It passes the most important test: the game world isn’t merely a container for various pieces of content, it is itself the content. I don’t think I’ve spent enough time emphasizing how awesome this world is. Every region is incredibly memorable; The setting is rad; There’s an incredible sense of scale; It’s packed with breathtaking sights; You have great freedom in how you explore it; Just like the game itself, this world feels completely distinct from all other game worlds. Many games go for depicting a post-civilization world, nobody nails it like Rain World does.
The scale of this world is mind-blowing. They could have gotten away with having less regions, given all the incredible innovation that’s going on here. Yet we get a world like no other, and a lot of it. There sure are a lot of screens in this game, the regions feel huge, looking at the map is beautifully overwhelming.
Shoutout to the in-game map. It’s my favorite map screen of all video games. It’s a fascinating mix of abstraction and detail. I love how it focuses just on geometry and connections. Even as a pure distillation of functionality, it’s awesome to look at. I spent so much simply appreciating the map- it has a level of ambition that’s fitting for the world it depicts. What’s truly wild is the way it commits to depicting differing layers in the levels. It’s cool how they superimpose lines on top of each other to represent the 3D nature of the world. Despite all the interesting stuff in this game, opening the map always felt like the biggest reminder of how special a game I was playing.
Iggy Is a strange inclusion. The way it points out danger, shelters, food, and gives directions towards iterators feels like a strange compromise. It’s jarring in a game that’s so intent on not telling you things. Surely they’re a net positive for the player experience, since it helps people stay under the frustration line, but this feels so out of place. I found the shelter indicators nice and helpful, occasionally the danger indicators saved my life, and I think the food indicator is not necessary.
What I really hold a grudge against is Iggy’s directions. It sucks at guiding you to places- it chooses strange paths, doesn’t give input frequently enough, and is often hard to interpret. One of the reasons I visited Five pebbles last is the way Iggy failed in guiding me to them- so I ended up backtracking and trying gates I remembered in previous areas. It’s also pretty unintuitive that Iggy’s presence is region dependent, (I forgot it was even a thing while I was in Subterranean). Their symbology can be quite hard to interpret, especially due to how briefly you see it. Good luck figuring out Iggy’s endgame. Apparently, it wants you to bring neuron flies from FP to Moon. I guess the devs couldn’t resist making this mechanic unintuitive, even when it’s explicitly to help players who are struggling with things being unintuitive.
I don’t think the idea of “this is moon’s overseer taking an interest in slugcat” lands well. They feel more like a partner spirit that is only occasionally interested in helping you. I can’t decide if it’s a worthwhile inclusion. Like plenty of people complain about a lack of guidance even with Iggy in the game. There’s a part of me that wanted them to commit more to making something that actually helps players and explains the game. There’s a part of me that thinks the journey should be lonelier until you mean an iterator. Then there’s the part of me that thinks Iggy has a net positive effect on the player experience and doesn’t get annoying-so mission accomplished?
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Rain World is a beautiful game. Every screen is gorgeous. The art style is incredibly distinct and evocative. There’s an overwhelming detail crammed into these pixels. Lighting and Shadows aren’t normally something I appreciate in games, but wow here they blew me away. Visually, my favorite areas are Five Pebbles, Sky Islands, The exterior, Shoreline, The Depths -shoot that’s about half of them. I love the aesthetic of Rain World, it’s amazing how they take a setting that is full of decay and inject so much life into it.
Then there’s the dedicated art screens- passages, region title screens, the intro, early hibernation scenes. All of these are amazing- playing Rain World has blessed me with 20 new wallpapers 😊.
Even the symbols of the game look awesome. I love the Karma and passage glyphs. They add so much to the vibe of the game. How many other games would have just used Arabic or Roman numerals here?
I’ve played my fair share of games that invent writing systems- Rain World’s is one of the more interesting ones, even with only the tiny subset of it that is visible in game.
Then there’s the matter of the fantastic soundtrack. It’s full of jams, beauty, and fascinating strange sounds. I’d love it if I got to hear it more when playing the game. I despise the way the music is implemented in this game; it probably is legitimately my biggest flaw with the game.
Imagine you’ve walked into a cool new area. The best track you’ve ever heard starts playing and the vibes are off the charts. Then you die to a lizard. Congrats, you’ve just lost your opportunity to hear the music- hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. This is the 3rd punishment for death that I didn’t mention before, and it’s the cruelest. Most of my deaths in Rain World I was able to take stride, but whenever this happened it really bothered me.
So that was a specific grievance, but I want to continue to make the overall point that I didn’t get to hear the music enough. The way in which music plays feels designed for people who can travel through the world in continuous journeys and travel between regions with the consistency of a commuter. The time when I’d want to hear the music the most is when I’ve been trapped in a region for a while, that’s the situation where you’re least likely to hear area themes. It seems like a lot of tracks only play when you pass through specific rooms, and if something happens after that trigger then it will be a while before you hear it again (if at all). I’ve listened to the soundtrack on its own many times now so it’s hard to tell, but it feels like I barely heard quite a few of these tracks.
I’m not a silence or even ambiance enjoyer. I generally prefer to hear distinct music playing. That said, I can still appreciate a game that goes against my tastes and does it well- like Breath of the Wild. Rain World is way over the line of doing this well. It hoards its music. Some silence would have been a great way to enhance the feeling of loneliness and impact of when tracks do play, but the game goes much too far. I probably could have dealt with this, given how cool it is when exploration tracks do finally play. Yet the way you have “one-shot” to hear them which can be easily interrupted shatters my tolerance.
The threat-music doesn’t suffer from this problem, although I wish the threshold for hearing an area’s specific threat music was a little lower- instead of only playing when you’re in “max” danger.
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For a game titled RAIN world, it sure feels easy to forget about the rain. I played in mostly 3 hour sessions, during which I’d only see the downpour 1-3 times. Usually either something else would get me first or much more rarely I would make it to a shelter. It feels like without fail every session I had a moment where I went “oh yeah the rain is a thing”. In some ways this was a gift that kept on giving. I consistently entered periods where the Rain had not been relevant for a while, only to have an incredibly memorable cycle where I was rudely reminded that it exists.
I’m not in a rush to call this a mistake. It’s just odd given how much the rain is advertised as part of the core concept of the game. It’s like calling your game Legend of Zelda and then giving her 15 minutes of screentime.
I love how the Rain is not an instakill mechanic. It was always fun to enter a mad rush when I got blind-sided by a cycle ending.
There’s a build up that gives a window of opportunity to make it to a shelter, even when you had lost track of time. This created several spicy close calls, failures that were mere centimeters away from safety and successes that were seconds away from death.
I also like the brief “twilight” period in which all creatures go to hibernate before the rain comes. It’s both a helpful warning and useful opportunity. I love that even green lizards are better at keeping track of time than me. I don’t know how many times I went “wow what a lucky miracle that everything is leaving, that probably saved my life…. oh shoot I need to GO”
Of course, it’s a bit silly to focus only on the moments where I actually saw the rain. The real value is its omnipresent pressure. This threat is one of the core pillars of Rain World’s game essence. It’s a mechanic that makes everything else in the game work better. It makes gathering food interesting instead of tedious. It forces the player to balance their pace and safety. It leads players to utilize their map knowledge to plan routes. It divides the play experience into chunks where it is easy to take breaks.
Random cycle length is an interesting decision. I appreciate it as a measure to diversify cycles. It also simply makes much more sense -it would be weird if weather patterns were precisely consistent. I bring it up because it definitely has a noticeable effect on the gameplay experience- sometimes there’s dud cycles which aren’t particularly fun.
One of my favorite games makes players precisely aware of the length of 22 minutes. The more I played that game, the more that period of time became intuitive. Rain World is the opposite, I never developed a good sense of timing. It felt like I was always reacting (and glancing at the cycle timer when I remembered that mattered). I’m not the type of player who can look at my cycle length and think “this is how far I should plan to make it”, I just make decisions based off how much time I have left (If I’m paying attention to it of course).
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The main characters of Rain World are the lizards. Equally deadly and silly, they steal the show. They’re the bread-and-butter threat of the game, and that sure works well.
The Dragon Slayer is my favorite passage, I went on quite the journey regarding how I interacted with lizards. First, I was scared of them. Then I learned how to outmaneuver these oppressive obstacles. Eventually, something snapped in me and I decided to impulsively attack one. One dead green lizard later and now I was done respecting lizards. My hubris was rewarded with many more deaths, but now I’m the one who should be feared. I love the way Dragon Slayer changed how I think, my first reaction upon seeing any new lizard was “Oh is this a type I haven’t killed yet? Sweet!”
Green lizards are my favorite, purely due to the nonsense I can get away with… I give them absolutely no respect and somehow still don’t die It’s fun to watch them be goofy, especially since I once feared them. Pinks and Blues are quite fun to fight. Oranges are an incredibly interesting threat- they often appear in rooms fun level design and force you to deal with squad tactics. Let one see you and there’s a great “now all of China knows you’re here” moment.
Then of course, there’s the white lizards. They feel like a jack of all trades, master of all. They’re fast, can climb walls, have incredibly powerful tongues, and oh yeah small detail they can turn invisible :). I lost count of how many times the game got me with a camouflaged lizard, a joke almost as funny as pole plants.
Normally, I’m quite detached from the games I’m playing. Rain World on the other hand, is able to get strong reactions out of me. There’s nothing like –“oh god there’s a lizard there”- or grabbing onto a pole- only to be reminded of some very important information concerning its nature. Normally I’m not a big fan of mimics in games, but I found them hilarious here.
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The ending didn’t hit as hard for me as it seems to have for others. It’s a cool sequence, especially visually, but it didn’t feel that meaningful. Transcending felt like a formality- a long and fitting ceremony to cap off my time with survivor.
Even here, Rain World does not yield. You must hold down for an uncomfortably long time. It feels like the void sea goes on and on- one final struggle, even if it’s trivial.
Overall, this feels like a journey before destination experience. The real meaning was the friends we made along the way (ironically, I tamed a pink lizard as the very last thing I did before returning to depths. They followed my passage into filtration system, only for me to abandon them forever. Now that I think about it I also (accidentally) trapped a jet eel in the entrance of LTTM … each time I visited Moon, I was reminded of the cruel existence I had created.}
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The echo conversations are pretty neat. They’re not quite as interesting as the pearls, and quite a bit more cryptic, but they make up for it with vibes. Each one is an incredibly memorable moment.
I wonder if the original intent for the endgame was to go on a pilgrimage and visit each echo to get 10 Karma. I’m not sure how I feel about Five Pebbles skipping this for you. On the one hand it feels counter to the intended thematic nature of struggle and escape. On the other hand, it’s a pretty delicious irony that slugcats treat FP as an ascension directions machine- he’s still serving some shadow of his purpose despite failing to find an answer.
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I’m starting to run out of steam. I’ve spent almost all of my free time in the past 2 weeks writing these thoughts. It’s been an unhealthy hyper fixation. Every time I try to do something else, I start to think about how much I want to finish this. This has become quite the time-sink.
10,000 words; 35 pages; Countless hours. Have I even captured what I wanted to say about this game? Is there value in all these words? I still have too much to say.
I didn’t talk about how much I love passages- how interesting they are to pursue and how special using each one feels.
I didn’t write 47 paragraphs about how fun grapple bugs are or tell the story of the grapple bug I smuggled across the world.
I barely even chronicled my experiences with the various regions in the game. Each one surely deserves its own section.
I didn’t go off into a weird side tangent on how interesting the environmental ramifications of iterator placement are.
I didn’t complain enough about Raindeer.
I couldn’t find the correct way to write the personal section. That was supposed to be the highlight that brought everything together.
I failed to explain why I find iterators so interesting.
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honestly, this is an all-timer.
No greater indictment of the gaming press than the scorn for one of the most innovative games to come out since Demon's Souls. It's a game all about intrinsic reward as really most platformers are but in something like Super Metroid there is a reward in the way of powerups, the reward in Rain World is simply living to the next area and seeing what practical joke will be played on you.
I haven't seen a game that showed this much restraint since Ico. The game could've given you upgrades, a final boss, a significant crutch, a more present story, really anything your usual metroidvania would do but it didnt. The few concessions to minimalism like the map and the titles of the areas being shown never dampened the extreme immersive quality this game granted me.
Despite being quite game-y, this game probably bridges the cold reality of the world to the player in the best way possible, not simply because the game is "unfairly designed" but because it does actually feel like a real breathing ecosystem, the scavengers or lizards arent just obstacles for the player to engage in, they act like how animals would in real life, they go on living their life independent of the protagonists existence.
Very sad that in the mid 2010s indie game hype wave, this genius title comparatively got left out. I had only learned about this game in 2019 from Matthewmatosis and put it on the backburner till now.
I haven't seen a game that showed this much restraint since Ico. The game could've given you upgrades, a final boss, a significant crutch, a more present story, really anything your usual metroidvania would do but it didnt. The few concessions to minimalism like the map and the titles of the areas being shown never dampened the extreme immersive quality this game granted me.
Despite being quite game-y, this game probably bridges the cold reality of the world to the player in the best way possible, not simply because the game is "unfairly designed" but because it does actually feel like a real breathing ecosystem, the scavengers or lizards arent just obstacles for the player to engage in, they act like how animals would in real life, they go on living their life independent of the protagonists existence.
Very sad that in the mid 2010s indie game hype wave, this genius title comparatively got left out. I had only learned about this game in 2019 from Matthewmatosis and put it on the backburner till now.
This review contains spoilers
Imagine you’re a well off kid in the late 80s or early 90s. It’s Christmas, your parents have bought one of those new trinkets called video games, something called a NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), with a pack-in-game cartridge to boot. After waiting for them to get some scissors to cut open the custom cardboard box and set up those incomprehensible cable things (AV cables + AC adapter + RF adapter), you plug the D-pad, pick up the cartridge, blow some air into it (you heard it makes the game run better, it doesn’t), insert it on the slot and press the power button. The screen flares up and you decide to play some game called super mario bros (there's some other game in the menu called duck hunt but who cares?).
Now, assuming you would have never played a game before, nor heard about it, or just waited a couple of seconds in the menu to watch the demo, you’d have no idea of what to do. All you can see is some sort of landscape with a little man-thing in the left corner. So you press the directional buttons and he starts moving, nice. Then you start exploring your surroundings: you try going to the left but there's an invisible wall stopping you, so you go to the right and the screen starts sliding as you go along. That's until some weird brown creature exits from the right corner of the screen, it walks straight to you, but you have no idea what to make of it, so you ignore it. That is, until it touches and kills your little guy, who dramatically falls off from the screen. Two lives left. Damn.
So you start playing again with your newfound knowledge that the little brown thing means bad news. This time you start experimenting with the right side buttons (B & A). You press the left one (B) but it has no apparent effect, so you press the right button (A) and, blam, your little fella jumps. So you advance confidently to where the brown thing is, but instead of walking right into it, you just jump across it. Phew. Now that you can actually advance you see a couple of floating blocks with question marks, curious. You jump on the first block and a coin comes out with no apparent effect, then you go to the next one and a mushroom thing comes out. It trails to the right until falling from the platform’s edge and changing direction by hitting a pipe, coming right towards you. You try to jump but the block above you won’t budge, so the mushroom reaches you and… your guy grows bigger? Nice, so this other mushroom actually helps you, though you have no idea how being bigger does any good besides looking cooler. So you keep advancing to the green pipes: the first one is small enough that a quick button press will get you above it, but the next one is taller and requires a slightly longer press. Ok, so the little guy’s jump height varies depending on how long you press the button. Looking beyond, below the pipe there’s one of the brown guys, but the distance seems just right so you can reach the pipe on the other side by jumping. So you jump while pressing as long as you can, but it isn’t enough and you land exactly atop of the brown guy, ouch. But wait, instead of dying you squash him instantly. Nice! So you can remove enemies by jumping atop of them. So you climb the next pipe and glance to the right and yep, more brown guys, two this time. But you know how to deal with them, right? You jump but this time you slightly misscalculate and land before the enemy. He touches you, but instead of instantly dying, your character gets… smaller? Of course! The mushroom thing makes you bigger, which essentially gives you one more life. But wait, did you forget there were two guys? Why is it that the first guy hurt you while the other passed through harmlessly? You see your character flashing and realize that after being hurt the game gives you a window of opportunity where your character is invulnerable so you can get away from danger. The flashing effect decreases gradually so you can naturally grasp on how much time you have left to reach a safe spot.
Of course, this was a platonic play of mario 1-1. You might as well figure out you can jump from the get-go by experimenting with the buttons. Or ignore the mystery blocks. Or successfully evade the power-up mushroom thinking it’s an enemy. Or never discover you can kill enemies by jumping on them. Either way, what’s important is not that you uncover every basic game mechanic straight away, but that the game allows you to discover new ways to interact with the world without holding your hand. It doesn’t need to show you, but subtly guides you to learn naturally by experimenting with the level design. It set the standard for what good level design ought to be like.
It’s a great experience, tailored specifically to the player. Every block, power-up and enemy is implemented based on how the player will interact with it in a specific way. And the designers can be sure of how you are going to interact with the world: mario can only advance to the right screen (besides pipes and vines), which makes for a mostly linear, manageable experience. As the player gradually familiarizes themselves with the levels, the element of surprise is gone and the experience, though entertaining, turns predictable, which is why even relatively simple AI can learn to master a mario level: it just needs enough attempts to find the best combination of buttons to get across an unchanging obstacle course.
This player-focused design philosophy also affects the game’s mechanics. Mario’s universe is relativistic: everything revolves around the player. Though each level may be loaded with a predetermined code for the entire level, its elements stay inactive until the player comes close enough to interact with them. This can be best exemplified by the spawning (and despawning) of enemies. In super mario bros, enemies spawn in a fixed spot, which is only activated when the player reaches a certain distance from it (which happens slightly offscreen). They may be allowed to exist offscreen as long as they stay close enough to the player character, but the moment they stray too far they disappear entirely. However, since the player can’t progress through the left in super mario bros, this mechanic is usually imperceptible. It’s much more evident in future games, like super mario brothers 2 and super mario world, which allowed players to backtrack and respawn enemies by returning to the left side of the screen. In these cases the games would recognize which direction the player came from and turn the enemies against them, even if most basic mario enemies are unable to automatically turn around to face the player (you could say their life is predestined from the moment they spawn). This is not because the developers did not have the means to stop them from respawning: though enemies always respawn in super mario 2, the map’s items do not, while in super mario world the enemies do not respawn if directly killed by the player since they reward the players with coins once killed (mario 64 would change this by allowing them to respawn without giving rewards beyond the first kill). In some games, like most metroidvanias, this respawning mechanic is crucial to ensure players can replenish health or ammunition dropped by enemies, which usually respawn after re-entering a room. Though the mechanic sacrifices diegetic verisimilitude for gameplay, it feels as if most developers either realized that having enemies spontaneously respawn on-screen would be weird or perhaps unfair. Except for the devs of ninja gaiden, of course, which famously (AVGN is still famous, right?) had the spawn zone set in the corners of the screen (which also meant you could despawn enemies by aggressively outrunning them and letting the corner-of-doom do its job).
One side effect of this is that most mario enemies are basically moving traps. They will completely ignore mario and – unless killed – proceed in their way, until they eventually stumble into a wall, another enemy, fall from a ledge or (more likely) are despawned by going offscreen.
But imagine a different super mario bros, where the player is not the center of the universe. Discard the linear map; have a branching cluster of rooms, with many entries to different worlds, whose acessibility would only be limited by player skill. Imagine if as soon as you loaded up a world it would immediately come alive in its entirety. Where every enemy, from the starting point until bowser’s castle, was constantly existing, even way beyond the reach of the player character’s screen zone. Furthermore, assume every one of these enemies had agency and competed for available resources in the map with themselves. Assume every enemy had a specific identity which the game would keep track of, including their death. Imagine if every one of these enemies had a relationship with your character and could remember how you treated them previously. Sounds utterly insane, right? Contradictory, deranged, self-defeating game design. Only a madman could dream of it. Well, these madmen are called Joar Jakobsson and James Primate; theirs is one of the most amazing games to be released in recent years.
Rain World is one of the few games I “recently” played (what do you mean it has been SIX YEARS!?) which made me think of a “copernican” approach to game design. To turn design postulates and preconceptions on their heads. To be unwilling to compromise originality for a set standard. To challenge what a game ought to be and a player's role in it. Whereas previous platformers/metroidvanias were supposed to be centered on the player as a protagonist, as a means through which the world is experienced, rain world lets its own world take center stage while the player feels like one singular detail in a vast mosaic.
Let’s return to old-schools games. You remember how in these games the existence of npcs depended on the current position of the player character? That even though every spawn point was set, they were only activated as the main character approached them? How enemies would disappear from reality if you stayed away long enough? Well, in Rain World's world (made up of major "regions"), as soon as a region is reached, each of its denizens is spawned and starts acting. The game keeps track of each individual creature, its relationship with other creatures and with the player. You feel as if the world is larger than you, as if it exists independently from you. So that even if you were to be gone it would linger on.
Sounds way too good to be true, right? And in a kind of way it is: one single room in rain world is composed of many objects and particles, besides the creatures which are really moving ragdoll clusters of different body parts with a programmed behavior which is based on their senses. You combine all this with the knowledge that rain world's regions consist of tens of rooms and you start wondering how the game specs do not require a nasa computer.
Like any good magic trick, rain world's is accomplished through a sleight of hand: everything in the current region map exists in two states: abstract and realized. The realized state is the game as you know it: with ragdolls physics, complex path-finding and particle effects. But much like in old-school games, the current position of your character affects how the world around them is rendered. The current room you're in is "realized", as are the neighboring rooms and typically the neighboring room's neighborings rooms (though if you are playing with very low configurations then only your current room is realized). But if you stay too far away the world becomes "abstracted": the possible map paths are simplified and objects are not rendered, though their position is stored. For abstract creatures, the body is not rendered anymore, the pathfinding and AI is simplified, as are interactions between npcs which, instead of being the result of complex ai choices in a dynamic environment with physic effects, are instead based on probability. [1]
So I guess it was all a lie, smokes and mirrors right? Let's not get too carried away: though creatures are abstracted, they are still existing entities: they migrate, do things and interact. Their current agenda is still simulated, even if in a very simplified way: if a wounded lizard starts retreating to its den and has to cross abstract space to do so, it (probably) keeps its current objective and the game simulates the action (probably, because though abstract AI is similar to realized AI, its parameters differ slightly, which may alter creature behavior). All of which is different from an old-school game, where other entities just stop existing altogether if you're far away from them.
One result of the fact that creatures are constantly moving behind your back is that rain world's "deck" is always being reshuffled. A rain world region is similar to an old-school map in that both have predetermined spawn points for npcs spread across them. But whereas old-school entities are only doing things for brief moments of on-screen existence after spawning, rain world's critters are constantly migrating ever since you enter a region. This gives rain world an uncertainty factor; even a veteran player who knows the map like the back of their hand does not know the current locations of creatures or which of them are alive. The fact that the next rooms are “realized” with all the complex actors and effects playing out means you always feel like you’re approaching a situation in media res, as an independent space with independent actors already set in motion. This forces the player to play more cautiously as the world always feels greater than them and beyond their control.
I mentioned creatures spawn and respawn in rain world, but how does that differ from a typical slide scroller? We already know the “region” the player is currently in is simulated, even if mostly in “abstract” state, so the critters start moving as soon as you enter. The starting point from where they move from is a den, the creature’s lair, where it retreats to if it retrieves food, is injured or if raindrops start trickling down. These dens are set in specific spots of the map (except for certain creatures like vultures, which have an abstract unreachable lair), which spawn or respawn creatures. Now, rain world is not a true ecosystem simulator like Species or Bibites, so creatures don’t have a real life cycle, reproduction and the possibility of going extinct. What happens is if a den is vacant, each game cycle will have a chance of spawning a critter in it (which is meant to represent the critter finding this lair and inhabiting it). Depending on the den stats, the next possible critter may be the same subpescies of creature or a different one. If the spawned creature belongs to a different subspecies then there’s a slight chance that the same process happens again with different creature types. Most often this means in-game dens go through different kinds of lizards/centipedes/vultures in what is referred to as the “lineage system”. One of the consequences of this is that if the player kills too many normal enemies, they may trigger the spawn of tougher kinds of enemies through the lineage system.
Another thing rain world is famous for is its critters. In a typical pixel art game you have a cluster of pixels making up a shape, a “sprite”, which are attached to hit/hurt-boxes. These pixel sprites are set to change position and swap to different sprites to give the illusion of doing a continuous action, like walking or jumping. Rain World looks like a typical pixel art game, but its entities are less like mario pixel sprites and more like Gmod ragdolls. Creatures have bodies made of different parts with physical characteristics like length and weight. If a creature wants to get somewhere, it needs to move these parts to get there. Since “animation” is procedural, all sorts of unexpected things may happen naturally: a creature may get stuck, trip over or accidentally fall from a ledge. All of which gives the impression of a real being struggling to use its body instead of an automatic slide scroll.
What sets all these body parts in motion is the AI. First off, AI perceives the game world through its senses: eyesight and hearing (depending on the creature). Eyesight works like a cone-shaped ray that the creature projects from certain spots of their bodies (lizards only see wherever their head is pointed, whereas centipedes are able to see on both ends of their body). The length and accuracy depends on creature type, the environment around, the specific spot of their vision and the regarded object type. Generally the eyesight is better on the center of view while being worse in the periphery (which means every frame you’re in the eyesight radius, there’s a lower percentage chance of being perceived in the periphery compared to the center). Its radius is limited by the environment type: aquatic creatures can see well in the water whereas terrestrial ones have their line of sight broken by it. Another factor is the regarded object: moving around as the player makes you easier to notice, whereas crouching gives a lower chance of being perceived.
Once a creature perceives something it has to identify it: should I ignore it, eat it or run away from it? Also, how many other things are in the room with me? Are they a threat in some way? Are they a resource? Yet, the creature's intent must be comprehensible and clearly communicated to the player. This is what Joar defined as "trickability"; the AI needs to have a complex enough set of faculties to appear "dumb", to be foolable:
"Trickability - This is the thing - the problem that needs to be solved. The idea is that you want the AI to be smart enough so that the player can trick it and get satisfaction out of having outsmarted it. When it comes to Rain World AI, this is the holy grail I'm pursuing. Every amount of complexity on the AI's part should generally fall back on this; this is why the AI is complex. An NPC that just moves towards a target on visual contact isn't smart enough to be tricked. RW AI needs to be smart enough to come up with a simple plan and carry it through, so that you can have anticipated that simple plan and act accordingly." - Joar [2]
This makes for dynamic gameplay as every interaction is the result of a plethora of factors. You can distract an oblivious lizard by throwing a rock and leading it to investigate the noise, but a lizard that has previously seen the player will try to reach their spot regardless of minor distractions. But if a vulture swoops down, it will try to hide in the nearest hole. Then, if it grabs you, it will try to take your body to its den, but it might be attacked by another lizard intending to do so same thing, or be harassed by a “neutral” animal, like a squidcada or scavenger, that views it as a possible threat, all of which might just give you a window of opportunity to escape from its jaws.
Every rain world creature is also an individual. In some cases it’s evident: many creature types have unique cosmetic features so that you can tell individuals apart. These individuals have a relationship value with you. Though initial value might define them as neutral or hostile, your interaction can alter their behavior: start killing scavengers and they will send death squads to take you down; feed a lizard enough and it will stop regarding you as prey and fight for your life. Besides the individual relationship, there’s also an universal one for species, so if you act nice towards one member of a species, it will slightly improve your standing with all of them (which fits more social animals like squidcadas or scavengers than lizards but I digress).
Remember when we were talking about super marios bros? Remember how it is tailored specifically to the player, how it’s meant to intuitively teach the player, which is made possible because mario’s world is very predictable? But if rain world undermines that predictability, then the brakes are off, fairness is thrown out of the window. You might die of a stray spear because a scavenger missed a lizard from the other side of the room. You might die because you crossed a pipe and there was a lizard waiting for you on the other side. Eventually, you accept it as part of life, just like a wild animal might die from lightning or a stray cat be run over by a car. What you can do is minimize risks, be cautious, don’t expose yourself. Act like a survivor.
This also applies to level design: old-school level design is made to adjust to the player. Every platform is placed to either help you or give you a specific challenge. But rain world levels are made to feel uncomfortable or inadequate somehow. There are all kinds of narrow structures or labyrinthic passages. You feel as an intruder who must adjust to the present circumstances instead of having each tile designed for your personal use.
This inadequacy also extends to the level's aesthetics. Though almost all levels are set in post-industrial ruins, their exact purpose is left beyond the player's comprehension:
"first and foremost is that we wanted to create a world as seen through the eyes of something slightly below human intelligence. the slugcat is smart enough to recognize that there is probably some purpose to the structures around it, but not comprehend their meaning. same with the use of "language", letters and characters, etc. the idea is to create a kind of dreamlike atmosphere where the player projects meaning into the structures they see, creating their own expectations about what they might be for and where they might lead, and we play with resolving those expectations quite a bit in the region / world map layout.
similarly, we wanted any specifics about the previous cultures of rain world to remain vague. the player might assume "human" by default, but thats not necessarily the case and we dont want to feed into that reading too much. whats important is that they were there, they built these structures, and now theyre gone.
also important is that the slugcat operates among the in-between spaces of these industrial ruins, like a rat in the subway or a squirrel on a rooftop. you'll sometimes see those overtly designed I.M. Pei vistas, where the structures seem to line up in some grand plan, but most of the time its a ditch filled with garbage and a pipe sticking out, or the crumbling basement of a building. so even if it werent some fantasy alien world we were working in, i think we'd still keep the overtly human signifiers to a minimum." - James Primate [3]
"Yep, we have thought about more recognizable architecture, but we gravitated away from it. For a few reasons, the main one definitely being that one James mentioned. If you can recognize too much in the environment ("That there's a fire post", "that there is a roof drain pipe") the environment wouldn't feel alien anymore. As the creature you play is supposed to not really grasp what's going on in the world around it, the player should be in on that impression. We are going for a thing that's more abstract or expressionistic - what's displayed on the screen is supposed to serve an emotional narrative, and that emotional tone has "not quite understanding what's going on" as a very important center piece." - Joar [4]
Another important game mechanic is "karma". There are ten different karma levels. You can increase your current level by surviving a “cycle” or lose a level in case of death. Crossing each region requires going through a "karma gate" (imo, one of the most immersion breaking features), which blocks you if your karma is too low.
If you read the game’s lore (or already have since this is spoiler tagged), you can see karma is tied to its history: every living being is stuck in the state of samsara, a cycle of eternal rebirth, much like the player. Though ancient monks could reach moksha/nirvana through asceticism (the hard way), the slightly less ancient industrial civilization discovered the world’s “core” to be made up of a sort of anti-matter substance known as “void fluid”, which can be used to ascend automatically (as long as your karma level isnt too bad) and is how you can achieve the game’s legit ending.
Now, a game having its respawning mechanic as a diegetic lore feature (e.g. cosmology of kyoto, planescape torment, dark souls, undertale) is nice but hardly original these days. Rain world’s lore is interesting trivia that may be discovered or ignored at the player’s discretion. Which begs the question: was this major mechanic implemented because of the lore or was the lore at least partly built around it (partly, since you could have samsara without karma levels/gates). Let's hear the devs:
"The karma system is the solution to a problem we noticed when connecting the entire world. It shows that what was driving player motivation wasn't survival, but exploration - the treat you're looking for is seeing new environments and new creatures (which is natural as humans are curious). This is all good, but it incentivised a pretty destructive play style. Instead of trying to survive, you would throw yourself out into the world as far and quick as you could over and over, not caring if you survived as long as you had the chance to reach new areas. The key problem here was the not caring if you survived part - that is very contrary to the mood we wanted to create, which should be all about survival. We're making a survival platformer after all, and want to create the feeling of being an animal in an eco system - which should be all about staying alive. Also as James said, players could move very quickly through the world just blazing through the carefully crafted environments and situations. Basically, a way too high movement to survival ratio.
Another problem was that any cycle that you didn't manage to reach a new shelter felt like a complete waste. I actually had one person on a convention floor, that had after much effort managed to make it back to the starting shelter with enough food, ask me "what did I gain from that?"
We needed to skew the main incentive away from movement and towards survival, making survival the main objective and movement the secondary. The solution we came up with was gating movement with survival - if you don't survive, you don't get to see new areas. A nice side effect of this is an automatic smoothing of the difficulty curve - you're only let into the next region when you're able to handle the one you're in, making sure that you don't randomly end up on too deep waters without any way of making it back." - Joar [5]
The karma system usually succeeds in this role. The fact that I could not only lose my life, but my karma level, meant I would act even more cautious in the ecosystem. In a sort of way, it made me value my “life” somewhat like a real animal would, even if not to the same degree. Gatekeeping new players from certain regions is also a good idea (no one wants to go from outskirts to drainage system in their first playthrough). But all that happens when the karma system is at its best; sometimes it acts as a double-edged sword, forcing you to spend entire cycles “karma grinding” and stalling the sense of freedom you get by exploring the world at your own rhythm.
Another of rain world’s forte is the music. Besides some genuine bangers in the soundtrack (bio-engineering, kayava), it’s also worth of note for being procedural in its own way: the game’s threat music will adapt depending of the danger level you’re in, so the proximity or greater number of predators will add a greater number of instruments to the score. All of this is meant to immerse the player in the slugcat’s perception of reality:
"When I first saw rain world, i had a very very clear concept. for me, a huge strength of the game is your emotional connection to this lone, cute white little creature in this crazy death filled environment, and i wanted the aural experience to amplify that. sound effects would essentially be extensions of the emotion and instinct of the character; a subtle "fly sense" when prey is nearby, an unsettling feeling when lizards are close, an impending sense of dread when the rains begin to come. Even much of the music was to be an extension of the character: the beating of the heart, blood pumping through veins, hunger in stomach, etc." - James Primate [6]
Video games are often described as a means of escapism, with the player's goal being to run away from a bitter/boring reality to a more exciting fantasy. But I feel that most tell very unconvincing lies, their cracks are too easily seen. Whenever I load rain world the feeling is different: everything seems to move regardless of my presence, the world presents itself in its grand indifference to my pettiness. And although I know its tricks I am still encaptured by the mirage.
"In the end I think my goal is to create the illusion that these things are alive. I'm fairly certain that I share this goal with most people making games, as it's an important factor in immersion. Working with behaviour to create that illusion is a path I think is worthy of experimentation - and rain world is my take on such an experiment." - Joar [7]
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[1] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.1860
[2] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.1880
[3] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1213832#msg1213832
[4] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1213832#msg1213832
[5] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1232162#msg1232162
[6] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.720
[7] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg947694#msg947694
Now, assuming you would have never played a game before, nor heard about it, or just waited a couple of seconds in the menu to watch the demo, you’d have no idea of what to do. All you can see is some sort of landscape with a little man-thing in the left corner. So you press the directional buttons and he starts moving, nice. Then you start exploring your surroundings: you try going to the left but there's an invisible wall stopping you, so you go to the right and the screen starts sliding as you go along. That's until some weird brown creature exits from the right corner of the screen, it walks straight to you, but you have no idea what to make of it, so you ignore it. That is, until it touches and kills your little guy, who dramatically falls off from the screen. Two lives left. Damn.
So you start playing again with your newfound knowledge that the little brown thing means bad news. This time you start experimenting with the right side buttons (B & A). You press the left one (B) but it has no apparent effect, so you press the right button (A) and, blam, your little fella jumps. So you advance confidently to where the brown thing is, but instead of walking right into it, you just jump across it. Phew. Now that you can actually advance you see a couple of floating blocks with question marks, curious. You jump on the first block and a coin comes out with no apparent effect, then you go to the next one and a mushroom thing comes out. It trails to the right until falling from the platform’s edge and changing direction by hitting a pipe, coming right towards you. You try to jump but the block above you won’t budge, so the mushroom reaches you and… your guy grows bigger? Nice, so this other mushroom actually helps you, though you have no idea how being bigger does any good besides looking cooler. So you keep advancing to the green pipes: the first one is small enough that a quick button press will get you above it, but the next one is taller and requires a slightly longer press. Ok, so the little guy’s jump height varies depending on how long you press the button. Looking beyond, below the pipe there’s one of the brown guys, but the distance seems just right so you can reach the pipe on the other side by jumping. So you jump while pressing as long as you can, but it isn’t enough and you land exactly atop of the brown guy, ouch. But wait, instead of dying you squash him instantly. Nice! So you can remove enemies by jumping atop of them. So you climb the next pipe and glance to the right and yep, more brown guys, two this time. But you know how to deal with them, right? You jump but this time you slightly misscalculate and land before the enemy. He touches you, but instead of instantly dying, your character gets… smaller? Of course! The mushroom thing makes you bigger, which essentially gives you one more life. But wait, did you forget there were two guys? Why is it that the first guy hurt you while the other passed through harmlessly? You see your character flashing and realize that after being hurt the game gives you a window of opportunity where your character is invulnerable so you can get away from danger. The flashing effect decreases gradually so you can naturally grasp on how much time you have left to reach a safe spot.
Of course, this was a platonic play of mario 1-1. You might as well figure out you can jump from the get-go by experimenting with the buttons. Or ignore the mystery blocks. Or successfully evade the power-up mushroom thinking it’s an enemy. Or never discover you can kill enemies by jumping on them. Either way, what’s important is not that you uncover every basic game mechanic straight away, but that the game allows you to discover new ways to interact with the world without holding your hand. It doesn’t need to show you, but subtly guides you to learn naturally by experimenting with the level design. It set the standard for what good level design ought to be like.
It’s a great experience, tailored specifically to the player. Every block, power-up and enemy is implemented based on how the player will interact with it in a specific way. And the designers can be sure of how you are going to interact with the world: mario can only advance to the right screen (besides pipes and vines), which makes for a mostly linear, manageable experience. As the player gradually familiarizes themselves with the levels, the element of surprise is gone and the experience, though entertaining, turns predictable, which is why even relatively simple AI can learn to master a mario level: it just needs enough attempts to find the best combination of buttons to get across an unchanging obstacle course.
This player-focused design philosophy also affects the game’s mechanics. Mario’s universe is relativistic: everything revolves around the player. Though each level may be loaded with a predetermined code for the entire level, its elements stay inactive until the player comes close enough to interact with them. This can be best exemplified by the spawning (and despawning) of enemies. In super mario bros, enemies spawn in a fixed spot, which is only activated when the player reaches a certain distance from it (which happens slightly offscreen). They may be allowed to exist offscreen as long as they stay close enough to the player character, but the moment they stray too far they disappear entirely. However, since the player can’t progress through the left in super mario bros, this mechanic is usually imperceptible. It’s much more evident in future games, like super mario brothers 2 and super mario world, which allowed players to backtrack and respawn enemies by returning to the left side of the screen. In these cases the games would recognize which direction the player came from and turn the enemies against them, even if most basic mario enemies are unable to automatically turn around to face the player (you could say their life is predestined from the moment they spawn). This is not because the developers did not have the means to stop them from respawning: though enemies always respawn in super mario 2, the map’s items do not, while in super mario world the enemies do not respawn if directly killed by the player since they reward the players with coins once killed (mario 64 would change this by allowing them to respawn without giving rewards beyond the first kill). In some games, like most metroidvanias, this respawning mechanic is crucial to ensure players can replenish health or ammunition dropped by enemies, which usually respawn after re-entering a room. Though the mechanic sacrifices diegetic verisimilitude for gameplay, it feels as if most developers either realized that having enemies spontaneously respawn on-screen would be weird or perhaps unfair. Except for the devs of ninja gaiden, of course, which famously (AVGN is still famous, right?) had the spawn zone set in the corners of the screen (which also meant you could despawn enemies by aggressively outrunning them and letting the corner-of-doom do its job).
One side effect of this is that most mario enemies are basically moving traps. They will completely ignore mario and – unless killed – proceed in their way, until they eventually stumble into a wall, another enemy, fall from a ledge or (more likely) are despawned by going offscreen.
But imagine a different super mario bros, where the player is not the center of the universe. Discard the linear map; have a branching cluster of rooms, with many entries to different worlds, whose acessibility would only be limited by player skill. Imagine if as soon as you loaded up a world it would immediately come alive in its entirety. Where every enemy, from the starting point until bowser’s castle, was constantly existing, even way beyond the reach of the player character’s screen zone. Furthermore, assume every one of these enemies had agency and competed for available resources in the map with themselves. Assume every enemy had a specific identity which the game would keep track of, including their death. Imagine if every one of these enemies had a relationship with your character and could remember how you treated them previously. Sounds utterly insane, right? Contradictory, deranged, self-defeating game design. Only a madman could dream of it. Well, these madmen are called Joar Jakobsson and James Primate; theirs is one of the most amazing games to be released in recent years.
Rain World is one of the few games I “recently” played (what do you mean it has been SIX YEARS!?) which made me think of a “copernican” approach to game design. To turn design postulates and preconceptions on their heads. To be unwilling to compromise originality for a set standard. To challenge what a game ought to be and a player's role in it. Whereas previous platformers/metroidvanias were supposed to be centered on the player as a protagonist, as a means through which the world is experienced, rain world lets its own world take center stage while the player feels like one singular detail in a vast mosaic.
Let’s return to old-schools games. You remember how in these games the existence of npcs depended on the current position of the player character? That even though every spawn point was set, they were only activated as the main character approached them? How enemies would disappear from reality if you stayed away long enough? Well, in Rain World's world (made up of major "regions"), as soon as a region is reached, each of its denizens is spawned and starts acting. The game keeps track of each individual creature, its relationship with other creatures and with the player. You feel as if the world is larger than you, as if it exists independently from you. So that even if you were to be gone it would linger on.
Sounds way too good to be true, right? And in a kind of way it is: one single room in rain world is composed of many objects and particles, besides the creatures which are really moving ragdoll clusters of different body parts with a programmed behavior which is based on their senses. You combine all this with the knowledge that rain world's regions consist of tens of rooms and you start wondering how the game specs do not require a nasa computer.
Like any good magic trick, rain world's is accomplished through a sleight of hand: everything in the current region map exists in two states: abstract and realized. The realized state is the game as you know it: with ragdolls physics, complex path-finding and particle effects. But much like in old-school games, the current position of your character affects how the world around them is rendered. The current room you're in is "realized", as are the neighboring rooms and typically the neighboring room's neighborings rooms (though if you are playing with very low configurations then only your current room is realized). But if you stay too far away the world becomes "abstracted": the possible map paths are simplified and objects are not rendered, though their position is stored. For abstract creatures, the body is not rendered anymore, the pathfinding and AI is simplified, as are interactions between npcs which, instead of being the result of complex ai choices in a dynamic environment with physic effects, are instead based on probability. [1]
So I guess it was all a lie, smokes and mirrors right? Let's not get too carried away: though creatures are abstracted, they are still existing entities: they migrate, do things and interact. Their current agenda is still simulated, even if in a very simplified way: if a wounded lizard starts retreating to its den and has to cross abstract space to do so, it (probably) keeps its current objective and the game simulates the action (probably, because though abstract AI is similar to realized AI, its parameters differ slightly, which may alter creature behavior). All of which is different from an old-school game, where other entities just stop existing altogether if you're far away from them.
One result of the fact that creatures are constantly moving behind your back is that rain world's "deck" is always being reshuffled. A rain world region is similar to an old-school map in that both have predetermined spawn points for npcs spread across them. But whereas old-school entities are only doing things for brief moments of on-screen existence after spawning, rain world's critters are constantly migrating ever since you enter a region. This gives rain world an uncertainty factor; even a veteran player who knows the map like the back of their hand does not know the current locations of creatures or which of them are alive. The fact that the next rooms are “realized” with all the complex actors and effects playing out means you always feel like you’re approaching a situation in media res, as an independent space with independent actors already set in motion. This forces the player to play more cautiously as the world always feels greater than them and beyond their control.
I mentioned creatures spawn and respawn in rain world, but how does that differ from a typical slide scroller? We already know the “region” the player is currently in is simulated, even if mostly in “abstract” state, so the critters start moving as soon as you enter. The starting point from where they move from is a den, the creature’s lair, where it retreats to if it retrieves food, is injured or if raindrops start trickling down. These dens are set in specific spots of the map (except for certain creatures like vultures, which have an abstract unreachable lair), which spawn or respawn creatures. Now, rain world is not a true ecosystem simulator like Species or Bibites, so creatures don’t have a real life cycle, reproduction and the possibility of going extinct. What happens is if a den is vacant, each game cycle will have a chance of spawning a critter in it (which is meant to represent the critter finding this lair and inhabiting it). Depending on the den stats, the next possible critter may be the same subpescies of creature or a different one. If the spawned creature belongs to a different subspecies then there’s a slight chance that the same process happens again with different creature types. Most often this means in-game dens go through different kinds of lizards/centipedes/vultures in what is referred to as the “lineage system”. One of the consequences of this is that if the player kills too many normal enemies, they may trigger the spawn of tougher kinds of enemies through the lineage system.
Another thing rain world is famous for is its critters. In a typical pixel art game you have a cluster of pixels making up a shape, a “sprite”, which are attached to hit/hurt-boxes. These pixel sprites are set to change position and swap to different sprites to give the illusion of doing a continuous action, like walking or jumping. Rain World looks like a typical pixel art game, but its entities are less like mario pixel sprites and more like Gmod ragdolls. Creatures have bodies made of different parts with physical characteristics like length and weight. If a creature wants to get somewhere, it needs to move these parts to get there. Since “animation” is procedural, all sorts of unexpected things may happen naturally: a creature may get stuck, trip over or accidentally fall from a ledge. All of which gives the impression of a real being struggling to use its body instead of an automatic slide scroll.
What sets all these body parts in motion is the AI. First off, AI perceives the game world through its senses: eyesight and hearing (depending on the creature). Eyesight works like a cone-shaped ray that the creature projects from certain spots of their bodies (lizards only see wherever their head is pointed, whereas centipedes are able to see on both ends of their body). The length and accuracy depends on creature type, the environment around, the specific spot of their vision and the regarded object type. Generally the eyesight is better on the center of view while being worse in the periphery (which means every frame you’re in the eyesight radius, there’s a lower percentage chance of being perceived in the periphery compared to the center). Its radius is limited by the environment type: aquatic creatures can see well in the water whereas terrestrial ones have their line of sight broken by it. Another factor is the regarded object: moving around as the player makes you easier to notice, whereas crouching gives a lower chance of being perceived.
Once a creature perceives something it has to identify it: should I ignore it, eat it or run away from it? Also, how many other things are in the room with me? Are they a threat in some way? Are they a resource? Yet, the creature's intent must be comprehensible and clearly communicated to the player. This is what Joar defined as "trickability"; the AI needs to have a complex enough set of faculties to appear "dumb", to be foolable:
"Trickability - This is the thing - the problem that needs to be solved. The idea is that you want the AI to be smart enough so that the player can trick it and get satisfaction out of having outsmarted it. When it comes to Rain World AI, this is the holy grail I'm pursuing. Every amount of complexity on the AI's part should generally fall back on this; this is why the AI is complex. An NPC that just moves towards a target on visual contact isn't smart enough to be tricked. RW AI needs to be smart enough to come up with a simple plan and carry it through, so that you can have anticipated that simple plan and act accordingly." - Joar [2]
This makes for dynamic gameplay as every interaction is the result of a plethora of factors. You can distract an oblivious lizard by throwing a rock and leading it to investigate the noise, but a lizard that has previously seen the player will try to reach their spot regardless of minor distractions. But if a vulture swoops down, it will try to hide in the nearest hole. Then, if it grabs you, it will try to take your body to its den, but it might be attacked by another lizard intending to do so same thing, or be harassed by a “neutral” animal, like a squidcada or scavenger, that views it as a possible threat, all of which might just give you a window of opportunity to escape from its jaws.
Every rain world creature is also an individual. In some cases it’s evident: many creature types have unique cosmetic features so that you can tell individuals apart. These individuals have a relationship value with you. Though initial value might define them as neutral or hostile, your interaction can alter their behavior: start killing scavengers and they will send death squads to take you down; feed a lizard enough and it will stop regarding you as prey and fight for your life. Besides the individual relationship, there’s also an universal one for species, so if you act nice towards one member of a species, it will slightly improve your standing with all of them (which fits more social animals like squidcadas or scavengers than lizards but I digress).
Remember when we were talking about super marios bros? Remember how it is tailored specifically to the player, how it’s meant to intuitively teach the player, which is made possible because mario’s world is very predictable? But if rain world undermines that predictability, then the brakes are off, fairness is thrown out of the window. You might die of a stray spear because a scavenger missed a lizard from the other side of the room. You might die because you crossed a pipe and there was a lizard waiting for you on the other side. Eventually, you accept it as part of life, just like a wild animal might die from lightning or a stray cat be run over by a car. What you can do is minimize risks, be cautious, don’t expose yourself. Act like a survivor.
This also applies to level design: old-school level design is made to adjust to the player. Every platform is placed to either help you or give you a specific challenge. But rain world levels are made to feel uncomfortable or inadequate somehow. There are all kinds of narrow structures or labyrinthic passages. You feel as an intruder who must adjust to the present circumstances instead of having each tile designed for your personal use.
This inadequacy also extends to the level's aesthetics. Though almost all levels are set in post-industrial ruins, their exact purpose is left beyond the player's comprehension:
"first and foremost is that we wanted to create a world as seen through the eyes of something slightly below human intelligence. the slugcat is smart enough to recognize that there is probably some purpose to the structures around it, but not comprehend their meaning. same with the use of "language", letters and characters, etc. the idea is to create a kind of dreamlike atmosphere where the player projects meaning into the structures they see, creating their own expectations about what they might be for and where they might lead, and we play with resolving those expectations quite a bit in the region / world map layout.
similarly, we wanted any specifics about the previous cultures of rain world to remain vague. the player might assume "human" by default, but thats not necessarily the case and we dont want to feed into that reading too much. whats important is that they were there, they built these structures, and now theyre gone.
also important is that the slugcat operates among the in-between spaces of these industrial ruins, like a rat in the subway or a squirrel on a rooftop. you'll sometimes see those overtly designed I.M. Pei vistas, where the structures seem to line up in some grand plan, but most of the time its a ditch filled with garbage and a pipe sticking out, or the crumbling basement of a building. so even if it werent some fantasy alien world we were working in, i think we'd still keep the overtly human signifiers to a minimum." - James Primate [3]
"Yep, we have thought about more recognizable architecture, but we gravitated away from it. For a few reasons, the main one definitely being that one James mentioned. If you can recognize too much in the environment ("That there's a fire post", "that there is a roof drain pipe") the environment wouldn't feel alien anymore. As the creature you play is supposed to not really grasp what's going on in the world around it, the player should be in on that impression. We are going for a thing that's more abstract or expressionistic - what's displayed on the screen is supposed to serve an emotional narrative, and that emotional tone has "not quite understanding what's going on" as a very important center piece." - Joar [4]
Another important game mechanic is "karma". There are ten different karma levels. You can increase your current level by surviving a “cycle” or lose a level in case of death. Crossing each region requires going through a "karma gate" (imo, one of the most immersion breaking features), which blocks you if your karma is too low.
If you read the game’s lore (or already have since this is spoiler tagged), you can see karma is tied to its history: every living being is stuck in the state of samsara, a cycle of eternal rebirth, much like the player. Though ancient monks could reach moksha/nirvana through asceticism (the hard way), the slightly less ancient industrial civilization discovered the world’s “core” to be made up of a sort of anti-matter substance known as “void fluid”, which can be used to ascend automatically (as long as your karma level isnt too bad) and is how you can achieve the game’s legit ending.
Now, a game having its respawning mechanic as a diegetic lore feature (e.g. cosmology of kyoto, planescape torment, dark souls, undertale) is nice but hardly original these days. Rain world’s lore is interesting trivia that may be discovered or ignored at the player’s discretion. Which begs the question: was this major mechanic implemented because of the lore or was the lore at least partly built around it (partly, since you could have samsara without karma levels/gates). Let's hear the devs:
"The karma system is the solution to a problem we noticed when connecting the entire world. It shows that what was driving player motivation wasn't survival, but exploration - the treat you're looking for is seeing new environments and new creatures (which is natural as humans are curious). This is all good, but it incentivised a pretty destructive play style. Instead of trying to survive, you would throw yourself out into the world as far and quick as you could over and over, not caring if you survived as long as you had the chance to reach new areas. The key problem here was the not caring if you survived part - that is very contrary to the mood we wanted to create, which should be all about survival. We're making a survival platformer after all, and want to create the feeling of being an animal in an eco system - which should be all about staying alive. Also as James said, players could move very quickly through the world just blazing through the carefully crafted environments and situations. Basically, a way too high movement to survival ratio.
Another problem was that any cycle that you didn't manage to reach a new shelter felt like a complete waste. I actually had one person on a convention floor, that had after much effort managed to make it back to the starting shelter with enough food, ask me "what did I gain from that?"
We needed to skew the main incentive away from movement and towards survival, making survival the main objective and movement the secondary. The solution we came up with was gating movement with survival - if you don't survive, you don't get to see new areas. A nice side effect of this is an automatic smoothing of the difficulty curve - you're only let into the next region when you're able to handle the one you're in, making sure that you don't randomly end up on too deep waters without any way of making it back." - Joar [5]
The karma system usually succeeds in this role. The fact that I could not only lose my life, but my karma level, meant I would act even more cautious in the ecosystem. In a sort of way, it made me value my “life” somewhat like a real animal would, even if not to the same degree. Gatekeeping new players from certain regions is also a good idea (no one wants to go from outskirts to drainage system in their first playthrough). But all that happens when the karma system is at its best; sometimes it acts as a double-edged sword, forcing you to spend entire cycles “karma grinding” and stalling the sense of freedom you get by exploring the world at your own rhythm.
Another of rain world’s forte is the music. Besides some genuine bangers in the soundtrack (bio-engineering, kayava), it’s also worth of note for being procedural in its own way: the game’s threat music will adapt depending of the danger level you’re in, so the proximity or greater number of predators will add a greater number of instruments to the score. All of this is meant to immerse the player in the slugcat’s perception of reality:
"When I first saw rain world, i had a very very clear concept. for me, a huge strength of the game is your emotional connection to this lone, cute white little creature in this crazy death filled environment, and i wanted the aural experience to amplify that. sound effects would essentially be extensions of the emotion and instinct of the character; a subtle "fly sense" when prey is nearby, an unsettling feeling when lizards are close, an impending sense of dread when the rains begin to come. Even much of the music was to be an extension of the character: the beating of the heart, blood pumping through veins, hunger in stomach, etc." - James Primate [6]
Video games are often described as a means of escapism, with the player's goal being to run away from a bitter/boring reality to a more exciting fantasy. But I feel that most tell very unconvincing lies, their cracks are too easily seen. Whenever I load rain world the feeling is different: everything seems to move regardless of my presence, the world presents itself in its grand indifference to my pettiness. And although I know its tricks I am still encaptured by the mirage.
"In the end I think my goal is to create the illusion that these things are alive. I'm fairly certain that I share this goal with most people making games, as it's an important factor in immersion. Working with behaviour to create that illusion is a path I think is worthy of experimentation - and rain world is my take on such an experiment." - Joar [7]
_______________________________________
[1] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.1860
[2] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.1880
[3] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1213832#msg1213832
[4] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1213832#msg1213832
[5] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1232162#msg1232162
[6] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.720
[7] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg947694#msg947694
I get the idea. I played this for 5 hours and I saw the idea several times. I get the appeal. I get why people eat this. I still don't want to finish my burger. Sometimes you have to accept that you just don't like Big Mac sauce.
Genuinely great ecosystem design but after a good amount of hours dying, watching some guides, and then dying again I have decided this simply might not be the game for me and thats ok. (It's definitely a skill issue)
my favorite game that i feel like i can't recommend. i adore the world and the creatures and the gameplay and movement. atmosphere is unparalleled.
sometimes it feels like bullshit, but i like the bullshit. the built-in rain world "remix" accessibility options are an extremely welcome addition for those who don't.
sometimes it feels like bullshit, but i like the bullshit. the built-in rain world "remix" accessibility options are an extremely welcome addition for those who don't.
I'll concede that I'm like, probably not even halfway through, but look at this and tell me with a straight face that this isn't the best game ever made
“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
--Watership Down
Rain World one of those games where the line of "I like it because I think it's fun" and "I like it because I respect the work that went into it" is blurred.
Every enemy has observable behavior patterns, be it hunting, pack tactics, fear of environmental hazards, or symbiosis with other creatures. Looking at the behind the scenes it's impressive how it all fits together with the AI having separate ways of tracking through sight or vision. It truly feels like I am escaping a wild animal and not an enemy with a "pursue entity: [Player]" protocol.
And understanding that is what helps mitigate the frustrations when the simulation works against you. Three camouflaged lizards camping by the one path forward isn't the devs crafting a challenging encounter, that's just where their AI is telling them to gather because they're being chased out of their usual hunting grounds by a migrating tribe of Scavenger Monkeys.
Still, this can be used to your advantage, because the lizards are territorial and don't like sharing space with one another. Coax one to assault another and they may just leave enough of an opening for you to slip past.
90% of the time it works and feels like you're overcoming the odds of a world programmed against you by fighting back with your knowledge of it.
The other 10% of the time is when the simulation breaks down. You start to see the artifice in the design and things transcend from "Tolerable inconvenience" to "Bullshit Setback."
Because Rain World still needs to be a game with a goal and path forward, and this at times is incongruous with it's measured little world.
Much of the actual frustrations I had came at the fault of the rain mechanic. You're on a timer (with inconsistent length) at the start of each day to fill your belly and find shelter, and sometimes the path to shelter just isn't the path that food has spawned on, and vice-versa.
This wouldn't be so much a problem without the karma system preventing your passage to new areas. Survive a day with a full belly, your karma goes up a level, die and it goes down. At the entrance to new areas you'll be denied access if your karma isn't above a certain level. Get rejected and you now have to remain in the area you just got through, back tracking until you find reasonable hunting grounds and survive enough cycles to get your karma level requisite.
Grinding. It's grinding. And the grinding is never fun because of the aforementioned chaos and unfairness of the simulated ecosystem. Getting through an area by the skin of your teeth feels terrific, being told to go back and do it five more times is deflating.
And it's clear the devs became aware of this deficiency, because endgame areas simply start to include farmable food and shelters right outside the karma checkpoints. Were it not tied to the game's themes and story of cycles and rebirth, I'd question if the game even needs the karma system.
The true frustrations lie in a few gimmick areas causing deaths (and thus depleted karma) far outside the control or understanding of new players. A completely pitch black network of tunnels that causes eye strain, a complex of sentient cancer and zero gravity, and fields of carnivorous grass that can only be traversed on the back of a squishy deer that can sometimes just not spawn near you (this is oddly the worst one).
But as I walk away from Rain World, I can't stay mad at it. It's too fascinating a creation. A labor of passion and experimentation.
I will, inevitably, grit my teeth and dive back in again.
--Watership Down
Rain World one of those games where the line of "I like it because I think it's fun" and "I like it because I respect the work that went into it" is blurred.
Every enemy has observable behavior patterns, be it hunting, pack tactics, fear of environmental hazards, or symbiosis with other creatures. Looking at the behind the scenes it's impressive how it all fits together with the AI having separate ways of tracking through sight or vision. It truly feels like I am escaping a wild animal and not an enemy with a "pursue entity: [Player]" protocol.
And understanding that is what helps mitigate the frustrations when the simulation works against you. Three camouflaged lizards camping by the one path forward isn't the devs crafting a challenging encounter, that's just where their AI is telling them to gather because they're being chased out of their usual hunting grounds by a migrating tribe of Scavenger Monkeys.
Still, this can be used to your advantage, because the lizards are territorial and don't like sharing space with one another. Coax one to assault another and they may just leave enough of an opening for you to slip past.
90% of the time it works and feels like you're overcoming the odds of a world programmed against you by fighting back with your knowledge of it.
The other 10% of the time is when the simulation breaks down. You start to see the artifice in the design and things transcend from "Tolerable inconvenience" to "Bullshit Setback."
Because Rain World still needs to be a game with a goal and path forward, and this at times is incongruous with it's measured little world.
Much of the actual frustrations I had came at the fault of the rain mechanic. You're on a timer (with inconsistent length) at the start of each day to fill your belly and find shelter, and sometimes the path to shelter just isn't the path that food has spawned on, and vice-versa.
This wouldn't be so much a problem without the karma system preventing your passage to new areas. Survive a day with a full belly, your karma goes up a level, die and it goes down. At the entrance to new areas you'll be denied access if your karma isn't above a certain level. Get rejected and you now have to remain in the area you just got through, back tracking until you find reasonable hunting grounds and survive enough cycles to get your karma level requisite.
Grinding. It's grinding. And the grinding is never fun because of the aforementioned chaos and unfairness of the simulated ecosystem. Getting through an area by the skin of your teeth feels terrific, being told to go back and do it five more times is deflating.
And it's clear the devs became aware of this deficiency, because endgame areas simply start to include farmable food and shelters right outside the karma checkpoints. Were it not tied to the game's themes and story of cycles and rebirth, I'd question if the game even needs the karma system.
The true frustrations lie in a few gimmick areas causing deaths (and thus depleted karma) far outside the control or understanding of new players. A completely pitch black network of tunnels that causes eye strain, a complex of sentient cancer and zero gravity, and fields of carnivorous grass that can only be traversed on the back of a squishy deer that can sometimes just not spawn near you (this is oddly the worst one).
But as I walk away from Rain World, I can't stay mad at it. It's too fascinating a creation. A labor of passion and experimentation.
I will, inevitably, grit my teeth and dive back in again.
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.
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
Bonito e meio difícil 👍
This review contains spoilers
When I write a review, I first like to establish the tone opposite to how I feel about the game on the whole so I can end with those true feelings. I’m going to break that pattern here because even though I eventually lost interest in Rain World, I feel compelled to discuss its biggest strengths at the end. I want them to be the main takeaway of this review, if nothing else.
Rain World is a game I would NOT recommend to most players for many reasons. Loads of predators are eager to kill you and the death system is the harshest I’ve ever seen outside of roguelikes. Because of how dangerous enemies are, it’s better to avoid them. Getting to a new area, however, requires you to have a high-enough karma level, which you increase by hibernating in metallic cages after eating enough food. Your karma level goes down when you die, but enemies never stay in the same place for every cycle, so memorizing your way through obstacles is impossible. This is actually a fine gameplay loop, and most areas introduce new obstacles to keep you on your toes.
Where the game loses me is the story and overall purpose of the slugcat’s journey. The intro suggests getting back to your family is the main goal, but apparently that never happens. Instead, you need to ascend like the Buddha, or something like that. Yeah, I couldn’t follow any of it. This isn’t usually a problem for me, as I love several games with minimal or vague storytelling. However, Rain World is so minimal that it ends up undermining what should have been an amazing setting. The story is told entirely through the environment and still images that appear with such inconsistency I have no idea how anyone is supposed to follow it. I’ve come to the conclusion that this type of storytelling works for me when there’s actual dialogue or characters. Even infamously cryptic games, like Dark Souls, Dead Cells, and Blasphemous, have funny dialogue, memorable character designs, and lore tidbits that give some context to their worlds.
As for the world itself, it conforms to a post-apocalyptic theme rendered with the most beautiful pixel art I’ve ever seen. It’s so detailed that I sometimes missed a spot where the slugcat can crawl through or couldn’t tell if a platform was interactable or part of the background. Not a huge issue though. But despite all of the love the artists put into these environments, I don’t see how they relate to each other. The karma gates effectively separate each region into their own bubble and this is a bizarre choice for a game that so clearly wants you to believe its world is real. Yes, predators never stay in the same place within levels and some of them remember your actions, but when your goal is to survive, it sometimes feels like you have to get lucky and wait for predators to fight each other so you can slip by. I’m well aware that the movement system is a lot deeper than it looks and I won’t deny that I felt like a genius figuring out things like using spears as climbing poles, crushing large predators inside a metallic cage’s locking mechanism, and using the slugcat’s physics to eke out an extra few inches on a jump. But Rain World’s gameplay encourages using stealth above all else, and it feels incredibly basic. I haven’t been able to finish the game because it was too boring. I realized around the 12-hour mark that I was no longer having fun, so I regrettably had to put the game down. Maybe I’ll return to it after a long break, but no guarantees.
With my feelings established, let’s finally address the argument I made at the beginning—why Rain World is nevertheless worth studying. There are two things it does that more games should do: detailed enemy interactivity and eschewing permanent upgrades. To elaborate on the former, no game I’ve played shows off this much interactivity between you and enemies, as well as among enemies themselves. Every single one has a distinct behavior and not all of them are immediately hostile to you. The fact Rain World doesn’t tell you about these interactions makes witnessing and exploring them all the more intriguing, especially when they can be used to your advantage.
As for permanent upgrades, the lack of them is a big middle finger to the Metroidvania genre. I mentioned in my Blasphemous review that I ended up not missing movement upgrades, but even that title resorted to items that unlocked various platforms for accessing late-game areas. Rain World on the other hand fully commits to this idea, and it serves to remind the player that they are never safe. Instead of gaining power through artificial means, you gain it through exploring the game’s mechanics.
Both of these ideas are refreshing and while I don’t expect them to take off anytime soon, I do hope more games experiment with them in various frameworks. Metroidvanias would especially benefit, as most rely on static, predictable enemies and a world that opens up through upgrades that function like keys for specific locks. Acceptable design choices for sure, but something different would be appreciated.
Rain World is a game I would NOT recommend to most players for many reasons. Loads of predators are eager to kill you and the death system is the harshest I’ve ever seen outside of roguelikes. Because of how dangerous enemies are, it’s better to avoid them. Getting to a new area, however, requires you to have a high-enough karma level, which you increase by hibernating in metallic cages after eating enough food. Your karma level goes down when you die, but enemies never stay in the same place for every cycle, so memorizing your way through obstacles is impossible. This is actually a fine gameplay loop, and most areas introduce new obstacles to keep you on your toes.
Where the game loses me is the story and overall purpose of the slugcat’s journey. The intro suggests getting back to your family is the main goal, but apparently that never happens. Instead, you need to ascend like the Buddha, or something like that. Yeah, I couldn’t follow any of it. This isn’t usually a problem for me, as I love several games with minimal or vague storytelling. However, Rain World is so minimal that it ends up undermining what should have been an amazing setting. The story is told entirely through the environment and still images that appear with such inconsistency I have no idea how anyone is supposed to follow it. I’ve come to the conclusion that this type of storytelling works for me when there’s actual dialogue or characters. Even infamously cryptic games, like Dark Souls, Dead Cells, and Blasphemous, have funny dialogue, memorable character designs, and lore tidbits that give some context to their worlds.
As for the world itself, it conforms to a post-apocalyptic theme rendered with the most beautiful pixel art I’ve ever seen. It’s so detailed that I sometimes missed a spot where the slugcat can crawl through or couldn’t tell if a platform was interactable or part of the background. Not a huge issue though. But despite all of the love the artists put into these environments, I don’t see how they relate to each other. The karma gates effectively separate each region into their own bubble and this is a bizarre choice for a game that so clearly wants you to believe its world is real. Yes, predators never stay in the same place within levels and some of them remember your actions, but when your goal is to survive, it sometimes feels like you have to get lucky and wait for predators to fight each other so you can slip by. I’m well aware that the movement system is a lot deeper than it looks and I won’t deny that I felt like a genius figuring out things like using spears as climbing poles, crushing large predators inside a metallic cage’s locking mechanism, and using the slugcat’s physics to eke out an extra few inches on a jump. But Rain World’s gameplay encourages using stealth above all else, and it feels incredibly basic. I haven’t been able to finish the game because it was too boring. I realized around the 12-hour mark that I was no longer having fun, so I regrettably had to put the game down. Maybe I’ll return to it after a long break, but no guarantees.
With my feelings established, let’s finally address the argument I made at the beginning—why Rain World is nevertheless worth studying. There are two things it does that more games should do: detailed enemy interactivity and eschewing permanent upgrades. To elaborate on the former, no game I’ve played shows off this much interactivity between you and enemies, as well as among enemies themselves. Every single one has a distinct behavior and not all of them are immediately hostile to you. The fact Rain World doesn’t tell you about these interactions makes witnessing and exploring them all the more intriguing, especially when they can be used to your advantage.
As for permanent upgrades, the lack of them is a big middle finger to the Metroidvania genre. I mentioned in my Blasphemous review that I ended up not missing movement upgrades, but even that title resorted to items that unlocked various platforms for accessing late-game areas. Rain World on the other hand fully commits to this idea, and it serves to remind the player that they are never safe. Instead of gaining power through artificial means, you gain it through exploring the game’s mechanics.
Both of these ideas are refreshing and while I don’t expect them to take off anytime soon, I do hope more games experiment with them in various frameworks. Metroidvanias would especially benefit, as most rely on static, predictable enemies and a world that opens up through upgrades that function like keys for specific locks. Acceptable design choices for sure, but something different would be appreciated.
It's raining, it's pouring, humanity is snoring.
This game is pure art.
The ecosystems, the intricated dynamics between species, the breathtaking environments, the player and the other creatures movements, omg! The movements mechanics are something.
It is simply superb, the dynamic animation is so unique, feels so fluid and natural, allowing for a ton of complex actions based on the game physics. (I understand that for some people looking for 100% precision the controls can fell a bit frustrating. But I think that is because you need to pay attention to more stuff than just pressing a button, like velocity, motion, positioning, everything changes the output.)
From time to time I find myself playing this again, attempting to reach its conclusion. The game's immersive nature and captivating exploration often lead me away from the main quest. With the recent Downpour release, I'm really hoping to finally achieve it's ending.
This is my ideal game, the game that if I had the skill I would create. Huge thanks to the team behind it.
The ecosystems, the intricated dynamics between species, the breathtaking environments, the player and the other creatures movements, omg! The movements mechanics are something.
It is simply superb, the dynamic animation is so unique, feels so fluid and natural, allowing for a ton of complex actions based on the game physics. (I understand that for some people looking for 100% precision the controls can fell a bit frustrating. But I think that is because you need to pay attention to more stuff than just pressing a button, like velocity, motion, positioning, everything changes the output.)
From time to time I find myself playing this again, attempting to reach its conclusion. The game's immersive nature and captivating exploration often lead me away from the main quest. With the recent Downpour release, I'm really hoping to finally achieve it's ending.
This is my ideal game, the game that if I had the skill I would create. Huge thanks to the team behind it.
I played it for a couple of hours and I don't want to keep playing Rain World.
I'll say though, it was a very interesting game to read about ! The design idea is fantastic, and I applaud what this game does... But I can't be bothered to repeatedly get killed anymore to see what it has in store.
All the power to those who love this though !
I'll say though, it was a very interesting game to read about ! The design idea is fantastic, and I applaud what this game does... But I can't be bothered to repeatedly get killed anymore to see what it has in store.
All the power to those who love this though !