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]

_______________________________________
[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 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.

Rain World is a game that doesn't like you. Not in the way that it's unfair, save for the few times you get trapped in a death-loop because a creature found its way somewhere it wasn't supposed to be. No, it throws you into the middle of a deteriorating world, where the only things lower than you on the food chain are miniscule insects. You are a slugcat, a small animal unfamiliar to your new environment, separated from your family, and your one and only goal is to survive. The world is hostile, and you - delicious.

Crawling your way through the maze of pipes and grimy suburbs, the game makes sure you feel alone. There is nothing like you in this land, and while trying to return to your family seems like a good course of action, you've no idea where you came from. Rain World's atmosphere is bleak, full of abandoned machinery and flooded tunnels, but the environment is distinctly alive, the AI given the ability to roam freely around the map. Interactions between creatures feel organic, with various context-dependent behaviours that establish their relationship within the ecosystem. Lizards are fearsome predators to you, and territorial to one another, but they quickly turn and run as soon as they catch sight of a vulture, larger and more dangerous than them. The game feels dynamic, and no day (or cycle) ever feels the same.

It is not only the animals of the land that are unfriendly, though. The world is plagued by torrential downpours, coming down with force just every few minutes and crushing everything that isn't able to hide. You are, of course, given safe spots - shelters marked with a special symbol that allow you to survive the rain, provided you have stocked up on enough food to hibernate. This limits the time the player has to explore - and I suppose, from a technical standpoint, stops the simulation from utterly breaking - but it is a genius way of forcing you to stop and take things slow, learn your environment before you can move on. The karma system you need to get through gates exemplifies the point, though it can feel stifling and trap you in spots too tough for you to progress out of. Some complain that the system feels like it punishes exploration, since unfamiliar territory often leads to more deaths and the inability to raise your karma level. No game is perfect, and Rain World is no exception to that.

This is where I will address what I think is probably Rain World's biggest issue. I adore the regions of the game, and I love the decisions made in their creation, from the three-layered map rendering system to the beautiful usage of textures and materials, the colour palettes that so clearly reflect the game's atmosphere. It has to be said, though, that the design of some areas - notably Sky Islands and Drainage System - can be classified as actively hostile to players.

Between precise parkour that requires use of a specific creature to help carry you across gaps and the constant hazard of predators knocking you off, Sky Islands is a nightmare to navigate and an even bigger nightmare to survive. This is exemplified with the game's more difficult mode - the Hunter - adding cyan lizards that easily leap the distance and snap you up in their jaws.

Drainage System, in turn, is a common newbies' trap - an easy-to-access region that leads you into a maze of waterlogged pipes, forcing you to quickly push your way through leeches and winding corridors before your breath runs out. Your way out is not any better, however, because one path will lead you through an infamous section of tubes with only small pockets of air throughout, three long rooms that lead you into a gate which mercifully has a karma requirement of one. The other route guides you down directly into the ending section of the game - the Filtration System subregion of Subterranean - and clawing your way out the way you came is nothing short of impossible, while taking the route to Farm Arrays is even moreso. As the ending cannot be reached so early without skips a new player wouldn't know about, they are often forced to bumble around the dark filtration pipes, and if they manage to find their way to the upper part of the area, they are forced to travel all the way to the east where a gate to Shoreline will put them out of their misery. This is no easy task, and many runs are reset or even abandoned just because a player feels unfairly stuck.

Another point to bring up are the screen transitions. Rain World's screens do not scroll. They are rigid, the camera angle baked into the map, and while I think this works well for the game, it can lead to unfortunate deaths. A creature just out of range can kill you as soon as you cross the boundary, and you will be none the wiser until you are already dead. This is an unfortunate part of the game that can only be avoided by carefully listening, and even then it may be too difficult to tell. This, I can concede, is not something you can properly counter.

These are not the only times Rain World can feel like too much. I said Rain World generally wasn't unfair, and I stand by that, but it has to be said that its mechanics can be discouraging to players. It isn't a game for everyone. It does not like you. It will not hold your hand, or wrap you in a warm blanket and tell you you'll be alright. It will tear into you like a wild animal, only stopping to provide you with a save point before it goes after you again. Like an oasis in the desert as a brief sanctuary from the harsh sun. Rain World is for players who like to feel hunted.

That is not to say you are powerless. The Hunter game mode lets you embody the role of a predator - though you are still soft and squishy, you are predisposed to violence, and you have more strength than the other slugcats. It is unique in several ways, mostly that the player is on an even more limited timer - not just the cycle length, but the cycle count, forcing the player to find a route that will leave them enough time to finish before the clock ticks down to zero. It is a challenge mode, and it uniquely rewards efforts at killing creatures, tallying points up at the end of your run.

This is something Rain World does not do often. While everything has a set amount of health points (or, in the code, damage resistance) that can be depleted, most of the time the player is punished, or at least not rewarded. A vulture's mask can be knocked off without killing it. You cannot do anything with a lizard's corpse. Killing a scavenger will make their tribe track and hunt you. In most of these cases, running is a much safer and more profitable option. This distinguishes Rain World from most other games, where killing enemies is desirable and gives the player more money, or power, or resources, and I think it's part of what makes the game such a unique experience.

This would not be my Rain World review if I didn't mention the music. It isn't baked into the game as a background track for specific areas, and it isn't anywhere near constant. Instead, it is split into two types. Firstly, specific rooms have triggers placed in them that play specific music, ranging from energetic, drum-filled beats to solemn ambient tracks. They serve to highlight the atmosphere of the area the player is in, and usually placed in distinct spots that have something to look at. This music is as much part of the environment as the creatures and the broken-down buildings around you.

Then, there is threat music - a feature of Rain World that is talked about more than most others, perhaps barring only the procedurally-animated creatures. Whenever danger is nearby, layers of a region-specific track are picked based on the severity of said danger. The more threatened you are, the more the music picks up, building tension and at the same time letting you know there may be something lurking just beyond the scope of your vision. It serves to warn as much as it serves to put the player on edge, to remind them that they shouldn't be comfortable. There is nothing more I could say about it that hasn't been said by everyone else.

Moving on to the game at large. While you are separated from your kind, you are not entirely on your own. A little yellow worm that projects holograms follows you around, showing you pictures of your family, pointing little arrows in a direction you're enticed to go. This isn't mandatory - Rain World isn't a linear game, and it fully lets you carve your own path barring an ending requirement or two - but it does lead you down quite an interesting path. While most of the focus is on the wilder aspect of the world, you are walking through the ruins of a civilisation, and their effects still linger on the world. Through a stormy climb - or machinery buried under a sea of water - you will find that there is more to the world than you first might've thought. The lore of this game is an abstract topic, influenced by buddhism and allergic to clearly defining its most important points. To go into it would be to write a review just about the same length, do much more research than I have time for, and still end up with more questions than answers.

There is ascension, and there are cycles. Things dissolve into the Void and never come back. The Ancients - a race long gone, leaving only echoes of their past. All little facts found in data pearls scattered across the map, crumbs of the larger story falling together to form a bigger picture. The rain is not just a natural feature of this world - it is the result of giant, living computers called Iterators, behemoths of steel and organics, built to find some way to help those less intelligent animals escape the mortal plane for good. A grueling, futile task, not even known to be possible for certain. In your path, you come across two of them - Looks to the Moon, and Five Pebbles. Now presented with odd new 'allies' and a mission you don't quite understand, your search for the ones you lost is now abandoned. You likely don't even remember the introductory cutscene.

The Iterators provide the closest thing Rain World has to a story. Through discarded data, one can find what happened before the events of the game - the Ancients' progress towards ascension, moving out of their lower cities onto the Iterators' tall cans, all disappearing one by one and leaving their creations to rot. Life created only to work at a task so that its makers did not have to try themselves, forced to try solution after solution until they deteriorated too far to continue or found a way to free themselves. Left with the remnants of a ruined world, plagued by eternal storms.

It has to be said that not every part of the game has the player stay back, external to the larger plot. In the Hunter mode, the player starts with two items - a pearl and a green neuron. These can be discarded or delivered to their recipient at will, but it does make the Hunter stand out, because against the background of the Survivor and the Monk - whose initial story is grounded firmly in nature - the Hunter is, from the start, involved in events beyond a simple animal's comprehension. Still, you are not a hero, and you aren't going to save the world. The Hunter's actions help Looks to the Moon, but on a grand scale of things it is only a brief moment of consciousness before her systems degrade again, while the slugcat itself does not seem to have such a happy ending. Whether or not they succeed in their mission does not matter, seeing as the Survivor and Monk are in the future where Moon is alive, and Hunter's ending seems to imply they are pulled back to the start if they fail. Trapped, just like everyone else.

Rain World gives you a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes - lets you learn of the Iterators' story, sends you off on a pilgrimage to the great Void Sea, letting you ascend like the Ancients once did. Even then, the rain still continues, the dissolved material falls as dust from the sky, and structures deteriorate further. You have not made a lasting mark, as tiny and insignificant as the insects you eat.

After all is said and done, you are just a rodent.

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.