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.