"Destroy the darkness of delusion with the brightness of wisdom. The world is truly dangerous and unstable, without any durability. My present attainment of Nirvana is like being rid of a malignant sickness. The body is a false name, drowning in the great ocean of birth, sickness, old age and death. How can one who is wise not be happy when he gets rid of it?" - Gautama Buddha

Rain World is not a game about living. It's not a game about dying. It's about samsara.

Why do so many yearn for annihilation, for silence? Why are we caught between quiet and din? What are we tied to? How do we remember the past? How permanent is history? What is it made out of? Is it in objects? Is it in something spiritual? Is it in technology? What are the driving forces of technology? Can technology be spiritual? Why do we make machines? Why do we make them look like us? Why do we make them look so different from us? What do they do when we are gone? How different is technology and nature? What is nature in the first place? Is nature cruel? Is nature kind? What does it mean to be cruel, to be kind? Is there such a thing as morality in an ecosystem? What is nature made out of? What is an animal? What is the life of an animal? What is the life of two animals? What is the life of a thousand animals? What is life at all? What does it mean, really, to be living? Why is it so painful? Why do we go on? What do we need? What do we want?

"Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett

I am not, nor have I ever been, a spiritual person. I don't think I ever will be. But Rain World helps me understand why people become Buddhists. This game was a spiritual experience for me. I mean that. I hate it, I love it, I am endlessly fascinated by it. It is an utterly singular game. I don't think there has ever been or ever will be another game quite like Rain World.

One of the best games ever made. Beautiful, fascinating, haunting, terrifying. But it's hard to recommend. It's one of the hardest and most grueling games I've ever played. It's profoundly frustrating. But it's a masterpiece. Even without my unique connection to it, it is full of incredible ideas, beautiful art, and shocking design. It's a vast ecosystem full of wonder and terror. It's stunningly beautiful on almost every level. I feel it on a visceral level. It's constantly on my mind. I cannot escape it; it's inside me. It's one of the best games ever made.

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.

Damn. I really wanted to like this one more than I do. Honest! But I just am not clicking with it.

I think my issue is that the physics in the game are just too unpredictable or too confusing to reliably set up a combo, which is usually what makes these games fun. Maybe if it showed where the blocks would end up or something, I don't know. I would often set up a combo, or maybe only thinking I was, only to immediately see it squandered. Meanwhile, I would have gargantuan combos completely on accident, which doesn't feel super satisfying, either.

I think this issue could be circumvented in one specific way: a "puzzle mode". This would help players recognize patterns and get a better understanding of the ruleset they are working with.

I wanna give this one an A for Effort. I love the premise, I love the structure, and I really love playing it. The process of navigating documents and file cabinets is so engrossing, I would gladly play more games in this style. And I'm happy to see more games expose the truly monstrous history of the CIA. The game also does a lot of interesting little things, even having a few genuinely delightful surprises along the way. I really want to front load this with compliments, because it really does some of this stuff incredibly.

But, unfortunately, I think this game does a bad job of actually delivering the information it wants you to uncover. I honestly don't feel like I know much more about the actual conspiracy this game was about. I know the names of the major players, but I only have a vague understanding of their actions. The game sets you up with a very specific question to guide you. And I'm not even sure I get the answer to that, frankly.

I reopened the game before I posted this review to pore over the documents once again to see if I was just missing something. And I can't say I have that much better an understanding of what was going on. I do not consider myself a particularly easy to confuse reader or player. Maybe I was just too sleepy for it to all come together in the way it was supposed to, and maybe that's my fault. Maybe it's because the highlighting system causes you to fixate on names, times, and places, rather than to focus on the actual content of the documents you are going through. (My notes, originally detailed, devolved into a list of reference numbers). Maybe it's because the documents are too sparse and too vague to give me a good understanding of the details. Maybe I'm just stupid. But I needed much more concrete and explicit explanations of the geopolitical situation, or just the basic situation, for that matter. Maybe that makes me stupid.

When the game cuts to credits, I only just started to feel like I was understanding what was going on. I see the silhouette of the conspiracy but nothing more. I understand its shape, but not its nuances and structure. The game spread out its arms and said "Tada!", but I was still waiting for the rabbit to come out of the hat.

I typically hate the criticism of "I Don't Get It!". But in this case, the goal of this game (ostensibly) is to inform me about a real life series of events in a way that is engaging. Was I engaged? Absolutely! Did I feel like I learned something? Not really!