Rain World

Andrei Tarkovsky's PAC-MAN

This is not your typical video game. Design is so unconventional as it gets for any type of medium, let alone video games.

It is like holding a centipede in your hand and after getting a bite and venom injected, you try to throw it away. You want to hold it again, and again and it goes on and on. The key point here is that after numerous bites and venoms, you are not afraid of it anymore and you can pet it as you like. Now you can play piano without a single fear while your centipede is stepping on its keys freely.

Visuals and sound design serve really well to the gameplay which is structured by developing physics-based animations and controls.

Profound lore is there for you to dig, no forced story presentation to players meaning you read almost no text if you don't search for it.

Rain World is a game that made me realize free will is an illusion. And I have a really good reason for that.

Ok yeah the title is clickbait but it's the most boiled down I can get my opinion on this game.

Presentation in this game is phenomenal. Like, absolutely stellar by all metrics. Visuals, music, sound, story, how you actually get the story, it's all greatly done in a way that only a video game can, and the only game that comes even close in my eyes to this specific kind of presentation done this well, is Hyper Light Drifter. It's also got absurdly in depth AI mechanics, tons of movement tech, it's overall really simply to understand the basics and rewards experimentation quite a bit. There is a TON going on here beyond what the premise "weird post apoc metroidvania about a strange, cutesy creature" would usually entail. All of these factors mix together to create the very specific tone and atmosphere of being a very small creature in a very big world, having to rely almost entirely on their own quick thinking to survive.

But the game just kind of hates you and seems hell bent on keeping you from really enjoying a lot of it.

Now, enjoyment is subjective. Some people play games like Aurora 4x, some people play games like Train Simulator, and some people play games like Pathologic. None of these games are going to be "fun" for most people, but they're all very successful in their own ways for various reasons, up to and including people just outright liking that style of gameplay.

Rain World however, and a few other games I see pop up from time to time, seem entirely intent on wasting the players time. Let me explain in a few bullet points.

- There are next to no character upgrades to be obtained in any way shape or form. There are some items that can be very useful, if not outright necessary for some zones, but they're only permanent if you sacrifice a hand to permanently hold onto it and don't accidentally lose them, though you can get more if you do.

- The only thing to gain from exploring, then, beyond just seeing the environments, is lore pearls. However, each pearl is usually located in a very precarious location on the edges of basically any and every zone in the game, making getting to them a task in of itself, and once you have one you need to bring it back to a specific NPC to actually understand what they say. With limited inventory, very treacherous and long areas, and no way to respawn lost pearls without letting yourself die right after, it's an exercise in tedium at best. I don't see most people getting more than a handful of these, and I don't blame them.

- The path of progression skips past quite a few zones, and the map is of no real help most of the time. Without mods, the map stays relatively zoomed in at all times, and the automap is very limited, making it easy to miss doorways in larger rooms if you don't check the entire surrounding wall. The automap does NOT carry over after death, so you can't just throw yourself into various paths until you have the whole thing charted out, you have to survive and pass a cycle before it gets locked in.

- A lot of areas are outright unfair if not bordering on sadistic, which is not a problem in of itself, but it becomes very frustrating and tedious when coupled with the respawn system and the scale of the map. Whenever you pass a cycle in a shelter, which can only be done when you have enough food and which you must do at consistent intervals because of the constant world wide flooding that happens that will kill you if you don't, it sets your checkpoint there. There are no other real checkpoints. This means that if you travel a long distance and die - and you will die, because basically every threat in this game is instant death, there are many of them, and you wont always have the tools, room, or knowledge needed to actually out maneuver or kill them - you go right back to that shelter and have to decide if you want to spend all that time trekking back to the same room that will likely just get you killed again. Sometimes, it's not even clear that you have any other option. The little orange or blue holographic beings that direct you around give you a very direct path, but they often disappear for extended periods of time and they won't show alternate pathways until you stray far enough off of the one you're on for them to register than this new one is 'faster'. Trying to maneuver past a single lizard can be difficult depending on the room. I've seen rooms with 4 or more, and that was far easier to navigate than the zone simply referred to as "Unfortunate Developments".

- Pretty much any kind of 'tech' is very difficult to pull off and never explained to the player. The only advanced movement option the game properly tutorializes is the long jump, which requires you to be crouched, not moving, and to hold jump for about a second or 2, which isn't always an option, and the resulting boost is marginal. Options like impaling spears on walls to act as a makeshift platform is usually more more useful, even if you play without the setting that lets your later remove the spear, and any more advanced stuff is much harder to pull off, much less universally applicable, and you're likely to never even find out you can do much of it on accident, let alone a lot of the combos or exploits you can get into. Theoretical player agency and skill expression really only counts in my book if it's something that you can reasonably expect the player to have learned on their own if not from a tutorial.

I could probably go on about the specific annoyances certain enemies bring to the table, or how the camera transitions in larger rooms seems tailor made to kill the player, or a number of other things, but this is already much too long, and I don't expect anyone to really read it. Suffice to say that if someone asked me what large scale indie metroidvania I'd recommend them try, I would only ever suggest this if I knew they were someone deeply interested in 'games as art' and exploring what can be done pretty much exclusive in the realm of games. For everyone else, I'd probably just say Hollowknight.

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.

The one thing I knew about this game before going in was how challenging it was and how this challenge created a schism between those who have played this game. By the end, the game had won me over to the side of liking it but only just barely as I had to go through a lot of pain to get to that point.

For starters, the presentation is downright gorgeous with stellar pixel art displaying a very hostile and abandoned world. Creeping around the ruins of civilization you know nothing about and has been gone for god knows how long is an aesthetic I find very appealing. Each area of the game feels very distinct from itself offering new creatures and obstacles to encounter which refreshes the gameplay loop a little bit.

Where my main concerns for this game lie is in its said gameplay loop which requires you to be at certain in-game levels in order to reach the next area. This would not be that bad on its own but the lack of solid directions lead me either to dead ends or down dangerous paths that resulted in my death numerous times. After a while, it felt like the game was wasting my time by throwing enemies at me out of nowhere and forcing me to grind to a higher level only to be killed out of nowhere again. I understand the game is trying to replicate the harsh environment a creature like the "Slugcat" would have to endure but many times my appreciation of this detail was clouded by my rage of dying over 10 times in one area.

I have a lot of respect for this game whether it be because of its aforementioned stellar presentation, impressive enemy ai, and ecosystem, or even its cool ambient soundtrack. I wish I could love this game more but I found its gameplay infuriating one too many times for me to even want to go back and play the other characters. That being said I would still recommend this to those who want to see a unique type of game that has not been replicated yet. I am glad I was able to experience it despite my misgivings about it.

Note: This review concerns the Nintendo Switch port of the game.

There are many things I love about this game. The enemy AI and emergent scenarios are nothing less than art. The music, visual design and storytelling are likely to be considered ahead of its time by future game reviewers. It is one of the few games go make you feel small and helpless to the whims of the scary world around you.

And that's why I hate to give this game such a mediocre rating, because I want to love it so much. But unfortunately, there are execution flaws that prevent me from enjoying it to its full extent. Namely, the control of the slugcat is very unpredictable, and I found myself often mashing buttons to get the slugcat to perform the intended maneuver. For example, it felt impossible to differentiate when the slugcat would do a wall jump versus grab a ledge at a certain height. The clumsy controls are compounded by how unforgiving the game design is. Difficulty by itself is not a bad thing, but becomes frustrating when death occurs due to the slugcat leaping off a surface or diving down a tunnel when it was not intended to do so. There are many times I died because a water tunnel had less than a one second margin of error to prevent drowning, and the slugcat would not be at the precise height to enter a door, requiring an adjustment that there wasn't time for.

In the end, I had softlocked myself in a water area where the only way out was to perform a maneuver of wall jumps up a well to the surface, and you can bet that that wasn't going to happen. A spear could have been used to create a much needed platform, but the spears usually wouldn't spawn in the area (and when they do, there's no guarantee they get thrown at the right height) . After too many attempts of the slugcat helplessly leaping around the well, I had to put down a game that I had been enjoying up until that point and had hoped to complete.

I hear the Switch port has an input delay, so perhaps it is more tight on the PC version. Thus, if the Switch version receives a patch, I may revisit the game and try again. But until then, I will continue to enjoy the artistic aspects of the game online, and look forward towards a better executed iteration of the concept.