Three Reviews of Rain World

I like the video game Rain World. The following are three separate reviews about Rain World, with various purposes in mind. The first is a review that was posted on the website Backloggd (edit until its current state was reached) which you can visit by clicking here, where I wax poetic about the themes. The second is the original post for a thread on the Waypoint Forums written in 2021, which you can visit by clicking here, and is sort of a plea for folks to give the game a shot. Lastly, the third one is a review of Downpour, the recent expansion, which was also posted to Backloggd, and it might be the most direct review of the game (and its expansion) I have here. I hope you enjoy them.

1.

“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.

2.

On March 28, 2017, four years ago today, Videocult released their debut game, Rain World. In Rain World, you play as a little creature called a slugcat, desperately trying to survive the harsh world you were born into. It is a unique and challenging game unlike any other. Enigmatic, uncompromising, and beautiful.

2021 is the year of Rain World.
Why? I don’t know. But it is.

It released at first to very mixed reviews. As for major outlets, it received a 6.3/10 from IGN, and a 5/10 on Polygon. Most people agreed that the art and animation were stunning, but many found the game too difficult, punishing, and uncompromising to be enjoyable. Its mechanics are opaque and strange, and almost nothing is explained to the player. Janine Hawkins wrote in her review on Polygon:

In essence playing Rain World too often felt like trying to turn a screw with the wrong sized screwdriver — not just a challenge, but more as if I hadn’t been given the tools I needed for the task at hand.

I think a lot about it in the way Austin Walker has spoken about Far Cry 2. He refers to it as an “incoherent” game. It rejects and recontextualizes the structure of the first-person shooter. In this way, Rain World is an incoherent Metroidvania, and may be one of the most incoherent games I’ve ever played in my life. Its story, its structure, its controls, its world, they all seem to defy everything I know about games. (Austin, on the off-chance that you’re reading this, you should consider playing this game!)

Rain World is a game that broke me. I don’t know how else to explain it. It got under my skin, twisted my stomach. I think about games differently, about living differently. One day, I die to the same obstacle over and over again. The same mistake. The same death. I grit my teeth, I grip tight, I sweat and swear. I think about quitting. But I don’t.

So it’s impossible to recommend it without caveats. Rain World is one of the hardest games I’ve ever played. The term “hard but fair” gets thrown around sometimes. Rain World is not fair. It is not kind. It is unforgiving and uncaring about all your plight and failure. This is going to turn many, if not most players off completely.

But underneath all that is a vast, beautiful, and albeit frightening world that enchants me endlessly. It is full of mystery and terror in vibrant shades. I want to tell you all about this sprawling ecosystem, but I don’t even want to elaborate; I dare not steal the wonder of discovery away from you. It constantly surprises me.

I cannot stop thinking about Rain World. It’s in my bones now.

You might be reading all this and feel certain you would hate Rain World. That’s okay. I totally understand why. It’s not a game for a lot of people. Most, I would wager… It may not be for you, but I think it’s worth at least taking a gander at this incredibly singular experience.

3.

Some of the most fun I’ve had with a game in years was learning how to kill lizards in Rain World. In my entire time with the game in my first playthroughs, I’m not sure I ever intentionally killed one of these beasts. I saw them as impossible foes. But in order to reach many of my goals in Downpour, I had to learn how to conquer them. The first kill feels like a fluke, like luck, and in a way it is. But each spear that pierces their hide feels more real, more earned. They never stop being terrifying. They never stop being a threat. But I had to learn how to take them down anyway, backflipping, juking, stabbing, feasting. I had to learn how to slay dragons.

I have a brand, and part of that brand is that I really like Rain World. In all my poetic waxings, I often am remiss to mention what makes playing Rain World itself actually so cool. So for once, I’ll try to offer an admittedly vague explanation. I’m sure you can find no shortage of mechanical rundowns, so I’ll keep this brief: Rain World is a unique game where you play as a little slugcat trying to survive and find shelter before the devastating rain comes. It’s quite a difficult game where challenges may often feel insurmountable. What makes Rain World such a unique game is its emphasis on emergent and procedural systems. The vast majority of these systems are not explained to the player at all, and as such have to be learned by experimentation and exploration. The behavior and animations of all the predators and creatures you encounter is unpredictable and dynamic. The game is a bountiful garden of consistently surprising gameplay.

The result, for me, is something unlike anything else: a constantly exciting game. It’s always a thrill playing Rain World. Even dozens of hours in, I find myself yelping and gritting my teeth. I can get into specifics but I don’t want to dispel the magic of experiencing it yourself. I adore this. It can also end up making the game agonizing. This is why initial critical response was negative, and why many players will find the game simply too hard or too cruel to even play let alone enjoy. But that agony is a part of the experience, or at least my experience, and it’s part of what makes the slugcat’s journey so beautiful.

So what about Downpour? This is an expansion that adds a litany of new features. If you just want a straight recommendation, I don’t advise going into anything related to the expansion before playing the base game. It’s not a required expansion and frankly is extremely geared towards die-hard fans. Most of my time was spent with the new slugcats, but they also added co-op, Expedition mode, challenges, and other stuff. A major addition to the game was Remix, a suite of new options that is available to owners of the base game. This alone makes recommending Rain World significantly easier, because it now comes with a big list of checkboxes that can help you tailor the game to your own needs. (If you want help figuring out what to use, check out my forum post here.)

Now, there is a criticism that Downpour in many ways actually distorts and weakens the unique core identity of Rain World. I’m torn on this. On one hand, I think it’s a bit paranoid. Even with an expansion (which is still optional!), Rain World remains a singular game like no other. Hunter and Monk were already additions and didn’t distort that vision. On the other hand, this game has a lot of things in it. There’s five new campaigns, a bunch of new game modes, and major additions to the map. There’s a chunk of community easter eggs, which frankly rubs me the wrong way, and the involvement of fandom in art can get ugly fast. The expansion also ends up adding a fair bit to the lore and narrative, and I don’t have simple feelings about some of the choices. (I won’t get into it for spoiler reasons, but there are some big swings that I don’t love.) It’s so much that I couldn’t possibly cover it all, and all the implications and complications in this review; even what I’ve written here is longer than I wanted. I wanted to just talk about the lizards, but this is too dense with content that I can’t just leave it at that. I would never go as far to say that Downpour ruins or fundamentally changes Rain World, but it does definitely add a lot to the mix.

There’s a reason for all this. Let’s talk a bit about the history here: years ago, some Rain World modders began developing the More Slugcats mod, which would add new playable slugcats to the game. Eventually, Videocult took these folks onto the team directly and made the expansion official. This, perhaps, explains why there is a sort of eagerness and lack of restraint to the expansion. The developers have announced intent to continue working on Rain Word, though I get the sense that this will mostly be the Downpour team and not the Videocult duo. I won’t lie that this concerns me; I don’t necessarily want to see this game endlessly expanded. I’m still waiting on the Signal project, and I want to see what else these teams are capable of putting together.

I think part of this comes from the fact that I don’t really engage with games in the way a lot of others seem to. For some people, Rain World is there forever game. I don’t want a forever game. I don’t generally seek to play a game for an indeterminately long amount of time. When I see credits on a roguelite, that’s generally when I stop playing. I am so puzzled when I see people gripe about growing tired of something after several hundred hours in a game. Even my favorite games of all time I generally do not return to ad nauseaum.

But that’s sort of why Downpour ends up making me happy. In spite of some of my concerns and gripes. A messier Rain World is still Rain World, and Rain World is good. And at the end of the day, Downpour gave me a reason to play one of my favorite games again. It gave me a reason to learn how to slay dragons. And that’s worth a hell of a lot.