Boredom as Design Choice
Despite a few moments of genuine magic, Rainy Season is janky and lackluster experience that may have been better suited for a short film.
Rainy Season is a game that aims to capture the cozy, somewhat boring experience or being stuck inside with nothing to do on a rainy day. You take on the role of an unnamed Japanese elementary school student who is visiting his Grandma’s house along with his mom and younger brother. The plan for the day was to go to the amusement park, but a sudden thunderstorm puts the kibosh on that so you and the rest of the family, minus your aunt who has to go to work, are stuck hanging around the house. Sounds like the perfect time to bust out The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [1991] or Super Metroid [1994] to me, but Mom is having none of that so you’re left come up with your own fun. The game aims to let the player relive those moments of their childhood where they had nothing to do and all day to do it in.
The structure here is similar to Gone Home [2013], where the player is turned loose in a 3D environment resembling a suburban home and told to go explore it. However, unlike the earlier title, there is no mystery to solve, no audio logs to unlock, and no definite endpoint apart from your mom telling you it’s time for bed. This happens after a set amount of time, so if the player wants to spend the entire duration locked in the closet they are free to do so. The game also has the decency to let you come to your own conclusions about anything you find lying around Grandma’s house rather than rushing to spoon-feed the backstory to you lest you have a moment’s uncertainty about the characters or the world they inhabit, an issue Gone Home [2013] had that severely undercut its own unique selling point.
Rainy Season’s biggest innovation is the fanciful daydreams that your character imagines while combing through the house. There’s a portal to another dimension where a gigantic cat is holding a tea party, a monster that resembles a child’s doodle hiding out in the upstairs closet, and a creepy old doll that comes to life. Best of all though is the daydream where your character imagines the garden has flooded and is now filled with a school of luminous fish. The visual is striking, but what really sets it apart is the soothing melody that begins to play in the background as the dream unfolds. The scene is so lovely that I’m even willing to overlook the numerous graphical glitches it causes where you can see the water clipping through the house’s floorboards. Much of the house is rather bland looking like it was cobble together from pre-built 3D assets and only tweaked after the fact to match the pastel coziness of the game’s art direction, but the daydreams invariably show an attention to detail and passion that is lacking elsewhere. Moreover, it is here that the game’s central theme, the magic of a child’s imagination, comes to the forefront.
Rainy Season has no save system, so you’re expected to play through the entire thing in one sitting, which makes perfect sense when a game is as short as this one. Indeed, the game lets you pick the duration you’d like, either 20, 40, or 60 minutes which is a nice consideration for those of us out there who are on a regular schedule and know exactly how much free time they are likely to have. However, if I may offer a word of advice to prospective players, don’t pick the longest duration. You may go in thinking you don’t want to feel rushed and want to take your time exploring all the game’s secrets but take it from me there is not a whole hour’s worth of content here. If you choose a 60-minute duration I can all but guarantee that eventually, you’ll either sit down in a nice corner listening to the patter of rain on the roof or use the clock to jump ahead through the day. Indeed the amount of things to do in Rainy Season gets a bit thin towards the end of a 40-minute play-through too. Indeed, unless you’re trying to crack it open an analyze every detail I wouldn’t suggest a repeat play through at all. To be fair though, it’s difficult to criticize a game about boredom for being too boring, as it seems a bit like complaining that your horror game is too scary.
Despite its short length and small scope, Rainy Season does not feel especially polished, indeed the version I played (from the humble trove) was janky as hell. It’s never a good sign where you need to use the jump button to get up a steep flight of stairs or when the mere act of opening an unlocked door constitutes a major obstacle. The latter is especially annoying as you have to use the mouse to swing the door open but more often than not it will either open a tiny crack or open wide and then immediately slam shut before your eyes. Please, to any developers of small, cozy walking simulators who may be reading this review: Just make the doors in your game open with a click of a button, I promise that this will not break the player’s immersion. Indeed, it might help with the immersion since in real life I’ve never spent a full minute opening and closing a door before I could walk through it.
Indeed, the mere act of interacting with any object in the game is a risky endeavor, as if they fall on the floor you will not be able to pick them up even from a crouched position. The only way to grab dropped items is to sit down next to them, a slow arduous process at the best of times, and if the item you’re trying to grab is oddly positioned then it could take a few attempts to reach it and more likely than not you’ll just drop the blasted thing again when you try to stand up. Moreover, this will be a continuous problem throughout your time in Rainy Season because your character will drop anything he’s holding if it bumps against the wall by accident. I guess the developer was trying to simulate the poor motor skills of a small child, but this is one instance of realism I could live without.
More serious than these minor technical issues though is how little the adults in the house respond to any misbehavior you engage in. In one play-through I decided to be as naughty a little kid as I could manage, I knocked everything off the kitchen table, leaving glasses and bottles strewn across the floor, yet the adults in the kitchen were completely oblivious to and disinterested in my tantrum. I threw my school books from the balcony like it was the last day before summer vacation and then had the sheer, unmitigated gall to go to my Mom and tell her that the homework was halfway done. There were never any consequences for these actions. Even when I climbed up on the bookshelf in plain view of my mom and grandma I couldn’t even get them to yell at me and tell me to come down. I understand that having the adults yell at you for misbehaving or send you up to your room with no supper would clash it the game’s cozy atmosphere but the fact that it is missing here quickly shatters my feelings of immersion. It makes the family feel the same as any other object in the house rather than characters in their own right that will react and respond to what you do.
Indeed, this issue raises a further question: Does anything in Rainy Season benefit meaningfully from being a video game? Obviously, this is a walking simulator, so there is no failure state and no real need for player input. Nor, is there much in the way of places for the player to explore, as the house the game takes place in is tiny and sparsely furnished. As mentioned above the environment does not react meaningfully to the player’s actions if they stray from the main path. Video games are a medium defined by their interactivity, and Rainy Season doesn’t have much in that department. All this leads me to think that Rainy Season would have been better suited to being an animated short rather than a short video game.
The positive aspects of Rainy Season, the soothing music and charming art style, would have worked just as well in a short film, while the negative aspects like the graphical glitches and frustrating doors, would have been eliminated entirely. About the only thing Rainy Season gets out of being a video game is the ability to inflict the same boredom the player character is feeling on the player. Even in the context of a game about boredom, I have trouble scoring that as a positive.
