I am extraordinarily conflicted with this game. Maybe more than I have been with any other piece of media, ever. I absolutely love the environments, enemies, the ecosystem, the visuals, the vibe, the characters, the complex enemy ai, and the absolute beauty of everything the devs have created. But it pisses me off so much. I have never really procrastinated playing a game until this one. The difficulty in figuring out what i need to do (i have no clue) and navigation of the world without dying just pisses me off so much. I have little to no direction, and I feel like I am going in circles, particularly after spending like 5 hours in one area that I don't know how I got into and do not know how to get out of. Also, the stupid Karma system... Do not even get me started. I do not want to have to systematically hibernate 4 times to be able to move onto another area. That does not enhance my experience, even in the slightest. It just wastes my time and frustrates me. I do not have a problem with how hard it is to survive in the world. I like how punishing the world is, and how hard the enemies are to survive against. I want a challenge in that regard. It helps to me feel immersed and it enhances my experience. But the nature of the layout of the world, and the fucking karma system just piss me off. I am shelving the game for right now, and will certainly come back in the future. I may come back and decide I want to keep playing on the default difficulty and just do my best to make it through despite the elements I do not like, or I may even play on the easiest difficulty so I don't have to deal with the aspects that directly degrade my experience. I want to love this game so bad, but cannot with my current experience.

I just don't know what to feel about this game. It's unique, that's for sure.

Art direction is flawless, from the environnement to the creature designs, the subtle use of light and the overall ambiance. The way this whole world lives and how it's inhabitants move and behave can honestly be quite captivating.

It's cool to be thrown into the game and having to learn everything, but after 20~h into it and having seen 99% of the map and bestiary based on the wiki, I feel like i've seen it all ? But also seeing people in steam reviews having more than 1000h in this makes me feel like I'm missing something ??
I love exploration in videogames, but here I just feel too lost, too frail, constantly. The controls are a bit janky because of the way everything moves, and you can die again and again and again at the same spot without really having the time to learn what your mistakes were because everything happens so quickly. Some instances are more frustrating than others, and I understand that it does contributes the atmosphere of the game, but ultimately you just pass from one area to the other without feeling like you really achieved anything.

This game is deep and complex, lots of hidden mechanics, it's a really impressive work in itself but it lacks strong, definite objectives and rewards for me to really enjoy playing it.
This game is both really fascinating, and at the same time I feel like it does zero effort to make me like it.

(To be honest, some of the stuff I said might just be that this is a survival game, and I guess I was expecting it to be closer to a metroidvania or something.)

this game is the closest thing to a horror game my weak little heart will ever be able to handle and i loved every second of it
perfectly captures that feeling of being small and weak in a world full of things out to get you. the spritework is some of the most beautiful i've seen in a game in a long time and the soundtrack is phenomenal. only gripe with it is how luck-dependent some segments can be, sucks when you get screwed over by a lack of spear spawns & enemies conveniently standing right in the one spot you need to pass through

One of the most impressive video games I've ever played. Even on a second playthrough, when I know the map like the back of my hand, this game never ceases to astound and enthrall me.

What really makes this game so special to me is the atmosphere. The beautiful, tragic world, the detailed ambient noise and minimal amount of music, the innovative and ludicrously intricate wildlife AI, everything contributes to this being a far more "immersive" game than any of the uber-graphical games-as-movies AAA schlock people tend to put that label on. Even the gameplay, which is probably the weakest part of the game, or at least the part with the most flaws, is so involved and intricate that it puts you, the player, physically in the world unlike any other game I've played. Even things I'd ordinarily criticize like the somewhat awkward controls, the occasionally cheap difficulty, and the extremely slow pace of things can be forgiven because they make the world feel that much more real, you really feel like a feeble little mouse creature that has a hard time climbing ladders and gets eaten by giant lizards and bugs. The processes of hunting, scrounging for food, running from predators, looking for shelter, etc. are so...real. It's so hard to explain, it's a game that really has to be experienced to truly understand what makes it so great.

This game also kills it with its approach to narrative. It has a perfect balance of leaving things up to the imagination and ever so subtly dropping little lore scraps to build one of my favorite narrative worlds since Half-Life 2. The lonely, solemn, empty world feels like a character in and of itself, and by the end it's genuinely sad to watch it slowly die and rot away. And this is all without mentioning the philosophy and messaging in the game, the themes of life and death and rebirth, the blend between Buddhist/transhumanist influences and existentialist sci-fi, etc. It's a story that invokes that same bitter-sweet sadness akin to things like Everhood, Evangelion, Mother 3, JJBA Stone Ocean, etc. This game and its narrative have been hugely inspirational to my own approach to worldbuilding and story writing for my own games, and I think it's a truly standout example of interactive storytelling.

This game is not without its flaws, as some of them even I can't excuse. While the difficulty and combat are steep obstacles that can generally be overcome to the point that they don't bother me much anymore, the grinding needed to progress from region to region can be outright tedious and frustrating at times. The game's treatment of key items is abysmal, as they can be easily lost (basically requiring you to restart the day to get them back, otherwise you lose them altogether) and often waste crucial "inventory" space. The lore is frustratingly difficult to access, as it requires egregious amounts of backtracking if you don't want to just read the wiki (like I did). Like the difficulty, the controls are weird and take getting used to but are quite fun once mastered, save for the zero-gravity sections where you often just waste time floating around until you hit a wall. The game's pacing in general can be annoyingly slow once the initial magic of the atmosphere wears off, to the point that I bound a button on my controller to the dev command to speed the game up, which makes the game a lot less boring IMO. And the Rain Deer. They are awful. Truly, truly awful.

All in all, this is not a game for everyone. People will get put off by the difficulty, the slow pace, or the confusing map, and that's ok and understandable. But as for me, personally, I believe this is one of the best indie games ever made and one of the best examples of video games as an art form. Because this is a work of art. An inspirational, beautiful, flawed work of art that I friggin' love.

After finishing it, I understand more of what people can love about this game, still is not a game I can say its fun, specially when all the movement it's up to you to discover... do yourself a favor and search the movement and tips online (fuck five pebbles btw, the worst area in any video game I've ever played.) discovering everything alone is not rewarding enough to stand the frustration.
One thing that this game does that is indisputably good is the immersion, you fight for your life like you would in real life... also the OST is good too. But that's about it. IMO this game is good but not the masterpiece that people say it.
Expect good ideas in a game extremely frustrating and full of unfair shit.

the ending is amazing and a bit scary if you have thalassophobia tho...

No greater indictment of the gaming press than the scorn for one of the most innovative games to come out since Demon's Souls. It's a game all about intrinsic reward as really most platformers are but in something like Super Metroid there is a reward in the way of powerups, the reward in Rain World is simply living to the next area and seeing what practical joke will be played on you.

I haven't seen a game that showed this much restraint since Ico. The game could've given you upgrades, a final boss, a significant crutch, a more present story, really anything your usual metroidvania would do but it didnt. The few concessions to minimalism like the map and the titles of the areas being shown never dampened the extreme immersive quality this game granted me.

Despite being quite game-y, this game probably bridges the cold reality of the world to the player in the best way possible, not simply because the game is "unfairly designed" but because it does actually feel like a real breathing ecosystem, the scavengers or lizards arent just obstacles for the player to engage in, they act like how animals would in real life, they go on living their life independent of the protagonists existence.

Very sad that in the mid 2010s indie game hype wave, this genius title comparatively got left out. I had only learned about this game in 2019 from Matthewmatosis and put it on the backburner till now.