This is a game that feels fresh in the modern world where there's hundreds of survival games where you end up in the middle of nowhere, limited resources and need to hide at night from the zombies, animals or anything else that wants to tear you apart and feast on your organs.

Raw Danger is about a highly developed city that likes to advertise itself as being a whole new utopia with vast spaces underground so there's always room for people, however, the damn begins to break during a really terrible storm and it's Christmas too!

You go through different characters who need to use your brain to collect items and craft or take clothing to help keep you dry and warm whilst this place is flooding and the freezing cold weather out there can threaten your life with hypothermia.

As you play different characters, the different actions that you take will affect the other either directly by causing a cave in that blocks their path or more indirectly, by taking all the supplies in an area so your other characters won't find anything left.

There are multiple endings associated with the game and with certain things you may or may not have done throughout the game. It was certainly enlightening to look back at the walkthrough and realised I could've converted bin bags into makeshift coats that help when you have nothing better to help.

It was nice to come across a different kind of survival game and I would recommend giving it a look to see what you think. The ideas, I feel, should be revisited in future games imo.

Gameplay + Stream

Raw Danger is that rare gem, one of many released for the Playstation 2.

The games premise is fairly simple, over the course of it's 5 (technically 6) chapters you will play as a myriad of characters from varied backgrounds as they attempt to escape a city on the brink of destruction on flooding.

Remarkably many of your decisions will bare consequences as the story plays out, this can range from how you traverse certain environments to how you interact with various side and main characters.

The game opens with a very obtuse and frankly boring tutorial sequence which well overstays it's welcome and unfortunately turns off many new players from diving into what this game has to offer.

Chocked full of charm and tacky as they come Raw Danger stand out among it's contemporaries as a game with heart. The developers Irem bit off far more than they could with this title and it's ambitious ideas, but the end result is a game that I continue to marvel at.

If you asked me to ask honestly I would give this game a 5 out of 10, though this is a 5 I wholeheartedly adore.

The way they localized this for EU/NA is completely hilarious and without any sense, it's truly insane but it kinda does add to the appeal of it; an adventure you go through and make your own. The scripted bits are kind of annoying at times, but they're usually very easy, you just need to figure out what to do (usually just holding onto something or running)
Overall it's a game that is very unique and somewhat tragic in its stories, and the characters meeting each other in small ways is very neat and definitely not overdone like some other games with multiple characters.

One of the best examples of why the PS2 is just in another level.

The first Disaster Report was a fun proof of concept game. Adventure with natural disaster setting with a lot of set pieces and a little bit of date sim. In the sequel they just decided to make one of the best games in the generation. The basic concept still the same but everything is better and the multiple playable characters just adds more to the experience. The first chapter is your regular Disaster Report, you and your possible partner trying to survive and you deciding how to act and what you should focus. Then you get to play a murder thriller occurring while the city is drawing and right after you are just a taxi with a cute journalist investigating an corruption scandal togheter at the same time everything going down. And then you play as a girl who was left to die in the school because of bullying and the list goes on. Disaster Report is low budget but uses everything it cans to give life and interesting situations to the player there's not one single moment in the game that isn't engaging they can turn even just found itens to try to resolve a fever in something interesting.

You may don't have complex situations like you get in Disaster Report 4 that really made me think about while playing but everything is just so creative. Is the best kind of game out there, just use everything you can in video game as an art and have fun. The guys behind those games really knew what they are doing.

I very often have a difficult time choosing what game to play. As someone who loves to spelunk the treasures of old game libraries, I'm daily encountering new games I want to play and complete. I have a list of over 2000 games that I use a random number generator on once per month, to describe it as a backlog would be to misinterpret it entirely. Raw Danger has sat atop of the "games I want to play soon" list, but now I've finally gotten around to it.

Raw Danger has been a game that's been at the forefront of my mind ever since I first heard about it. Raw Danger is by all accounts, a janky, Japanese made PS2 game with a fountain of unique ideas and genuine surprises. The love put into Raw Danger is evident from it's confidence in itself. Despite being the sequel to Disaster Report, which didn't exactly set the world on fire in the west, Raw Danger's developers decided to double down on what they wanted to do with the first game, retitled it overseas and released what can only be described as an intensely different game. It has all the ingredients of what I want to play in a game. Lovingly detailed, far too ambitious and filled to the brim with more video game than one can possibly think of stuffing into a PS2 game. The geniuses at Irem devised six stories, all interesting in their own unique ways, with so many diverging paths that they are bound to be unforgettable.

Raw Danger's scenarios give the player absolute freedom. Want to snitch on a criminal? Want to take a hat from a chef dangling from a ledge? Want to leave a taxi passenger to die because she wasn't going to pay you anyway? You can do all that, and so much more. There's so much of the game I didn't see on my first playthrough, and that excites me so much for my future playthroughs.

I would love to write a lot more in detail about Raw Danger, and I plan to in the future, but I want to experience absolutely everything it has to offer. It's non-conventional gameplay systems interwoven with it's interesting scenarios allow it to stand mountains above any game ever released. It's immediately entered the pantheon of my all time favourites.

This game is an emotional rollercoaster ride, you laugh at first at the ridiculous scenario, the things you can say and do, and the outfit that you and your companion can wear, until a certain depressing scene hits you out of nowhere and it's made me teared up. (THIS STUPID JANKY GAME ABOUT VARIOUS PEOPLE IN A DISASTER MAKES ME CRY)

This game is a special game that is probably never replicated by other games. hell, even the later game in the series itself couldn't even replicate it or even improve on it and every release feels like a disappointment.

Not only that, this game changed the way I see obscure games that got mixed reviews at the time of release. I used to brush off these kinda games to play a good game and not waste my time playing these games, but after playing the first game and then this, I want more games like this and started exploring the PS2 library and beyond for more obscure games.

If you read this until this point, you might see I'm not even explaining what this game is actually about and how is the gameplay. it's on purpose because I want you to go play this game blind just like how I'm experiencing this game or play the first game "Disaster Report" ("SOS: The Final Escape" for the EU version / "Zettai Zetsumei Toshi" for the JP version) first, while it's not as good at this, you can get an overview what the game is like.

Outside of Japan both of the game is badly dubbed and have bad localization which changed the character name, appearance, and location to be more Westernized. It's funny, but if you want there's an Undub version and restored the game to be a more faithful version if you know where to search or played the JP version if you know Japanese. So yeah this game rules and you should play it once in your lifetime.

Raw Danger! is the essence of video games unfiltered.

Let me give it to you straight: this is the stupidest video game I love. Early in a scene a character will try to climb through a hole. They stop a few centimeters away from some sparking wires. The camera uncomfortably zooms in on their face. 'Ugh, no. That's electricity!' our protagonist says annoyed. It's beautiful, honest, pure schlock. There are dramatic action sequences feature objects falling on your head. They like someone behind the camera is throwing props at an actor. It's great.

One particular trend of it's era were multiple playable protagonists, and Raw Danger! is no exception to this. The overall story spans a few days, but we see the events happen through various characters. One of the most marketed features of the game also shine through here. Actions done as one character can affect the story with another. Open a door here, and someone else will be able to take that path. Help someone, and later play through the section of the person you helped. When you see your characters from past episodes they'll even be wearing the stupid outfits you put on them. If you are playing with someone else, there will be many moment where both of you point at the screen with joy and exclaim 'Oh there is that guy!'.

Geo City itself is a character. The setting is 2010 how people in the mid 00's imagined it. The foundations lay on optimism, it's painted out to be a high tech architectural marvel. You would never describe this as sci-fi though, the everyday lives of its citizens are the same as they were before. There are cute convenience stores and boring beige office buildings. Little parks with pagolas in them. Here is an atmosphere here that you could take a 5 second gif anywhere and have a viral vibe in your hands. Put this setting anywhere from the last 30 years and it would fit. Only thing dating this game is nobody having a smartphone on them.

The game features some of the most idiotic villains you will ever see. Conversely, it also features the most realistic depiction of the police I have ever seen. One character is running away from a detective who just won't go down. He keeps being swept up by horrible disaster, only to reappear later like the terminator. Can't keep a pig down.

Raw Danger! is non-violent without falling into the creepy "wholesome" forced positivity hole. Some of the choices you can make are violent. Some people you can straight up murder. But there is little focus on this, you wouldn't refer to any of these characters as killers. I think its more apt to describe Raw Danger! as an action game with non-violent protagonists.

The goal for each level is simple: get to the exit. Characters are heading somewhere. But the moment to moment flow of the game is where the solemn beauty lies. Some dramatic scenes have music. Most of the soundscape is just the ambience of the ruins around you, the wind howling, the flood flowing, the rain falling. Sometimes you just stop under some cover to assess the situation you are faced with. Sometimes someone you are escorting is freezing to death, and you have to run back and help them. Maybe you have nothing to save them with, and you just slowly walk with them, hoping the janky pathfinding has as little work to do as possible. It's tense. While the level design controls these, these really strong, emotional moments mostly emerge from the gameplay systems in place, making a serene and strange dichotomy to the overall goofiness of the cutscenes. When the game is in your hands, the human heart beats.

Serene moments come sparsely though. The system of the game keep you moving from save point to save point, as your characters are constantly losing body temperature (BT), which reduces your speed. Get wet and the BT evaporates even faster. And boy it's raining hard, you will get soaked very fast. You have to earn the moments of rest, making them feel even more special.

One thing that makes this game very easy to play is how light all the systems feel. It's a game with many verbs. Usually this is very antipathic to me, but all the systems are very light in this. A lot of them feel more like allusions to a more complex system. You have limited inventory but its just a simple number based system, and you really dont need all the things you can find. You can give items to characters, and the game just applies its effect immediately, if it's health kit they get healed, if a piece of clothing they put it on. You can craft a few things if you want. Each character has a special ability that you can ignore if you want, but has some fun interactions if you figure out where to use them. It feels like an arcade version of survival simulation roguelikes. Enough to grasp the concept, not so much to have to read a two thousand word wiki guide to really understand it.

I think a lot of people like this game ironically because of the stupid cutscenes and jerk decisions you can make. Instead, I would like to inspire anyone reading this to love this game with an honest heart. It will give back as much as you put into it.