If you had a dream for an entirely original game concept, how much would you be willing to compromise your vision for more sales? If it was possible to quantify such a thing, imagine that making it more appealing to the mainstream by 5% would also increase reception and sales by 5%. Would you stick to your guns and create a completely uncompromised game, even if it meant a Metacritic score of 50? Maybe making it just a little easier or a little more direct would be enough, just so you get to the 70 range and a trickle of word-of-mouth sales. It wouldn’t be a best-seller, but if someone was interested enough to buy it, they would be likely to finish the game with a positive experience.

Rain World decided not to compromise even 1%. This game wants to make a statement about nature, and saw the tiniest bit of compromise to make it fair or predictable as antithetical to the message. For starters, you play as a lonely Slugcat, a defenseless rodent trying to locate the rest of its kind in a journey across an industrial zone overtaken by nature. While predators can snap you up in one bite and machines can crush you effortlessly, all you’re able to do is pick up stuff, throw items, climb, and eat. Your journey is a progression from water lock to water lock, hiding each night from a torrential flood of rain which also kills you instantly. To not starve in the middle of the night, you need to have at least four stocks of food, and surviving a night increases your progression meter by one. Filling this meter to a certain level is required to open the doors between the major areas, but dying means the loss of two levels. This means that to progress to a new area, you have to scour for food sources on a time limit while avoiding unpredictable instant-kill predators and any mistake means you have to repeat the process at least two more times. Once you get to a new area, there isn’t always an immediate water lock, so you have to quickly explore and avoid the new predators after spending most of your time just entering the area in the first place. While those are just the basics, it gives a taste of just how brutal the survival in this game is. I quit the game three times before pushing myself to finish it, and even then I wasn’t exactly having fun.

The reason I'm belaboring the point of just how little fun I had in this uncompromising murderscape is twofold: firstly, to let you know what you’re getting into if you do decide to buy it, which you just might when you hear that secondly, all the pain was worth it. It all paid off. The slow reveal of the game’s themes was absolutely magical. The ending was a perfect mesh of story and gameplay satisfaction, where I felt like I accomplished something and really learned something. It’s the most satisfied I’ve ever felt when completing a game in my entire life. It’s probably going to end up in my top ten games of all time. If all this sounds intriguing to you, and you think you can handle the pain, I’ll be cheering for you every step of the way. Stay dry, Slugcat.

Completamente comprometido a su idea de mundo, Rain World renuncia a cualquier tipo de progresión que incite al jugador a volver. No hay mazmorras, no hay bosses, no hay un sistema de niveles ni de construcción ni de mejora de equipamiento. No hay siquiera personajes o una historia. Sólo unas imágenes al principio que señalan al escape de este mundo como puntapié.

Por esto resulta normal leer cosas como "recién al tercer/cuarto intento con este juego pude terminarlo" o "lo dejé al poco tiempo" o "lo retomé por recomendación de tal o cual persona". Esta fue mi experiencia, efectivamente. No fueron pocas las veces que, tras una sesión de juego, terminaba en una situación peor a la que había empezado. No sólo por su sistema de "símbolos", que castiga al jugador por morir repetidamente, sino porque cada vez entendía menos cómo progresar en ese lugar y cuál era verdaderamente mi objetivo. No hay nada a lo que agarrarse, sencillamente. Sólo a la sensación de vida que desprende en el momento a momento.

Esa sensación de vida es todo en Rain World. Como tantos otros juegos que logran este efecto, contrapone constantemente un mundo muerto con criaturas vivas en él. La idea permanentemente presente del "lo que alguna vez fue" con el "cómo sacarle provecho ahora?". Sobrevivir en un mundo que no da las condiciones para la vida.

Y las criaturas presentes no están quietas esperando a que el jugador pase cerca para activarse o moviéndose en un patrón repetido. En cada ciclo muestran un comportamiento creíble. Inteligente pero errático, redefiniendo a cada instante sus objetivos pero chocándose por inercia o por el tonto manejo de sus extremidades. Como nuestro personaje, parecen estar tanto en conflicto con sus alrededores como con su propia anatomía.

Spoilers:

En el desenlace, hasta esa única premisa del juego es subvertida. La idea inicial en Rain World era sobrevivir y escapar de este lugar? El final entonces es en lo más profundo y a la vez un suicidio. Rain World propone el último acto como uno trascendental, la unión física y espiritual de cuerpo y mundo: la muerte más hermosa de la historia de los videojuegos.

Rain World is a great game, but holy cow is it frustrating. And like that's the thing, that's how good the game is; you'll want to play despite the frustration. You're a small, awkward creature. You will stumble and fall around precarious heights, horrific monsters, and more. See some generally bizzare shit. There are going to be unfair situations on account of all the scary stuff out there and how small you are. But if you persevere, if you're wily and nimble, and lucky, there's something really special beneath all the grime.

Playthroughs completed:
-The Survivor
-The Monk
-The Hunter (though only briefly)
-The Drought (almost all)

It was only relatively recently that I discovered Rain World, but I absolutely adore it. It's just so... FASCINATING. I genuinely feel that this game, more than almost any other, is a master of immersion and environmental situations. That means to say, the dynamic soundtrack, adaptive obstacles/enemies, brutal survivalism, GORGEOUS graphics, and depth of worldbuilding make it a wholly seperate gameplay experience. I'm sure I'll take some time to play it again and again.

Talk about a game that was almost the complete opposite of what I expected. For a while I have disliked the huge fetishization of retro games, as I felt like they put games in a stereotypical mold that I disliked a lot. I don't want video games to be a medium where the music associated with it has to be 8-bit tunes (which unfortunately is still the case, and chiptune-inspired albums or songs are still generally seen as being "video game inspired"). While it is true that 8-bit music has a very valuable place in video game music, this fetishization of everything retro risks obscuring more games with more modern sensibilities. Maybe not the games per se, but definitely the soundtrack. If you ask any layman to name a tune from a video game, he will most likely name the main Super Mario Bros. theme, or maybe the Legend of Zelda theme. This shows how modern video game soundtracks have unfortunately fallen in the shadow when it comes to the general population. But what does all of this have to do with Rain World, I hear you ask. Well, Rain World managed to completely shatter that expectation. I walked in expecting a retro-inspired game that would be fun for a very short time and came out at the other end having just played one of the most exciting, beautiful, unique and amazing games that I've ever played. I know that I've placed a lot of high scores for games recently, but it's probably just because I have played so many good games recently. But Rain World is definitely the best of these. I have never in my life played a game that emulates nature and the ecosystem as well as Rain World. I have never encountered something as beautiful as this game. I will admit that it was a bit rough in the start due to its extremely high difficulty, but as soon as I got into the game, I was completely hooked and never looked back since. The environments are simply incredible both to look at and to play in, as the levels are almost always extremely well designed. Some areas in particular, like Five Pebbles and Subterranean, are probably some of the coolest locations I've ever been to in a game. And it's not just the gameplay that is absolutely top notch. We are talking about a masterclass in sound design, which is so good that there is a YouTube channel dedicated to basically just uploading ambience from different locations in the game. And the soundtrack, which comes in once in a while, is always welcome, and provides a very strange but compelling mix of synthwave-styled stuff and more modern production styles. I always felt welcomed into the world every time I went back to the Shaded Citadel from Shoreline and that incredible trip-hop-ish tune started to play. So, to summarize: this is one of the best games I've ever played. Basically everything is absolutely top notch, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone. The creators deserve the money, so buy it at full prize. You might not like it at first, but the environments and sheer beauty of the entire thing will keep you coming back most likely. What a game!

Do you ever look at a mouse and wonder if the only thing that makes it's life of constant alert, threatened by hungry jaws and the cruel indifference of our planet's off-kilter axis, even remotely bearable is it's feeble brain's inability to process all the horror around it?

Do you ever last awake at night and ponder what unending torture an eternal cycle of death and rebirth would be, yet still shudder at the thought maybe death is just the ultimate end?

Well this is the indie survival platformer for you!

Rain World takes you on an unforgettable odyssey through a ruined, yet beautiful, post-apocalyptic ecosystem. Not world in the videogame sense with enemies strategically placed to impede your progress, but an ecosystem in which plant and animal life goes about it's business. Said business often includes eating you, but not always. You will struggle to outwit predators, gather food, and find shelter from the regular world ending storms all while trying to reunite with your family of fellow slugcats that you've been separated from. Except...

Except, maybe that's not all there is to this world. Maybe there's more to life than survival in the bowels of these machines that were created to do...what exactly?

And so you'll push on, gleaning what information your little brain can process, you'll pull yourself out of mere survival and begin to master this strange world eventually reaching Transcendence.

TL;DR good game, some performance issues on Switch.

The "2001: A Space Odyssey" of gaming - exactly the director's mindset, a deep and engaging story, unlike anything else in its medium, and outstandingly impressive technical aspects (for Rain World, the Enemy AI and animation go above and beyond), yet still remains controversial due to its unusual presentation.

If you wish probably to experience the most immersive survival game ever created, this is a must-play. Just know that this is an unrelenting, often confusing game that is not afraid to frustrate the player.

Or you could get this game for the amazing competitive multiplayer mode. That's pretty good too.

"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.

Nota: 4/10

Rain World é um jogo com um conceito bastante original e interessante, além de um gráfico muito bonito. Infelizmente, problemas de game design somados a uma dificuldade injusta tornaram o jogo muito frustrante e prejudicaram muito a experiência. Além disso, é um jogo que não ensina ao jogador as próprias mecânicas, nem através de um tutorial, nem através do level design, tive que recorrer ao google várias vezes para conseguir progredir.

As ideias por trás do jogo são boas, mas a execução é ruim. Acredito que esse seja o jogo mais frustrante que já joguei e isso me levou a abandoná-lo.

Outlandishly difficult, horrifically intense in the best possible way, and beautifully alive. It sets an ominous chord from the moment you slide out of a drainage pipe into the industrial wastes that hangs over your trek through the desolate, overgrown cityscape of its world. The sewers sloughing into orange dust, the mountains of garbage home to a dying ecosystem, the crypts that survive a land no longer for them. It's gorgeous and intriguing and as brutal and daunting as it can often be, it gently prods you to try again, and again, and again. I will play this game forever.

I haven't played a lot, watched someone else play for a while though. This is a game like no other I've experienced, but whether that's a good thing or not is debatable.

Rain World does a great job at conveying that you're mere prey in a dangerous, unwelcoming world full of strange, murderous creatures who are constantly looking for their next meal. There's very few things you can do to fight, and most are very ineffective, so your best bet is to avoid enemies - not an easy task. Additionally, you have to eat and seek shelter in time to survive. Movement is pretty tricky at the beginning because the character is very floppy, but it does feel more natural eventually, I found.
This game is great at making you feel powerless and is not very kind, even on easier difficulties. Definitely not a thing for everyone, but I enjoy and appreciate experimental games like this. I'd probably rate it lower otherwise to be honest.
The art direction is nice as well, great use of colors that create the right atmosphere, very minimalist UI.

There’s little I can really say about Rain World without trespassing on somebody's definition of spoilers. Having something explained to you outright is obviously less engaging than experiencing it yourself, this is one of the biggest reasons games are so loved to begin with. But one of the things that makes Rain World so difficult to review is its near-absolute commitment to this idea. This doesn't seem like a contentious thing on the surface - "show don't tell" after all. But Rain World's strict difficulty and hesitancy to explain itself makes for an environment that seems apathetic as to whether or not the player learns all of its systems. To some that may sound like a welcome challenge and to others, a frustrating chore. And while the former is a good mindset to have, at the end of the day even those partial to the idea will almost certainly find themselves at their limits when it comes to the game’s obtuseness. Very little beyond the basic controls is explicitly laid out, and while there is some guidance given in the form of a little yellow overseer, his hints amount to abstract symbols and gestures that will still require much player interpretation. But even factoring that in, the onus is on you to discover the vast majority of the games systems with no guidance whatsoever. All this is to say, Rain World is a hard game but perhaps the hardest thing about it is getting into it to begin with.
It's impossible to lay out precisely the right mindset to enter the game with, but a step in the right direction would be to relinquish as many of your expectations as possible going in. That's a difficult and impenetrably vague thing to recommend but everything I've said up to this point can only do so much to communicate the experience of playing it. I'm sure most of you reading this can't remember this far back, but try to think of the sorts of games released in the 80s and even in the 90s. Though some classics stand out, a large chunk of games from the period would be considered unacceptable, obtuse, and bizarre if released in this day and age. This is partially because of technological limitations, but people tend to overstate the degree to which that's true. Pressing the X button in 1997 isn't any different from pressing it today, after all. No, the greatest difference between the design philosophies of then vs. now is rooted in the fact that, back then, there was less of a frame of reference for how a game should work. As time goes on, developers will stumble upon certain design decisions that tend to please the average consumer more. As they do this, other developers take note and start to implement these things in other games. The more this is done, the more ingrained certain expectations become in consumers. Whether or not this is a good thing is besides the point, if you’ve been paying attention you’ve probably figured out what I’m getting at here - that Rain World isn't bound by convention in the slightest. If it weren't for the rather robust physics system and detailed creature behaviors, the game, with its fundamental design philosophy intact, could easily have been released in the 90s and blended right in with its environment. As it is, nearly every critic I've seen hate on the game looks at the surface level choices that are simply contradictory to the gene pool of conventions that the game industry has evolved into. Many games hold it to be self-evident that mechanics should be taught in isolated, tutorialized environments so that the player can safely learn them. Many games hold it to be self-evident that lethal threats should be highly telegraphed beforehand to make for a consistent and fair experience, even the first time through. Many games hold it to be self-evident that the character's movement should be intuitive and respond as players expect, and that ideally the player won’t have most of their moveset outright hidden from them. I know many of you would scoff at the audacity of implying that denying these things could result in anything but a disaster. But think to yourself - just how much of that is based on your preconceived notions of what a game should do? Obviously if the game doesn't telegraph threats in a way players will understand at a glance, this leads to confusing, frustrating deaths until the player figures it out themselves. And if a game isn't thoroughly tutorialized, you'll go for some time without knowing what to do, and a similar thing could be said for the atypical movement. To those who have played the game and would criticize these things, I ask you this: can you really imagine a better version of the Rain World that does conform to your expectations? One where there are no creatures, but instead enemies, no environments but instead levels, and no fluid traversal but instead stiff movement? Whether you can appreciate it or not, the fact remains that the lengths Rain World goes to to preserve its artistic vision is absolutely integral to the experience. Never before have I lived through a more believable and dynamic world, nor have I felt each threat and relief with the same passion that the in-game character would. Essentially, the divide between player and character is as thin as I've ever seen it, you all but become a limp, pale, slug-creature starving for food, and your mindset adapts to view the world this way. And it's all thanks to the fact that the ecosystem is clearly not made for you. All of the animals have their own agendas, and the vast majority of the time you won't be fighting them, but running past or even hiding from them. They aren’t placed as obstacles or challenges to overcome, they are your equals and have the same goal as you - survival.
But if you find it hard to enjoy, do keep in mind that you're far from alone even among the most dedicated fans. It's hard to find someone out there who didn't have difficulty coming to appreciate the game. Any of its dedicated defenders, including myself, will tell you the same thing - that it takes many long breaks and even a couple restarts before you become hooked, but once you do, there's nothing else like it. The unshackling of one's expectations is a painful process in this case, but in the end, learning how to live and breathe as a foreign creature in an alien ecosystem is so enrapturing that no amount of my rambling can truly communicate it. In life, pain is essential to know true pleasure. In a similar vein, failure is essential to learn, and eventually to know success. At the end of the day, hating Rain World is an essential step to loving Rain World.

Completing Survivor difficulty on Rain World was one of the hardest experiences I've had with a game. It's not that the game is cruel, or unkind. More that it, and the world it places you within, exhibit a deep indifference towards your survival or success. Predators are everywhere and some will for a long time feel actively unfair, so much of your long-term survival necessitates you experimenting in order to learn and understand but in doing so likely dying in the process, multiple progress-critical mechanics are never explained to you. You need to eat, you need to escape the overwhelming, consuming rainfall, and somehow you need to not let your spirit be broken in the process.

Rain World is an incredibly hard sell. So much of its obtuse construction flies in the face of more standardised "good game design". It's almost impossible not to end up deeply frustrated with the game at some point on your first playthrough as you start to feel trapped into some corner of the map, feeling at the mercy of the harsh world around you and its seeming unpredictability. I will say that the only content in the game I really consider bad is the Rain Deers in the Farm Arrays, and that outside of that basically every moment of frustration did bear considerable fruit for me in the end. Try to find the strength to continue even in those darkest of moments.

You see, for all those struggles and frustrations, all the obtuseness, the game managed to achieve some incredible moments for me. The big one is that, dramatically more so than the vast majority of games, you genuinely feel like you're playing out the role of this strange little slugcat. The desperation to find food, the awareness of the ticking clock as the rain beckons, the panic as predators chase you down and there's not time to think or process and you genuinely have to turn to instinct to figure out how to escape. At its best Rain World is so immensely immersive, the rush you feel speaking less to the feeling of wanting to do well in a videogame and more to the feeling of wanting, desperately, to survive.

It's just such a deeply emotional experience to me. All that frustration is worth it for the time where you manage to find a bunker, deep into unknown territory, mere moments before the rain sweeps you away, or the time you escape multiple predators all closing in on you at once against what feels like insurmountable odds, or finally, finally understanding your movement and the nearby enemies and the surrounding landscape well enough, alongside just the right amount of luck, to break through a pathway that has had you stuck for ages. Curling up in your newfound bunker and getting to rest easy, feel safe, if only for a moment.

There's more to the game than this too. The game ends up turning into a very profound, even spiritual, experience in ways I couldn't really see coming even though I knew others have had similar experiences with it, and in ways I'm still processing the day after finishing it and will likely continue processing for a while (update from almost a year later; this aspect of the game has burrowed into my head wholly and completely, my fascination with the game's Buddhist themes grow with time unendingly). In my playthrough both the central couple hours and the final couple hours were remarkable to me and left a huge impression. I don't want to drift into spoilery territory though, so will leave that there.

Rain World is such a very hard game to recommend, and requires a lot of effort from you to meet it on its own terms, but the experience I had with the game is something that will stick with me for a long time.