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.
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.
Hattori
2 years ago