Instinctively, I want to love this game. I want to give it a perfect rating and gush about how incredibly interesting the design of this brutal and uncompromising world is, how emergent and complex the interactions between all the creatures are, how satisfying it is to slowly master the world around you so that not only can you survive -- a real accomplishment when compared with the initial cycles of the game -- but deftly navigate wherever you want, weaving around enemies, grabbing items, filling your stomach, and understanding the world inside and out. I want to say all these things are true about the game because that's the sense that I had about the game in the first 2 or 3 of the 10 hours that I played this game before dropping it.

But ultimately, in all of those areas where the game at first feels incredibly deep and fresh and engaging, I started to realize that everything was surface-deep at best. For example, fans rave about the complex systems of interaction that occur between different creatures, but after some observation in the game, it became apparent that by "complex" they meant "emergent," and I very quickly became bored by the fact that everything functioned on incredibly simple rulesets with a large heap of randomness. Is this natural? I think so, yes, and if this game were a nature simulator, that would be a great feat. But this game is a survival platformer. This does not particularly feel satisfying or interesting to me for the purposes of a survival platformer, it feels lazy and frustrating and lacking in the intentionality and design that make the best games in both of those genres the best .

This is, in fact, a recurring theme in how I felt about this game. As a survival platformer (or generally as a game altogether) many of the design choices fail to make any sense whatsoever to me. They make all the sense in the world if this game is ambivalent about being a game altogether -- and largely I think that was the intent behind much of the game. Certainly that is the sentiment I see emerge from fan discussions that I read while trying to understand why I wasn't clicking with the game. As such, I think the creators of this game and I fundamentally just disagree on what makes a good game. And that's deeply unfortunate, because this was a game that from the first I heard about it, I wanted to love.

Revisiting the point of randomness briefly, I want to discuss difficulty. I did not ever find this game hard in the span of my time with it, although I certainly found it frustrating at times. By pure chance my gameplay style of grabbing food items, sprinting through areas as fast as I can without dying, and making a beeline for the first new shelter I discovered was a winner, and not once during that normal pattern of gameplay did I die to the rain, although I found myself backtracking to known shelters once or twice when I failed to find a new one sufficiently fast. I did, however, die a number of times to the creatures in the world. Generally I found this not to be punishment for playing the game poorly so much as sheer bad luck to stumble upon a room where it just so happened that the creatures were positioned so as to pounce upon me before I realized what had happened -- on returning to these locations, the creatures were positioned differently and that plus my newly acquired knowledge meant I functionally never died to a known enemy. I died to random chance. In many cases, this wasn't frustrating, as in the situation described above. That just happens in this game, and I did not consider it a fail state given the flowers (a legitimately cool piece of game design for a number of reasons!) which protected my cycle "streak." What was, however, frustrating was when I found myself unable to progress due to completely uncooperative rideable creatures in several areas, or when a creature parked itself right where I needed to parkour and refused to move no matter my attempts to manipulate it -- these things also just happen due to the nature of the game, but they're frankly just bad, time-wasting pieces of game design that I did not enjoy. When I made it past obstacles of this kind, it did not feel like it was due to any improvement of my own, and ultimately one particularly tedious instance of this resulted in me completely shelving the game. This game is, in my opinion, not particularly difficult if you engage with it the way it wants you to, and I want to be clear that my problems with the game are not in fact because it is "too hard" or anything of the sort, but because of cases of what I believe to just be bad game design.

Some of the things about this game's design I do find legitimately engaging. I generally love when games do not tell me anything at all and want me to figure out what they are and how they function. The little companion fly guy that follows you around somewhat undercuts this piece of design in several places, which is incredibly strange to me because it is very easy to get off the intended path and not realize it. If you follow the path, he tells you what many of the items are and how to use them and what they do. If you don't, then you're completely on your own. This feels like an incredibly half-assed system and it makes the game actively worse. Specifically, the fact that this system is present meant that the developers seemed to feel there was largely no need to make items naturally interact with the world around them (or rather, to have creatures interact with the varying items -- spears are the main exception here). But because it's so easy to inadvertently miss out on the tutorial system, you are left with no natural clues as to what to do to interact with the world around you, leaving you to simply guess and experiment. This is, at best, a passable approach to being a game that never tells you how to play it, because the best of those games guide you from just below the surface while making the player feel as if they were unassisted the whole time. And unfortunately, even this passable approach feels unintentional given the inclusion of the tutorial guy, which begs the question: Why in the world does the UI go completely unexplained? I personally found it fairly intuitive, thankfully, but from what I saw in discussions about the game, many people had no clue what the UI was supposed to indicate. That is a failing on the part of the game.

In fact, it is a truly puzzling piece of design that there are non-diegetic elements in the game at all. It seems like it wants to be an immersive environmental simulator in many ways, including forcing you to figure out how the world around you functions, how your character moves (there's a TON of hidden movement that can largely only be figured out by pure luck or, as with most players, by reading about it online), and what your objective in the game even is . In that case, any mechanical complexities such as the survival cycle should be implemented into the world itself somehow! But then on the other hand you have the weird tutorial system, which suggests that this game actually wanted you to be told how to do many of the things in it, and if you're going that far then why not clarify one of the most basic mechanics of the game? Baffling is the only word I have for this -- it feels like the development team for this game was split in half on how they should fundamentally approach what this game is and how it is told, and they ended up with a half-conceptualized amalgamation of two far better games.

It is undeniably true that Rain World is unique, that it is ambitious, and that much about it is deeply interesting as a piece of interactive media. I find it hard to ever be truly negative about this game because I so deeply want to be drawn into it in the ways that many other people are. But other games exist that are also brutal and obtuse and tell you nothing about them and challenge you to engage with deep and interlocking systems in order to understand what the game is and how to play it, and they succeed in making me love them by virtue of being incredibly carefully crafted and well-thought out pieces of game design. As much as I regret to say it, for me, Rain World fails to live up to what it wants to be.