As much a work of love as it is one of complete insanity. The most incredible thing about these games is that they exist. If I told you about it, you wouldn't believe it. If I showed it to you, you still wouldn't believe it. If I explained it to you, you'd think I was crazy.

And then you play through it.

Norse epics, mid-seventies pseudohistory and four thousand year old Sumerian myths reimagined as increasingly elaborate puzzles. Deadly traps and mysterious riddles that aren't pulling your leg or punishing you arbitrarily, you just didn't pay enough attention, because you have grown used to not having to pay attention, it's just a video game, right? But it's not just a video game. It is a trial. A test of your worth. The penitent man will pass. The penitent man will pass. The penitent man will pass.

It exists. Somehow, it exists. These are the greatest games ever made. There is nothing else like it.

A collection of ascended user made mods of wildly varying quality, but generally tending towards being good-to-great, despite how gimmicky every single new slugcat is. Considering Rain World's.... peculiar fanbase, it could have been so much worse, even if some of it still plays and reads like bad fanfiction (mostly the spearmaster campaign).

edit: very belatedly docking a star over the insufferable sense of entitlement a substantial part of the community has developed around it; I have to agree with other reviewers who correctly argued from the start for it being detrimental to the main game, or at the very least to how it is perceived.

A supreme single player experience that eventually devolved into a completely bastardized online shitshow. Act rushing, Baal running, item duping, "forum gold", trade scamming - it's these things make up the core of the absolutely soulless collective memory of D2, fossilized into place by people who got hopelessly addicted to a game that exhausted itself ages ago, increasingly trying to find ways to not actually play the game and instead just optimize their dopamine hits through whatever means necessary. No wonder nobody has managed to quite get it right again - in one way or another, almost every ARPG has been trying to copy the parts that went horribly wrong.

If you're playing through it for the first time today, or at least for the first time in some 20 years, tho? Still unmatched.


"Sisters... there was no other way."

The most disappointing game I have ever played. Bad performance, cheesy combat, inane story, and the protagonist looking like a submissive sex doll for absolutely no reason except to bring in thirsty teenagers is just the absolute lowest, creepiest marketing ploy I can possibly imagine. This is the kind of stuff those people who make blanket statements about how video games are stupid and degenerate point at when they want to dismiss the medium as a whole, and I hate it for making me agree with them even if just once.

"Oh, but it is so deep and complex". Yeah, if you're a horny teenager who never managed to stop fapping for long enough to read a book or watch a movie. "You're just being a sex-hating puritan!" No, Bayonetta is awesome, you can sexualize your characters as much as you want if you do it right. Bayonetta is also about a billion times more fun than this garbage. Go play Bayonetta instead.

Do people who complain about "lack of directions" have a right to breathable air? And how does such a staggering concentration of stupidity not cause their brain to collapse into itself? The universe is truly full of mysteries.

Anyway. I could complain about how the disconnect between the grand scale of the story and the toy model scale of the solar system and its planets never stops being a bit jarring, constantly reminding you that you're "just" playing a game; or about how you can only really play it once, since completion almost necessarily implies solving all of its mysteries; but these aren't really issues, these are necessities of its design, every detail in the game being so meticulously crafted, everything being at the same time so completely open-ended yet with each new path being discovered at a pace so smooth that it's only after you've finished it that you can fully appreciate the effort that went into setting up how the game reveals itself. Will inevitably be lumped into some generic, grossly inadequate "puzzle" category because of how it requires mental effort over reflexes or dexterity, but there aren't any real puzzles in it - there are problems to be solved. How do I reach that place? How do I get past this obstacle? The answers aren't in some arbitrary minigame that creates a bridge from point A to point B for you to walk through, point B was always available from the start and you just needed the correct pieces of knowledge to figure that out - and as you make progress you start to notice just how far from each other these points can be, and yet how within reach they are, and that's the beauty of it. The universe is truly full of mysteries.