if you're expecting an expansion of the original rain world experience, a survival game featuring dynamic ai and a world loaded with mystery -- you will be very disappointed. this expansion (or more aptly, a modpack) does not feature any new creatures outside of evolutions of other ones, or a single one in both of the iterators which is easily avoidable and not particularly notable in any way. what this expansion ~does~ do is focus on adding new lore for the game. heavy amounts of it. loaded with fanservice. big issue with this -- base rain world was very light on its lore originally, and, in a thematic sense, the lore didn't even matter to the game itself. this helped tremendously in setting the tone of the game, making you feel as though you are a powerless animal, who has no idea what's going on, in this dilapidated, alien world.

all of the campaigns feel as though they were made by completely different people who wanted totally different things out of the game. while this sounds good for mixing things up in theory, this raises another huge problem--the new lore has a tendency to contradict itself quite a bit. even with the things that are consistent, it characterizes the slugcats (which downpour itself acknowledged were just wild animals running amok) as these silly capeshit heroes, and the iterators as these hormonal teenagers having a bit of internet drama, instead of these intimidating mechanical demigods. what was once a giant supermachine becomes just another region to explore and find a task out of, and the iterators are effectively reduced to the puppets within their cans, begging these rodents to carry out their duties, which ultimately will not and will never matter in the end. hey, at least gourmand's campaign still feels like a natural survival game with a grungy dilapidated atmosphere, where yes, you CAN explore for fun and have choices in it, instead of literally all the other campaigns being another carbon-copy indie metroidvania with the same design philosophies of people who make deviantart oc fanfiction. it makes sense that most people in the rain world community are a mixture of hollow knight fans & h0rny furries. not to mention they literally added an actual boss fight to one of the campaigns.

might i add that communication was so bad amongst the team that made this, literally no one knew who was getting money and who wasn't. instead of asking the actual people who weren't paid why they were not paid once this information ~was~ found out, their first instinct was to try and cancel the publishers in the public rain world discord server for more money. then, as it turns out, some people deliberately did not want any form of compensation. either they wised up from their incident and deleted all messages of the attempted cancellation, leaving only the people who corrected this thought pattern (which, i will give them the benefit of the doubt of and believe this is the actual reason why messages were deleted,) or they were being slimy and trying to cover their tracks. after all, rain world apparently did have a more predatory publisher in the past. still -- it shows how poor communication was amongst the team that made this expansion. i guess it makes sense why the lore contradicts itself. thankfully none of it is canon anyways, but the fact that it's an official modpack with no clarification of whether or not its canon, not on steam or within the game, and no separation from the old lore in the collections menu, is definitely going to confuse some people.

at least the fez heartbreak secret is cool. could've been worse i guess