Raindrops keep killing me stone dead.
Rain World is astonishingly good-looking and absurdly cruel, a 2D action-platformer that thrills almost as often as it makes you throw down the controller in despair. Almost. Guiding a character only referred to by the developers as a “Slugcat”, your travels across an obtuse, ruined world combine elements of stealth, survival, and even hints of shoot-‘em-up to great effect - but the structure of the game itself works against its sometimes brilliant moment-to-moment play.
During development, the game became a consistent source of Twitter gif fodder for its almost uncannily fluid character animations, achieved through a mixture of pixel art and procedural generation. In playing, Rain World has lost none of that charm. It’s the first thing you notice, in fact – Slugcat clings onto poles, shimmies through cramped ventilation and pounces across gaps not only beautifully, but reactively, taking into account the angle you began at and adjusting accordingly. Enemies follow suit, with everything from carnivorous, camouflaged plantlife to enormous, gas-spurting vultures acting and reacting with spectacular, horrible grace.
The backdrop of a world ruined by ecological catastrophe wrestles for your attention, too. Flooded subterranean chambers shimmer with reflected ripples, overgrown architecture is dappled with shifting shadows of clouds and enemies hovering out of sight. Each single-screen area looks meticulously crafted, dotted with almost unnecessary levels of detail to make them feel not just like video game levels, but a truly abandoned place. It is, without doubt, one of the best-looking 2D games I’ve ever played.
Rain World’s basic gameplay rhythm is one of survival and reconnaissance – using Slugcat’s jumping prowess and whatever weaponised debris you can find, discover a safe room (as thinly spread and desperately welcome as Dark Souls’ bonfires), scout out enough food to hibernate safely, return to the safe room to reset the day cycle and save your map, then begin it all again. There’s no stated goal beyond this – a practically wordless storyline suggests that you’re guiding your Slugcat back to its family home, but what direction you head in across its sprawling map is up to you.
It’s refreshingly hands-off. The game’s enemies – many of whom can kill in a single hit – have patterns of behaviour (even sub-species have different abilities – pink Komodo-like lizards can climb when green ones cannot, for example) to be learned and exploited. Certain plants grant different effects when eaten, while others seemingly only offer a gross little bonus animation that lets you vomit them back up at any time. Story’s told almost entirely through environmental detail, single images during hibernation or flashing holograms projected by a strange worm companion that seems to be observing you throughout. It’s the kind of game that lends itself to excited conversation and wiki deep-dives, and the urge to explore is strong. At first.
Progression into new regions and ecosystems is dependent on you hibernating several times without dying. However, with food sources somewhat randomised (areas packed with prey nests might be simply empty on one cycle of play), the process of just collecting it can become a chore. Couple that with random enemy placement – meaning learning how to progress through trial and error is out of the question – and it becomes a grind. Add to that the fact that a new save point might be several rooms into a brand new area, and that dying there will not only take you back to before you unlocked it but force you to eat and hibernate again before even entering the new area again. Well, then it becomes something else entirely – boring.
Oh, and I haven’t mentioned that if you spend too long without hibernating, it will begin raining so hard that simply stepping in a downpour crushes you to death, and the entire world will eventually flood. Any one of these systems by itself would be tough but fair, but in combination the odds are stacked so high against the player that it risks toppling the entire structure of the game.
I have no doubt that a few will enjoy the cruelty of Rain World’s systems (I can feel the “git gud”s coming even now) but, in a game that makes exploration its true reward, to be forced to trudge through the same areas a dozen times or more is antithetical at best. There’s definitely bravery in turning pure player skill into the means of progression, but the cost is simply too high when it goes wrong – not least when player skill is sometimes not the problem.
Enemies are presented as persistent beings, stalking across multiple areas by using the same entrances and shortcuts as you – except when they teleport across the room through no discernable means. Worse, even the game’s best elements can take their toll. Those procedural animations can become imprecise in action – while being chased by an enemy, I have more than once accidentally climbed into a useless hole – turning myself into a potted treat for a beast – instead of climbing through the escape tube placed directly next to it, simply because of the angle I approached at.
The Verdict
Rain World is a maddening thing, because of quite how special it could have been. Beautiful environments, incredible animations and enticingly hazy mechanics are fantastic, but the sheer cruelty of how it’s pieced out to the player transcends challenge and becomes an unwanted trial.
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