Rain World is a survival fantasy platformer video game released in 2017. It was created by the developer team VideoCult, and published by Akupara Games and Adult Swim Games. It has a 4.5/5 star rating on Steam with over 27 thousand reviews, and about 600 thousand purchases across all platforms. It costs $24.99. It is a well loved indie game and I could not recommend it more. With the new Watcher DLC coming out on March 28th of next year, I felt it was topical to review the original game.
The lore and environmental storytelling are incredible and make the play want to keep exploring the world and piecing together the story of what happened to the world. In Rain World, everything is trapped in a cycle. Nothing can truly die, from the smallest bugs to the largest intelligent creatures, everything respawns at the beginning of the cycle upon their death. It’s a super cool way to incorporate a key game mechanic, respawning, into the lore of the world, making it canonical.
The lore is incredible, and so is the gameplay. The mechanics of the game and the controls are intuitive and easy to understand but also versatile enough to support multiple play styles. The controls slightly change between each campaign, or Slugcat, the little creature you play as. Different Slugcats have different environments they play in and different stories all revolving around the same area and same theme and story of ascension from the mortal world, and escaping from the cycle. From the frail, weak, Monk, to the carnivorous Hunter, there is a wide diversity, even in just the base game.
There are 3 base game slugcats, Monk, Survivor, and Hunter, all with different abilities and stories. Survivor and Monk are siblings. Survivor fell into a hole while his family was walking over a gap. Monk followed after him to find his brother. They are both pretty much the same campaign, with Monk being the easy mode version. They venture through the world, gaining Karma and finding iterators (gigantic sentient semi-biological computers), on a mission to ascend. If you finish the Gourmand campaign, which is a part of the Downpour DLC, Survivor and Monk are able to return to their home and find each other again. I love this campaign. It is the most basic one, but there is a beauty in simplicity. While it is the basic campaign, it doesn’t mean it’s boring or simple. It is still an incredible story with awesome creatures and environments.
Hunter is the next hardest campaign, in which you are tasked with bringing a neuron to Looks To The Moon, an Iterator, to revive her. It is a much harder campaign than Survivor and Monk, with harder enemies, more aggressive opponents, and a harder spawn area. I love that it shows how Moon was revived and came back to life after her collapse before Survivor and Monk get there. Rather than telling you how she came back, you are shown it, and you have to do it yourself. Hunter is only able to survive 20 cycles before she dies of a rapid disease. She must make her way to Moon before the 20 cycles are up, or she fails. It ups the difficulty fairly significantly, but I think it’s a cool way to do a vanilla version of a hard mode.
The base game is incredible and well loved, but that’s not all there is to the game. There is also the Downpour DLC, which added 6 more slugcats, Gourmand, Rivulet, Spearmaster, Artificer, and Saint, but that adds so much content that it deserves its own review. Over all, this game is incredible, and is well worth the $24.99 price. It is available on Switch, PC, and PS4. It is a beautiful game with incredible graphics and gameplay, with intriguing lore and storytelling. If you get nothing else from this review, hear this. Play this game. It is the best game I have personally ever played, and I play a lot of games.
