Surviving Rain World
A Review
Reading time: 8 mins.
I don’t think I like Videocult’s Rain World. I picked it up cheap during a sale, knowing nothing about it before I started playing. I dove straight into an experience of disempowerment and sudden brutal death, frustrated by the game at every turn. This isn’t unusual, reviews from the game’s release discuss misery and frustration bitterly. The game had me sighing and pinching the bridge of my nose, wondering why I kept coming back to it. The experience of playing Rain World kept me engaged, even when I was having a bad time with it, and drove me to finish the game. So how did I survive my time with Rain World?
It is the gameplay of Rain World that tests my patience. This game is uneven and jagged like a broken flint nodule, a natural roughness. When I sit down to play it I end up slicing my fingers on its sharp edges edges, battered and torn until I quit in frustration. Rain World has you play as a slugcat. Like a real-life cat you’re predator and prey, hunted by creatures larger than you through the wreckage of an industrial world. Difficulty is tied to which slugcat you play; the Survivor is the standard setting, while the Monk provides an easy mode and the Hunter gives a hard mode. The Downpour DLC added a host of extra slugcats, each giving altered gameplay, but for this essay I finished Rain World in about 22 hours as the Survivor and then played a few hours extra as the Monk and Hunter.
The basic gameplay of Rain World is straightforward. It is 2D metroidvania made of static screens the player moves between via platforming. I always found the platforming and movement controls sluggish and awkward, like being caught in glue. I sense that this is how slugcats are intended to move, and it plays into the sense of being helpless against larger predators, as escaping from a lizard feels challenging when you don’t have tight air-control. I always found myself squeezing the gamepad in a vain attempt to make the controls feel better, as though pressing jump harder would make the Survivor jump farther.
Exploration is the main object of the game, but freedom to do so is sharply limited by the rain. If the player does not make it to a Shelter before the rain begins, they are obliterated by the downpour. Every creature in Rain World flees before the onslaught, forcing the player to Shelters which act as save points. If the player dies during a cycle, then they respawn at the start of the cycle in the Shelter they last rested at. I cannot stress enough: I love the rain. It is presented as an unstoppable force that shakes the screen and smothers all other sound, a force of nature so powerful that it makes predators flee in terror rather than hunt you. The rough edge here is it made exploring new areas very stressful when time in a cycle was running out, and sometimes encouraged me to take shelter early rather than risk being caught out without anywhere to hide from the rain. For me this captures the feeling of being a small scared animal wonderfully, and I think the core issue is that I don’t enjoy this sensation.
For me the real core of Rain World is gathering knowledge. Knowledge is the railroad flare keeping back the toothed dark, vital in a hostile ecosystem. Aside from basic controls at the start of the game, you are taught via level design. I learned I could wall jump when the only path forward was a narrow vertical pipe – all that was required was a experimenting and well-timed inputs. I kinda love this design of learning mechanics naturally, while so many games would have you unlock an ability by picking up an item. Another example were the green lizards, which lived to chase and devour me in the early game. These were a big threat, but by watching them from a hiding place I realised they couldn’t climb and suddenly I had an advantage over them. Every time the player learns how to interact with the world in this way, they are building a mental survival toolbox that will keep the slugcat alive and uneaten. This is Rain World at its best, and it always felt good to experiment and find out how items or creatures work. With this comes a warning: using a wiki destroys this experience. I resorted to a wiki a handful of times, and it is such a shame I didn’t get to figure out some features by myself. To make up for this I tried to only use a wiki if I was bashing my head against a wall or could not work out how to use an item, which to the game’s credit was rare.
My main point of contention is when a death doesn’t feel like my fault. This happened to me quite frequently and is due to those jagged edges of gameplay. Rain World has a lot of interacting systems, the key being that predator placement at the start of a day seems semi-random and predators move through the levels by themselves. Frequently I would be grabbed by a predator who was waiting just beyond my field of view. If this only happened occasionally it would have felt like my fault for being careless, but I was unlucky enough for this situation to play out over and over for several lives, often while already fleeing from a predator. This felt like I was rolling dice on whether I got to live. I think this is a good model for how small animals survive day-to-day, but I didn’t enjoy experiencing it first-hand.
Another sharp edge is when I knew where to go and how to get there, but repeated deaths forced me to attempt the same area several times. Excitement or anxiety evaporated, leaving a sticky residue of tedium – I didn’t think the platforming challenges were difficult, but it felt like sometimes the Survivor would fall off a ledge without my having any control over it (often into a pit of leeches who drag you down to drown). Other times a predator would block the only route forwards so that the rains would catch me before I could make it through. This is probably a skill issue on my part, but to me it felt like muddy controls and hidden predators conspiring to ruin my fun. Linked is the sheer size of Rain World. The game is huge, but movement through it can be time consuming due to the lack of shortcuts or teleporting. I commend this design choice as it makes the world feel big and scary, but I also keenly felt their lack when my options were to push through a high-level area or return to a low level one. Again, my fault for being stubborn and refusing to backtrack, but I cut myself deeply on this sharp edge that would have been easy to round off.
All of these features of Rain World came together to give me a bad experience for several hours. Curiosity was my poisoned chalice; I decided to head down whenever the map let me, to avoid the flying vulture predators who I hadn’t worked out how to deal with. I managed to get into the end-game areas very early into my playthrough, then got trapped in the Filtration System when I slept in a Shelter. The only viable path out was a long linear run past dangerous predators. I was also dealing with mechanics, such as darkness, that are tutorialised in areas I hadn’t yet been to. My curiosity led me to explore much of the pitch-black Filtration System without a light source, and I was having a great time before I realised I was trapped down there. After crawling over the sharp edges of Rain World during my escape, I made it to the Shoreline and started having a much better experience. I think where Rain World stumbles is that it has no way to stop bone-headed players from forcing their way off of a gentler progression path into a thicket of pain, precisely because it rewards exploration and learning about the world. I got into the Filtration System as I had been following a path into the unknown, then each new area I found sparked my imagination and spurred me to keep going.
So, can Rain World be fixed? No. It’s not broken, just jagged. I think the map best explains this. It’s the Survivor’s memory of where they’ve been, so it takes a few second to load. Further away areas take longer to load, and the whole map can’t be on screen at once. This is a very nice piece of storytelling, but I find it frustrating to use for planning long routes through the map. However, changing these features of Rain World would detract from the experience the game is trying to build and could leave it as a game without a heart. If the map loaded instantly, if you could teleport between Shelters, and if the Survivor had tight air control for platforming, the magic of Rain World depart and I don’t know if anything else would condense to replace it.
The only parts of Rain World I like without reservation are the visuals and the music. These came together to soothe my annoyance with the gameplay. Rain World is set in broken industrial environments, its concrete bones cracked and overgrown with vegetation. This ethos runs throughout the game – each area was clearly once a subway, a factory, or some lived in place that has been abandoned. The player views this through static screens that they move between, which limits their view and often directs it to features of interest in the background. The player can only see a new screen when they enter it, which can make the path ahead of you feel mysterious, although I would understand if someone would prefer smooth scrolling between screens. The art style is also to my taste, with wonderfully realised pixel art for gameplay and some beautiful digital paintings at certain moments. The world game is almost always easily readable, for example clearly indicating which objects you can climb. There were only a few occasions where I thought a background detail was a climbable pipe, which is impressive for a game so large. The music is also great. Generally, Rain World goes light on music, saving it for intense moments like when the player is being chased by a hungry lizard. This is a shame, but the relative quiet of the rest of the game lets you use your ears to detect predators before they strike as well as keeping the music fresh when it is deployed.
Reviews from around Rain World’s release in 2017 use bitter language to talk about their time playing the game, and described similar frustrations to my own. Among the pain bleeding from the page I noticed that in Prescott’s PC Gamer review, despite calling the game bleak and having a miserable first few hours, they began to enjoy the game after learning to play by Rain World’s rules. I also wonder if players who didn’t enjoy Rain World, like these reviewers, have mellowed to it in the years since they played it last. I am reminded of the discourse around Pathologic, another game where suffering and disempowerment is central to the gameplay experience.
For myself, I think that the core of Rain World is solid. If I could have my time over, I would have played it through on an easier difficulty, which might have spared me some pain. In spite of everything I’ve said I may even buy the DLC – once I’ve had time to recover. There was plenty in Rain World that I didn’t touch on, like the karma mechanic or the most unexpected ending sequence I have seen in a game. Without hyperbole, I would never have guessed the ending, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere and I really enjoyed it. I still don’t think I like Rain World, but I do think people should experience it and I’m glad to have played it.
Further reading
Rain World Review, Joe Skrebels, IGN, 2017.
Rain World review, Janine Hawkins, Polygon, 2017.
Rain World Review, Shaun Prescott, PC Gamer, 2017.
Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why, Hbomberguy, YouTube, 2020.
Pathologic Classic HD Review, MandaloreGaming, YouTube, 2019.
This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0