Rain World

Rain World received early attention for the "uncanny fluidity" of its animations

The slugcat can use spears and debris to defend themselves from predators in this hostile, ruined, and obtuse 2D world.[3][4] The player is given little explicit guidance and is free to explore the world in any direction[4] by entering pipes and crawling through passages that span across over 1,600 static screens that each spawn their own creatures in set locations. These creatures can then move from freely around the region.[5][6] The slugcat can jump, swim, and climb poles to avoid enemies while foraging for sparse food, which is used to hibernate in scarce, designated safe rooms called shelters. Hibernating resets the time limit and saves the player's progress. If the player does not reach the shelter before the end of the day cycle, the rain will come, crushing the slugcat or causing them to drown in one of the many now-flooded rooms. Additionally, if the slugcat does not eat sufficient food by the end of the day, the game will not save, and the slugcat will wake up in starvation mode. In starvation mode, the slugcat is much slower, does less damage when throwing spears, and faints if they jump too much. Starvation mode can be exited mid-cycle by completely filling up the hunger bar, but if the slugcat doesn't completely fill up the hunger bar by the end of said cycle, it will starve to death when it tries to hibernate.[4]

Upon death, the slugcat returns to the last save point. The player also loses one karma, which is indicated at the bottom of the screen. Karma is gained upon successfully hibernating, and the player can shield their current karma level by eating a yellow karma flower. The flower appears in set locations around the map and is re-planted wherever the slugcat dies while under its effects. The player needs to meet a specific karma level to go through karma gates, which lie at the borders of every region in the game. [3]

Predators range from camouflaged plants to large vultures to Komodo dragon-like lizards and large aquatic creatures. Many enemies can incapacitate the slugcat in one hit, and some species have different variations, such as the different colors of lizards, which all have unique characteristics. Creatures spawn from dens in set locations and can move freely throughout the region, meaning the player is sometimes faced with problems that they can't avoid.[4] All the creatures in the game possess dynamic AI and exist in the game's world perpetually, even when not on the same screen as the player.[7] Players are expected to mainly evade the enemies[8], but they do need to experiment with spears to climb walls and knock fruit off of vines.[3] It is possible to kill predators by repeatedly hitting certain parts of them with spears, though attacking them is mainly used as a way to ward them off. However, killing creatures becomes almost a requirement in the base game's hardest campaign, Hunter, where the slugcat is a carnivore and must eat the flesh of other creatures to get meaningful amounts of food.[9] The slugcat, if holding an object in each hand, can swap their places by pressing the grab button twice.[5] It can also eat mushrooms, which grant status effects,[4] such as faster reaction times (shown in-game as time slowing down) and increasing how far the slugcat jumps.[3]

Rain World's setting is destroyed by ecological catastrophe and illustrated in pixel art. Its story is communicated through details in the environment, dreams that the slugcat can have during hibernation, and holograms from the worm-like overseer that guides the slugcat.[4] The game offers very little to guide the player aside from the overseer, who gives some hints about where to find nearby shelters and lore-related events. The player can also view a map to check their location in the vast in-game world.[10]

The player can choose between two campaigns at the start: Monk and Survivor. As Monk, creatures are less aggressive and you need less food to hibernate. Beating either Monk or Survivor unlocks the third character, Hunter, with a difficult campaign featuring more powerful and hostile creatures. Monk and Hunter were added in the 1.5 update, and Monk was created to address concerns about the game's difficulty. The 1.5 update also added a local multiplayer arena mode, and a sandbox mode where players can spawn in objects and creatures from the game.[9][11]

The Downpour expansion adds five new campaigns, which are set during different points in the timeline, and enables local multiplayer for story modes. Each campaign features a new slugcat with new abilities. Spearmaster can create spears, but throwing them at other creatures is the only way that Spearmaster can eat. Rivulet is twice as fast as survivor and jumps higher, but has shorter day cycles. Gourmand has access to a crafting system and can damage creatures by falling on them, but is quite slow. Artificer can double jump and create explosives, but can't hold her breath underwater. Saint has a grappling tongue but is unable to throw spears.[12] Downpour also adds three new game modes. The first is Safari mode, which lets players freely observe the world and control any living creature within it. After that is Challenge mode, which provides 70 scored challenges. Finally, there's Expedition, which is a semi-roguelike mode with random missions that award experience points upon completion. Downpour's release was accompanied by the free Rain World Remix upgrade, which added accessibility options, ways to customize game difficulty, and better modding support.[13]

The Monk and Survivor campaigns share a similar plot. When a group of slugcats is caught off-guard by the rain, the Survivor is flushed into a pit, becoming separated from the others. The Monk is the Survivor's younger brother and jumps after the Survivor. Regardless of which character is chosen, the slugcat wakes up alone to explore the abandoned world.

Eventually the slugcat reaches Five Pebbles, a massive, decaying, semi-biotic supercomputer, called an iterator. After climbing up Five Pebbles' leg or exterior, the slugcat falls into the chamber of Five Pebbles' puppet. Five Pebbles explains that, like all creatures, the slugcat is trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth and wants it to end. He then directs it to a place where it can free itself from the "great cycle." Following his guidance, the slugcat travels to an underground chasm and enters a sea of "Void Fluid" where it can ascend.

More information about the setting can be obtained by bringing pearls to another damaged iterator named Looks To The Moon. She explains that the ancient civilization that once inhabited the world sought to escape the eternal cycle and succeeded, collectively ascending from existence. She and Five Pebbles are AIs created by the ancients to calculate a way for every living organism to ascend. Iterators use vast quantities of water as coolant, which they then release as vapor. This vapor then falls back down in the form of the rain. The iterators functions are also the only source of heat on the surface.

One of the local iterators, Five Pebbles, eventually decides to create an organism to overwrite the self-destruction taboo, a law written into all of his cells to stop him from self-destructing. In order to run all of the parallel processors, he needs to use more water to stop himself from overheating. Because of this, Looks To The Moon, who shares a water source with Five Pebbles, no longer has enough water. In an attempt to save her life, Looks To The Moon forces Five Pebbles to stop. This results in the creation of a Terror Long Legs, a creature that can spread inside of iterators in a similar fashion to cancer. Looks To The Moon was unable to make Five Pebbles cease his increased water intake in due time, and she ends up collapsing.

The Hunter campaign chronologically takes place before the Survivor and Monk campaigns. As Hunter, the player starts with a pearl and a green Neuron Fly containing "slag reset keys." The Hunter delivers the Neuron Fly to Looks To The Moon, reviving some of her basic functions. If the Hunter gives Moon the pearl as well, its message reveals that a third iterator, No Significant Harassment, sent the Hunter to help Moon.[14][15]

Prior to creating Rain World, Joar Jakobsson was a graphic designer in Sweden who taught himself how to animate sprites. He had played few games and had little industry experience[8] when development began in 2011.[7] He began with a sketch of an elongated cat, which was named "slugcat" by one of his YouTube viewers, though the character has no official name. Jakobsson had previous interest in derelict environments, and what they reveal about the humans who previously occupied them.[8] Partly inspired by his feelings of foreignness while living as an exchange student in Seoul, South Korea, a core idea in the game's development was to recreate the life of "the rat in Manhattan". This rat understands how to find food, hide, and live in the subway, but does not understand the subway's structuring purpose or why it was built.[7] Jakobsson and his development partner, James Primate, hoped that players would similarly feel as if they were close to making sense of the game's abstraction of an industrial environment without fully understanding.[8] Jakobsson designed Rain World's enemies to live their own lives, in which they hunt for food and struggle to survive, rather than serve as obstacles for the player. Enemy placements are randomly generated, and in final playtests a week prior to release, the developers noted how some players became more or less interested in the game based on the luck of their enemy spawns.[7] The developers expected players to learn to avoid combat and play the game primarily through stealth and flight.[8]

Jakobsson served as the game's artist, designer, and programmer. His levels are made by hand in a standalone level editor. The designer brushes recurring, cloned elements, such as plants and chains, onto the map. The software combines and processes to add shadow.[8] At one point, Rain World included a multiplayer mode, and separate story and custom modes.[8] The development team successfully crowdfunded some development costs via Kickstarter in early 2014.[16] By early 2015, about four years into development, the team had switched to the Unity game engine and released a test version of the game to its Kickstarter backers.[17]

The game, before reaching cult status,[13][34] received mixed reviews on its release, according to video game review aggregator Metacritic.[28][29] Reviewers praised the game's art design and criticized the harshness of its gameplay mechanics,[4][3][32][10] particularly its unpredictable deaths, ruthless enemies, and time-consuming hibernation requirements.[32][31] Eurogamer compared its savage, survival elements to Tokyo Jungle.[5]

Rain World's punishing gameplay frustrated reviewers,[4][3][32][10] who often descended into apathy.[32][3] Considering the random enemy spawns, one-hit kills, infrequent game saves, frequent repetition, crushing rain, some inexplicable enemy movements, and sometimes clumsy controls, IGN wrote that any of the game's challenging elements taken alone would be "tough but fair", but when considered together, "the odds are stacked so high against the player that it risks toppling the entire structure of the game".[4] Reviewers were bored by the repeated navigation of rooms with random enemies after each death, which tempered their strong urge to explore.[4][10] Polygon's reviewer was miserable following the loss of her multi-hour progression. She wrote about futility as a central tenet of Rain World, and felt that she was not given the proper tools to survive.[3] Reviewers lamented, in particular, how the slugcat's jerky animations and imprecise throwing mechanics led to many unwarranted deaths.[4][3][10][33][5] Multiple reviewers concluded that while some hardcore players might enjoy the tough gameplay, Rain World excluded a large audience with its design choices,[4][10][5] as its choice of emergent enemy strategy would feel unfair to most players.[33] Rock, Paper, Shotgun called the game's checkpointing among the worst in modern platformers, and its challenge, unlike the similarly punishing Dark Souls, without purpose.[10] Rain World's karmic gates, which require players to have a positive hibernate to death ratio, were arbitrary goals "disrespectful" of the player's time, according to GameSpot.[32] Making players trudge through an area a dozen times, IGN argued, is "antithetical" in a game in which exploration itself is the reward.[4] PC Gamer's reviewer, with time, began to see Rain World's cumbersome controls less as "bad design" than as "thematically appropriate", given the game's intent to disempower the player.[33]

Some reviewers fondly recalled serendipitous in-game encounters as they learned the game environment's unwritten rules.[10][32] Not knowing how foreign figures would react, Rock, Paper, Shotgun's reviewer treated new encounters as puzzles. This experimentation led to moments of fearful scrambling across a room to avoid a new, encroaching enemy type, and discovering that other enemies that are harmless if left alone.[10] Rain World was abundant with opportunities for a player to demonstrate ingenuity and improvisation, according to GameSpot's reviewer, whose highlights included making a mouse into a dark room's lantern, using weapons as climbable objects, and luring enemies into battle to distract from the slugcat's presence.[32] Those critics considered these mysterious, perceptive interactions to be among the game's best features,[10][32] though far outweighed by Rain World's punishing game mechanics.[32]

During development, Rain World animations became popular on social media for their "uncanny fluidity",[4] which reviewers continued to praise at release.[4][31] IGN described slugcat's animations as beautiful and reactive to the angle and physics of movement, from clinging to poles to squeezing through ventilation.[4] The reviewer said it was among the best aesthetics in a 2D game, with each screen showing abundant detail and meticulous craft.[4] The graphics were more interesting than beautiful to Polygon's reviewer, who also praised the limited color palette's role in distinguishing the slugcat, prey, and enemies from the environment.[3] While some journalists compared the game's aesthetic to that of Limbo, Rock, Paper, Shotgun's reviewer felt that Rain World had more in common with Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee's aesthetic: both featured similarly dark yet attractive worlds, scary yet fascinating characters, frequent inter-enemy conflict, and frustrating or masochistic controls. Oddworld, though, had more frequent saves.[10] Rain World successfully depicted "the cruel indifference of nature", according to GameSpot. Its imaginative and compelling landscape—surreal inhabitants in a bleak, alien atmosphere—recalled the spirit of games like BioShock and Abzû, in which the reviewer was too attracted to the artistic detail to contemplate the credulity of the man-made environment.[32]

Media related to Rain World at Wikimedia Commons

• Official website