Rain World Review (ᔑᓭ∴ᔑリ⊣)
TL:DR, cool game, very frustrating to play. I recommend it but only on sale, or for soulsborne fans looking to relax
(played far more than those hours on PS5)
Well, I finally completed the game for the first time, and frankly I recommend only buying it on sale. almost 40 dollarydoos is just too much for what i experienced.
it's a great concept and I love exploring the world, and the amount of effort put into the game is obvious too, but at the end of the day it is simply lacking a lot of things that makes it a far less enjoyable experience than it would've been otherwise.
For one thing, the controls and physics of the player character leave something to be desired. I feel like a couple of the poles are designed specifically to piss you off when you try to climb them, and a lot of times you'll enter pipes and little cracks in the environment instead of the pipes and cracks you actually want to enter. It's very frustrating to play, and apparently there's a lot of different 'secret' techniques to moving around the world that is altogether too difficult to use, better yet even discovering on your own. I googled a control guide after a while and I still can't even do the majority of the things described with any consistency.
The other biggest negative to me is that there is basically zero goal or direction given to you, leaving you to stumble around on your own until you hit one of the only NPCs in the game that actually has dialogue. That dialogue and the very small tutorial messages are the only text in the game at all, which I'm usually fine with, except there is just not enough visual hints given to learn things on your own outside of that, such as the aforementioned movement techniques.
Personally, the only time I actually enjoyed playing the game was when i was trying to complete the 'passages', minor goals you can complete during your survival which don't even reward anything except a one-time teleportation to somewhere you've slept before in the same game. I was hoping maybe completing those would unlock more characters or gameplay challenges or anything else, but no. Even still, I enjoyed trying to complete them more than actually progressing the game.
I would've liked to try out playing with other cats, but there are only 2 types of characters with their own playstyles in the base game, and it seems like one of those is specifically a speedrunner-designed hard mode. The normal game was already frustrating enough, I don't even want to bother trying to complete something thats self-described as harder, even if it plays differently.
I would've also enjoyed learning more about the world, specifically about the different plant species seen in the background and more about the environment, but that knowledge is simply nonexistent. I could only find gameplay information and lore interpreted from the dialogue. The lack of an art book is a seriously big missed opportunity imo, its a shame too because i'm honestly really drawn into the world, there's just nothing concrete about it other then whats hinted at in-game. (Apparently the DLC is even considered an 'alternate universe' in terms of lore, which is completely baffling)
I don't think I'll bother playing the game again until the DLC on console goes on sale. it's just too repetitive and annoying for me to bother otherwise.
Actually, it does have workshop support on steam, so maybe I'll try out modding the hell out of it until its unrecognisable. I don't think I could handle playing the exact same game again. (I don't think you can play the DLC characters until you beat the base game, which i still haven't done on steam yet, how exciting)