Rain World Review (spicee)
Let me preface this review with the following: I love environmental storytelling, complex AI, retro graphics, worldbuilding, and a sense of feeling incredibly small in a world that is far larger and storied than you are. This game felt like the perfect setup to a great experience.
I cannot state how quickly that sense of wonder and urge to explore turned into seething irritation and boredom.
This game undercuts the power of its own setup at every turn. Its exploration is hampered by its constant and incessant need to make the player backtrack and loop around. Its progression is kneecapped by a lack of direction that leads the player to aimlessly spiral throughout the frankly far-too-massive world looking for something, anything, to tell them where to go. And its immaculate detail and sense of scale and history goes absolutely nowhere with a main story that is borderline nonsensical.
You will die. A lot. And you will be forced to backtrack, and scavenge, and backtrack, and scavenge, in the same exact locations you have seen a billion times. Your desire to see more of the world and encounter new and interesting foes and locations will be weathered down into a rote desire to just get to the nearest checkpoint so you can be done being snapped up by the same Daddy Long Legs or Camo Lizard every attempt. Thankfully, the Karma requirement for most gates aren't too high, but the need to have a higher survival-to-death ratio to merely progress (when the entire game is built around randomly killing you) is punishment on top of punishment.
When playing through the game on Survivor for the first time (for which I eventually completed the game), I immediately went exploring and found a nifty gate in the outskirts to the Drainage System. Wow! A new area! I explored and explored, heading deeper and deeper through the Filtration System and into the Depths, where I found the Temple of the Ancients. These Guardian dudes sure were cool, until they bashed my head into the bricks, leaving me unable to progress.
It was at this point, out of pure frustration, that I googled what to do, only to realize that I had *skipped 80 percent of the intended progression*, missing both of the major NPCs I needed to meet. I had to *restart the f---ing game* to get back to the outskirts, and follow the little yellow guy with regimented strictness so I wouldn't get lost.
People often review this game saying "go in blind! experience everything for the first time without spoilers!" Respectfully, go f--- yourself. This game is already confusing enough, and my blind first-time experience led me straight into a massive dead end. For a game that is intent on minimalism, to not hold your hand in the slightest, its main progression is a nonsensical chaining-together of NPC locations and an obtuse Karma requirement that isn't explained in the slightest.
Hand-in-hand with progression obscurity is perhaps the biggest dampener on my experience with this game: the story. There isn't one. Like, at all. Which is fine, plenty of games have an abstract or nonexistent plot, emphasizing experience with the world and gameplay. However, the game assumes that your *ultimate goal* is "breaking the cycle you're stuck in". This is related to some mumbo jumbo about the precursor civilization of Rain World, blah blah blah, which guides you to the final location to achieve the ending. None of this is explained or introduced explicitly at any moment until someone directly says it to you near the end of the game. If you are going to make your game non-linear, the ultimate goal should be clear to give some sense of progression direction. Remember the *literal opening cutscene* where you are *separated from your family?* I was wondering where they went, how do I find them, are there other slugcats lost like me, among other questions, none of which are answered in place of some abstract metaphor for breaking the cycle of Samsara.
Look, I get it. People *love* this game. I'm sure I could learn to love it too, if I got really good at movement tech, learned to effortlessly butcher lizards and vultures, memorized the whole map, and learned a bunch of stuff about the lore and the characters and the timeline. However, this game is an exercise in *excellent worldbuilding and environmental storytelling* wrapped up in *the most infuriatingly boring gaming experience I've had in years* for a first-time player.
I completed the game once on Survivor, and it will be the last time I complete the game as well.