The remains of a once bustling industrial civilization lay rotting in the sun, choked and overgrown with alien flora. Torrential, bone-crushing rains pound through the land day by day, rendering it nearly impossible for anything to survive. And yet, there are creatures here, ones just as strange as the environment they inhabit, thriving, despite the deadly ecosystem.
Now, enter you: the humble slugcat. Small, weasel-like, flexible; armed with nothing but the sticks and debris you find on the ground to protect yourself from this hostile new world. As you explore, and hunt, and die, you’ll slowly start to learn its rules, and maybe even uncover its secrets.
Rain World is an indie survival-platformer game developed by Videocult, a videogame studio based in Boston, MA. Although it was initially released in 2017, the game is far from abandoned. Since then, Videocult has released two giant expansions, or DLCs, to Rain World: the Downpour DLC in 2023, and the very recent Watcher DLC, which was released on March 28th of this year. In Rain World, you control a ferret-like animal called the slugcat, who was separated from its family in a flash flood. The goal you are left with is to find them again, and to simply survive.
The main mechanic of Rain World is, unsurprisingly, its rain. At the beginning of the game, you are given a certain amount of time to progress before the ecosystem’s deadly rains arrive and kill you. The only way to evade them is to find and hibernate in dens scattered around the map. In order to hibernate and save the game, slugcat must have eaten enough food to fill up its hibernation meter, or else the game would not be saved. After hibernation, you are free to explore before the rain returns once again and the cycle repeats.
Additionally, Rain World’s ecosystem is populated with a plethora of fauna and flora that will aid or hinder you on your journey. Hostile lizards ranging in many colors, mimic plants that lie in wait to ambush you, giant vultures descending from the skies, tribes of monkey-like creatures to befriend or antagonize, and plenty more. Procedural animation and advanced AI carries these creatures around the world, creating smooth and uniquely realistic behaviors rarely seen in other games. All these aspects of Rain World come to create an incredibly in depth and immersive environment for you to explore. For instance, lizards are normally hostile towards slugcat, but if you give them enough food or save them, they will soon become passive towards you, even following you around and protecting you from danger.
(Yoyo Zhou)
Yet, like a real ecosystem, Rain World is far from fair— its advanced creature AI and randomization after every hibernation cycle makes it so that sometimes, you’ll find yourself in situations where it is almost impossible to survive. Creatures are not coded to give you a way out, rooms may not generate enough spears and rocks for you to escape predators, and the game never tells you where to go outside of the yellow tutorial creature that occasionally points you to the next region. And on top of that, there’s always the looming threat of the ticking clock, counting down the seconds toward the next deadly storm.
If it wasn’t obvious enough, Rain World is difficult. You will die countless times, you will get lost, you will be frustrated, you will want to take breaks. Even with nearly 100 hours in the game, I still sometimes feel like I barely know what I’m doing. Yet, I will always recommend it to anyone who is willing to try.
Every time you die, it’s a learning experience— the more hours you spend, the more you understand the world, and the less you find yourself succumbing to it. Death, failure, and unfairness is as intertwined in the game as its cyclical rainstorms, in both the story, and in the gameplay. Finally getting past a difficult room or finding a new area is more rewarding after you’ve failed countless times to get there. This satisfaction is further rewarded by Rain World’s stunning pixel art environments— exploration would not be the same if not for its visuals.
Rain World aims to put you in the shoes of an average animal just trying to survive and make sense of an unforgiving world; a world that simply doesn’t care about you. You are just another cog in nature’s machine, and the game captures this feeling wonderfully. Rain World definitely isn’t for everyone. But, if its difficulty doesn’t intimidate you, I highly recommend checking it out— it is an unforgettable experience.
