Why Rain World Deserves its Resurgence

Way back in March of 2017 developer Videocult published Rain World in partnership with publisher Adult Swim Games. The reception was... Mixed. However, the game's cult following, along with the release of new content and a bright future seems to be leading to a late revival.

First off, what is Rain World? Rain World is a game in which you play as a slugcat, an adorable yet small, vulnerable, almost-bottom-of-the-food-chain creature in a vivid interconnected world where the environment around you is largely trying to eat you. Your job is to traverse this hostile world in order to find the family that you were separated from, while also securing enough food and appropriate shelter to survive each cycle before the titular rain pours down and takes you with it. If that sounds cruel and ever so slightly stressful to you that's because it is, but that's also the beauty of Rain World. 

The environment in this game is incredibly connected, every creature that inhabits it has its own distinct AI, whether they be predator, prey or somewhere in-between. This means that each creature has an understating of every other creature surrounding it, and will react differently based on their perceptions of and reputation with said creature. For example, an intimidating green lizard may see a you, our determined slugcat, as a tasty treat. However, if you source food for the lizard, removing its need to hunt, then it might start to see you as a friend, rather than a foe. Lizards tamed this way may even follow you and attack anything that threatens its new friend. This is just one of the ways in which the AI in Rain World can be interacted with, bonds can be made, tribes can be entered, and reputations good or bad can be shared throughout entire races. 

Watching all of these relationships interact with one another is its own marvel, and it's this deeply believable ecosystem that makes your journey through Rain World worth its frustrations. It's like living through one great nature documentary, can we be angry at a fox for snapping its jaws on a rabbit to feed its family? Though embodying the rabbit of this world makes Rain World incredibly intimidating, it also makes every triumph, every escape, every moment of strategy, quick-thinking or sheer dumb luck incredibly rewarding and memorable. 

Sounds great, right? So why have I never heard of this game, you may be asking yourself. Well, this appreciation of Rain World's environment isn't something that comes quickly, you have to really live in this world, and likely get downtrodden by it, before you start to see its magic. Rushing from area to area trying to reach the end is going to leave you with a lot more frustrations than exciting, wondrous moments. Instead, Rain World is a game of meticulous movements and understanding your environment. This is, unfortunately, antithetical to the review process, in which a reviewer may have only a short time to play a game, process their thoughts and put it to publish as soon as possible. Though this works in many cases, Rain World is a definite exception, and received extremely middling reviews after its release, with a metacritic score of an underwhelming 66. Though these reviews contained fair criticisms, the limited window reviewers had to experience the game didn't give them the opportunity to appreciate its real draws. Conversely, the player reviews for Rain World were overwhelmingly positive, with many people amazed and enthralled by its world. This is where the game's cult following started to emerge, ignoring the larger journalistic reviews and trusting those impressed player experiences.

Unfortunately, despite this ever growing player base, the game started to experience external problems due to issues with the previously mentioned publisher, Adult Swim Games. Though Rain World had received updates and additional content from the start of its release in 2017, including additional characters and rooms to explore, this quickly came to a halt and talk of further development on the game seemed to cease entirely. This was disappointing for fans, especially after a relatively exciting first year for Rain World, with several patches and updates, a port to Switch and physical PS4 release. However, past these developments the game seemed to be, to the public eye at least, effectively dead. That is until January of 2022, almost five years after the initial release, when Videocult announced that following a prolonged legal dispute with their publisher, Videocult now had full ownership of their IP under a new publisher, Akupara Games.

Thankfully, even with the prolonged radio silence on Rain World's further development, as well as shaky initial reviews, Rain World's player base had never given up on the game, building a strong community among players. Among this community several modders appeared and starting producing fan-made content for the game, which proved to be extremely popular with the game's community. Two of these mods that had become particularly cherished by the players were the Jolly Co-operation mod, and the More Slugcats mod. The former of which added a full co-op mode to the game, allowing multiple players to explore and survive together, while the latter expanded on the character options, developing new slugcats with different quirks and abilities. 

These mods became so prominent within the community that they even attracted the attention of Videocult themselves and, in partnership with new publisher Akupara Games, they bought this content in house, working with modders to create an official DLC package for the base game. This new DLC was titled Rain World: Downpour, and the announcement was met with a wave of excitement across the community and beyond, with sales of the base game and the DLC skyrocketing to numbers never seen before in the game's six year life span. The combination of Videocult's full control over their project alongside the release of a community based content expansion has not only bought Rain World into the limelight and attracted attention from new players, but directly rewarded the community that waited. The resulting praise and lasting excitement has created a new narrative for Rain World, one that is six years old and just getting started.

But enough about Rain World's history, why should you play it? And why now? Well this lasting buzz is the perfect chance to look into the game for yourself, and with the console release of the Downpour DLC rumoured for June of 2023, soon all players will be able to experience everything Rain World has to offer. 

This is a game of exploration, in every sense of the word. In a very literal sense you play through and explore a large interconnected labyrinth with various exciting and deadly regions, from the lofty Sky Islands to the dark and dingy Shaded Citadel, the world you find yourself in can feel enormous against our dear slugcat, and it has the potential to hold you in both terror and awe, oftentimes simultaneously. It's also however, an exploration of Rain World's inhabitants, the many creatures that populate the regions that you travel through. Almost everything you experience in Rain World is unique, including every interaction with its inhabitants. For example, you may be traversing through an open area searching for food when a vulture swoops down and plucks you straight off the ground, resulting in a game over. When you wake up from the last shelter you slept in and clamber back to that same point, this time there may be no vulture to be seen, or perhaps there's a new threat, or, if you're lucky enough, a friend.

This is because each screen you move through in Rain World doesn't have predetermined enemy locations, instead, many enemies have a burrow or area that they start from at the beginning of a cycle and free movement across the whole region. The creature AI is such that they may react differently to a variety of scenarios, meaning that the way in which they travel, the prey that they hunt, the areas that they rest, their level of aggression towards other creatures they pass, along with a number of other criteria, can differ wildly from cycle to cycle even if you're travelling through the exact same areas. Watching this butterfly effect play out each time you navigate Rain World's environments keeps things constantly exciting, even if sometimes the RNG of it all can really feel like it's working against you. The end result though, is a feeling that you are just one part of the picture, a working cog within a vast ecosystem that is constantly changing and reacting, just as a real one would.

Though it's not just the gameplay and environments that are complex and intriguing, but also the deeper story and lore of Rain World. Exploring the desolated environment around you, it's not uncommon to develop questions such as "who used to live here?" and "what happened to this place?". Rain World takes an approach to answering these questions through 16 coloured pearls scattered around its interconnected world. Each of them holds within a piece of the puzzle and explains a little more about the world you find yourself in, as well as how it got itself into its current state. 

The catch here is that you need to physically find these pearls and bring them to a specific place where they can be translated for you, and taking a pearl with you is no easy feat. Our slugcat can carry two items at once and store one safely in its stomach by swallowing it, meaning you can carry a maximum of three pearls at one time. However, having your hands full while you travel through regions can be difficult, as it limits you from picking up spears to defend yourself or grabbing things to eat without first putting something down. Additionally, being struck by an enemy or falling from a height with have you dropping everything you are currently holding, making it possible to lose these pearls entirely without resetting the cycle. This process is certainly not without its frustrations, and managing these items between cycles can add a further level of difficulty onto a game that is by no means easy in the first place.

However, it should be mentioned that this is all completely optional, and serves as more of a challenge to the most devoted of players, rather than an integral part of the game. In fact, the core concept here is not dissimilar to FromSoftware's love of hiding intricate lore details within item descriptions, and piecing it all together can be just as satisfying. If unravelling a deeply tangled spool of fictional history and past civilisations appeals to you, then this is for you. If not, that's fine too, the game does very little to push you into exploring its own premise, content for you to make your way through each region without ever wondering about the origin of it all.

The reason this works, and works so well, perhaps has a lot to do with a core idea of the game that programmer Joar Jakobsson mentioned during an interview with Vice just after the game's initial release in 2017, the 'rat in Manhattan'. Jakobsson relates the gameplay of Rain World to the experience of a rat living within the subway of Manhattan, saying "A rat that lives on the subway tracks has an idea of what the subway station is, in the sense that it knows that the train is dangerous, and the Cheetos on the track are tasty, and this particular little drainage pipe where it's living is a safe spot to scurry away to when the train is arriving." This outlines the core of Rain World, where each creature, including the one you play as, must learn to exist within a hyper-hostile environment. However, despite learning to survive in this place, Jakobsson goes on to outline that "It doesn't understand the political, economical, and social reasons why humans have built the subway station, it's just way beyond it".

This idea permeates throughout the entirety of Rain World in a fascinating way. Throughout the course of the game you will come across an array of interesting and brilliant structures, whether it be a floating city deep in the background or a piece of complex machinery right in front of you that you have to navigate through. Despite these structures, you likely don't have time to ponder their meanings or origin, the rain is approaching and you need to secure food and shelter before you're washed away. The embodiment of the subway rat that envelops you whilst you play through Rain World's game loop is clever, behind-the-scenes magic. By placing a direct emphasis on survival and ensuring that the player is constantly aware of the perils that face them, you start to naturally blend into the loop of the ecosystem and think like an animal. Every cycle is wake up, find food, avoid predators, take shelter, and above all survive. 

However, this definitely softens towards the middle of the game, in which you start to explore areas safe from the rain, giving more time between cycles and the opportunity to be patient and, perhaps, start to ponder. It's at this point that the game begins to introduce you to the background of its lore and the option to explore it further, but it's not going to be easy. But of course, after all what is the vast technical marvel of the subway to a hungry rat running along its rails?