Thanks to Adult Swim Games for the review code
Title: Rain World
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 12/13/2018
Story
In this fierce metroidvania adventure, you take control of a Slugcat separated from its family and forced to hunt for survival. No matter what kind of predator you are, the slugcat has quite the battle ahead of it, all as you uncover the mysteries of the strange and bizarre world…
Presentation
Rain World looks rather distinct, being presented in a colorful, yet dreary way that I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to describe for this review without coming across like a rambling mess. You have a lot of dark looking areas in this massive world, and while they do have variety, you’ll be mostly just looking at dull backgrounds or darker areas most of the time. The good news is your slugcat and the enemies are color-coded in such a perfect way to make them visible, that while the backgrounds may be dull and gray, identifying anything of note is a non issue. Usually if you see color on something, that item is probably something you want to observe more closely.
Here on Switch, I was rather surprised by how silky smooth the game ran. Sure, the many updates have no doubt played a big part in keeping Rain World a super polished experience, but everything looked crisp, albeit with a small font size, and the game ran smooth enough unless a ton of enemies were to come on screen, something that I didn’t have happen to me outside of goofing off in the sandbox mode. No complaints about performance here, the game just looked and felt great on my Switch Lite.
The sound design was also an oddity for me, but one I got used to after some time. There are moments of little to no sound besides noises you hear in the environment, with only some brief music cues here and there during the gameplay. That reminded me of the retro Tomb Raiders in a sense, even though this game was a lot more noisy, and sound effects still pack a punch despite the lacking BGM. You’ll definitely hear the predators coming, and if you strike something with a bolt or spear you picked up, the impact sound will leave no room for doubt. Still, for the bits of actual music I did hear during menus or other parts of the game, the compositions are overall quaint, and this is a game where I think forgoing actiony music for the occasional cues and somber tunes was a smart choice.
Gameplay
Rain World is a metroidvania where the main goal is to explore the world and find your way back to your family while surviving the fierce outdoors, except that task is way, way, way easier said than done. If I may be frank, the original experience I had with Rain World when booting the game up pre-launch on Switch was immediately fumbling around, running into a group of enemies I was too slow to dodge, and then getting annihilated by predators. Cue life events a few months later shooting this into the deep end of my review queue.
Major props though for all the updates from then (2018) to now (2024), as I found the second go of Rain World to be much more enjoyable, despite the brutality. You now have multiple difficulties to choose from, along with the Rain World Remix mod to enable if you want more QOL and control over the game, though I abstained from that in favor of trying to do as close to a vanilla run with the Monk class as possible. Monk still makes you forage for food before hibernating, but not nearly as much. For a newcomer like me, it made getting the hang of this game’s weird open-ended nature and hunting mechanics a lot easier.
So once you do figure out how to control your slugcat and get used to the movement, just how do you survive in Rain World? Surely the best choice of action is to just constantly dodge predators and beeline to whatever the exit or main objective is, right? Well, while Rain World is incredibly open, it really isn’t a metroidvania that I found to have merit in just rushing head first into things. For starters, even if you’re used to the controls in the first few screens of the game, you’ll likely still get eaten or hurt by Predators.
They lurk around, are very attentive, and will target you if you even come near their path. You have no weapons or attacks by default, and the only way to stop them here is to either succeed in stealth against them so they go away, or temporarily stun them with an item you find on the ground. They will even hunt you through vents you use to move between screens, so it’s not like you can just walk off and despawn them like a retro game. No, they’re determined to hunt you down, creating an unusually fun thrill once you do manage to shake them off or breeze through a screen without alerting one!
Wandering aimlessly to avoid conflict still won’t save you from the most powerful force in this world; the rain. Eventually a flood of rain will start pouring down and if you aren’t in a shelter with proper hibernation from food by the time the rain turns into a rising flood, you’ll die no matter where you are in the world. Thus, whether you memorize an older shelter or work your way out to find a new one on the map, each journey out of the shelter is a race against time to eat food to hibernate and either find a newer shelter or work back to your old one before the rain hits. There’s no visible time limit that the player can see as far as I was able to tell, so there’s quite a bit of anxiety once you’ve spent a couple of minutes wandering around and not being able to find food, just knowing that the fatal rain could kick in at any moment and kill you. However, while dying sends you back to your last checkpoint in the shelter, you can still keep going, even if you’re on the lowest tier of the game’s Karma system.
What is Karma? Well in Rain World, it basically gates your progress in exploration. See, each successful cycle builds up your karma, and the higher it is, the more gates in the world open up for you to explore and find new areas. Lose karma, and those gates are shut off. Since the game is fairly open-ended, this means you can pretty much fumble your way around a lot of the math with careful hibernation, but with how brutal the game’s difficulty is, it’s insanely easy to wander too far down the wrong corner of the map and end up in a hellish area with too many predators and obstacles, and there’s even a good chance you might not realize it until hibernating in a space that’s far more dangerous than where you’re actually meant to go.
The fun part is finding new, safer areas or little secrets that unlock extra content for the game’s local multiplayer modes, but that karma system could be a huge frustration if it blocks you from an area you want to access. Or you could just get lost aimlessly, as I did in over two hours of play; make no mistake, Rain World is big, and one of the bigger metroidvanias I’ve played in quite some time, and I can definitely see why some compare the difficulty of exploration to that of Hollow Knight.
Still, even if the game’s map was a bit overwhelming for me, I had enough fun with the mechanics and dodging predators, and luckily the local multiplayer options allow for a more casual usage of those mechanics. You and up to four players can duke it out in a competitive multiplayer setting where you fight off predators, or goof around in the sandbox where you can spawn enemies and other various things from the game and just go wild with them, even to the point of the game’s framerate reaching single digits or outright crashing. It warns you about this, and the game is more than happy to let you get as crazy as you want with this mode, and I have to admit finding new components and arenas for this mode became my most motivating factor for exploring the main game, just to see what cool new things I could unlock. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like there’s any online component, but if you happen to have friends over, this could be a fun bit of chaos to whip out.
Conclusion
Of any metroidvania I played, Rain World by far feels to be the most hostile and brutal of them all, solely due to the focus drifting away from the usual combat and upgrade format the genre’s been known for. Yet despite that, I still got an odd satisfaction at poking around and getting more and more of the map uncovered, and making my own path forward until I saw the next shelter and found a good place to stockpile for hibernation. It also really helps to have multiple difficulties available and even an optional set of accessibility toggles to poke around with, which made going back to it now as a Monk way more approachable than my first time as a Survivor all those years ago. That doesn’t mean it manages to be easy, though.
This game has gotten a lot of updates in the period since I first got it in for coverage, and out of all the games on the SFG queue, it might just be the one that’s the most actively supported by the developers and a passionate fanbase, and I saw the appeal a lot more this time around. There’s even a pretty big expansion DLC called Downpour available to purchase that offers more difficulties, areas and toggles to play with, and while I didn’t touch that in the slightest, it just goes to show how much more fleshed out the Slugcat adventures have gotten since 2018. I did try out the local multiplayer stuff however, and found it to be a fun use of the game mechanics, especially with how chaotic Sandbox mode can be, which in turn leads to an extra bit of motivation for seeking out parts of the map to unlock more content for it.
Will I stick around to try and finish the game and unlock everything? Definitely not, as even I don’t have enough time to push my limits that hard and the game is still brutal even when you make the difficulty as gentle as possible. I barely can handle Hollow Knight, and while I appreciate this game, I consider it to be roughly the same level of approachability, maybe even a bit less. But needless to say, this game is a pretty smart diversion in the Metroidvania formula, and this Switch port is an excellent way of doing it, even if won’t be an adventure I can recommend to everyone. Still, if you want to take on fierce predators, this is a great way to do so!
I give Rain World a 6 out of 10.