We just finished Rain World last night, and damn, it surpassed every expectation and theory my wife and I had pondered over as we played and discussed our game. The ending, after the utter frustration we felt at every turn and the slow built up in exposition, is the most beautiful and fulfilling thing I've experienced in a videogame and probably in any form of art (and my wife holds a similar position). Over the second half of last year, we had put some 50 hours into it in sporadic sessions, but starting on Jan 1st we dedicated pretty much all of our free time into it, investing an additional 60 hours into it in the two weeks since, which, considering we both work, goes to show how deep it drew us into its beautiful yet punishing world. To be fair, a normal playthrough should take some 30 hours, but the cooperative gameplay adds a lot of potential for deaths (we died 600 times, quit 200 times; only 45 the 110 hours logged by Steam were counted as "alive" time), plus we went out of our way to pick up over 80% of the available unlockables before feeling satisfied enough to head out to the ending area. Those who have finished might see how well this plays with the themes of the game, and I now feel confident in saying that this is the best game I've ever played, and I seriously doubt it will be surpassed in the future.
The best part? We're not even done with it. We got the "bad ending" of the second campaign (Hunter) and though of course it does not hit quite the same chords the fact you're better at fighting off other creatures and that you must feed off them to survive makes for a completely different experience where you can see the more advanced patterns of the AI play out. And we still have some other 6 campaigns left from the base game and the DLC, so this game still has time to keep making an impression on us. Unbelievable.
I didn't talk much about it but the OST is downright amazing, other than the combat music (that in itself deserves being discussed), it plays very sparsely, but over half of it is stuff you might as well listen to if you enjoy game music:
But we still had to dose down a bit on the RW obsession so now we're doing the well known Outer Wilds together and I got to put some more time into Fear & Hunger. I can't say the game will be a great experience from start to beginning because I'm still dying over and over in the first few areas but damn it's certainly something special, itemization is crazy good so far, level design is more open with a couple bifurcations from the first moment, and the whole experience is downright brutal. If you were put off by the RPGMaker style please ignore it because if the whole game is as good as the first couple of hours you will be in for a hell of a trip.
