ANNOUNCEMENT: Regarding the Downpour DLC, the base game got all the same QoL improvements, so unless you specifically want to play the new slugcats' campaigns, or in co-op, buying the DLC isn't necessary.
ANOTHER ANNOUNCEMENT: Maybe combine this thread with
this?
Like many, I've had Rain World in my library for years, and like almost as many, I've never played it more than a few cycles before sticking my nose somewhere where it's not supposed to and got it bitten off. Now with the DLC, I've found enough time and persistence to delve further into the game and it's been a mixed experience, equal parts frustrating and delightful. Despite plenty of loudmouths claiming that Rain World should be experienced blind, if you're like me and haven't gotten to it in 5 years, it's probably not going to happen. I took the liberty of reading the Rain World wiki and got a rough outline of the game, the map, and the core concepts. It's made playing the game more pleasant.
Rain World seems to be something that a lot of people find very enticing in theory, only to find out that it's not really what they wanted after all. And it's not the game's fault, really. Rain World sells itself as it is: a harsh, uncompromising vision of a middle-of-the-foodchain creature in a ruined world. And it is really good at what it wants to be. Unlike most "emergent behavior" or "dynamic environment" buzzwords which mean that NPCs don't stand in street corners after dark, the challenge and enemy behavior in Rain World genuinely seems to emerge from their inherent properties and game states. This can and will lead to unfair scenarios where numerous enemies happen to congregate in the exact bottleneck you're intending to pass through, or an offscreen enemy drops down from the room above right on top of you, but mostly it seems you can get by just observing and being careful. I don't think you "gain" anything from killing your predators, they will run away after a few good hits and that's good enough. They're inedible in any case.
I'm not sure lumping Rain World with 2D metroidvanias makes that much sense, really. Sure, mechanically you're climbing, running, throwing projectiles in a blocky 2D world, but the design philosophy has much more in common with NEO Scavenger, for example.
There's also a rare undercurrent of body horror in the game. Nature is harsh, after all, and conflict between predator and prey is often a matter of life and death. If you're the prey, you don't only get killed, you get
eaten, providing calories for the monster that dragged your in-game avatar's helpless corpse to its lair. You get desensitized to it over time, but it is unsettling to see the slugcat's limp corpse helplessly dangling in the jaws of a giant lizard. The game doesn't even end there yet, you can choose to observe what the lizard does to you afterwards: it attempts to return to its nest where the coup de grace will thankfully be administered offscreen, but if it encounters other lizards (or other predators), they might try to snatch the meal (you) from its mouth. In those occasions, you might even be able to escape in the scuffle - at least when the initial bite wasn't lethal.
And that's only the lizards (of which there are loads of varieties). Other enemies include demonic centipedes that own the subterranean burrows, demonic eusocial spider swarms that gradually get over their fear of you, overwhelm you in numbers, and bite you to death. Then there are demonic aquatic leeches that and drag you down to the bottom until you drown, demonic carnivorous mimic plants that blend into the background and drag you underground if you grab them, demonic mobile cancer cells that just absorb you. All of them appear to have their own behaviors and methods of detecting their prey, and dying to any of these is horrifying.
And of course, in some occasions the script is flipped backwards. You're the hungry predator and some unfortunate butterfly or baby centipede is your next meal. Tough luck, a man's gotta eat.
It's also easy to bitch about quest compasses and autojournals and such, but Rain World shows what it really means to ditch practically all handholding in a game. Sure, you have sort of a guide with you but he doesn't speak your language, gives conflicting directions, and is subject to the same restraints as other entities in the world: when the rain starts coming, he's off sheltering somewhere safe. What's worse, his first mission that covers the first third of the game is to lead you to another odd character who can't communicate with you either.
The rain cycle is also a mixed bag. Every 10 minutes, a lethal downpour covers the land. You can only survive in specific shelters where you hibernate until the next dry season. To hibernate, you need food. To get food, you have to hunt. To hunt, you have to explore. If you explore, you expose yourself to danger. Progress in Rain World is about getting to the next shelter with a full stomach in time before the next rain hits. Or just returning to the current shelter to hibernate, there's no shame in that. Every successful hibernation gets you a karma point, every death removes one. Areas are separated by "karma gates" that open if your karma is high enough. This is intended to promote a careful playstyle, where you don't just rumble around recklessly without regard for the slugcat's life but it can be a source of frustration as well. Grinding some calories to hibernate a few karma points might be immersive in a sense but it isn't really fun. But then again, Rain World explicitly seems to disregard "fun" as a motivating factor in its design so it fits the game world.
All in all, Rain World is a remarkable feat in so many ways. The
dynamic ecosystem, the
procedural animation, the
bold design choices, the
surprisingly deep lore. As a personal preference, it's nowhere as exhilarating to play as meticulously curated platformers like Super Meat Boy or Hollow Knight. I'm not sure that I'll ever finish Rain World, but I'm delighted that this game has been made, and that it's found its audience, and that its makers stuck to their unique vision.