Rain World

Rain World is a survival platform game made by Videocult and published by Adult Swim Games and Akupara Games. It originally released on March 2017. In the game, players control a "slugcat", an animal similar to a cat that must survive in a dangerous world with many predators that will try to eat the slugcat.

The enemies in Rain World act alone to that of the player. As a slugcat, the player must use weapons to fight predators, find food, and sleep in safe rooms before a heavy and deadly rain comes. Rain World's creators wanted to make the player feel like a rat in subway tracks that do not understand their surroundings and their purpose.

Critics gave Rain World mixed reviews. Many enjoyed its art and animation, but hated the game's difficulty, the location of its checkpoints, and weird controls. Despite this, the game garnered a large group of fans.

In January 2023, Videocult created downloadable content titled Rain World: Downpour, which added many things to the game including multiple new slugcats. Downpour was released for Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox on July 11, 2023. The expansion pack received generally positive reviews from critics.

 Gameplay 

The slugcat can use spears to fight predators in the hostile world. The player is given almost no help and can go anywhere. Animals move freely around the region too. The slugcat can jump, swim, and climb poles to find food. Afterwards, the player must find safe shelters where they can save their progress and avoid the rain. If the player does not reach a shelter before the end of the day, the rain will kill the slugcat. Also, if the slugcat does not eat enough food by the time they sleep, the game will not save, and the slugcat will be starving. The slugcat will be slower and much less capable. Starvation can be fixed mid-day by eating, but if the slugcat doesn't, it will die when it sleeps.

If they die, the slugcat returns to the last save point. The player also loses one karma (a word that refers to the result of someone's actions). Karma grows every time the slugcat sleeps, and the player can save their current karma level by eating a yellow karma flower. The player must have a specific karma level to go through karma gates, which are at the ends of every region in the game.

Predators include plants to large vultures and lizards. Most animals can kill the slugcat immediately, and some have different types, such as different colored lizards, which all have special abilities. These animals spawn from holes in set locations and can wander freely, meaning the player is sometimes faced with problems that they can't fix. All creatures in the game possess a changing behavior and exist forever, even when not in the same room as the player. Players are expected to run from enemies, but can kill them with enough spears, though fighting is mainly used as a way to scare them away. The slugcat, with something in both hands, can swap their places by pressing the grab button twice. Some food the player eats may give special effects.

The player can choose between two slugcats: Monk and Survivor. As Monk, animals are easier and the slugcat needs less food. Beating either Monk or Survivor unlocks the third character, Hunter, with a difficult campaign and more difficult creatures, as well as a 20-day time limit to finish the game. The game also has a multiplayer arena mode and a sandbox mode where players can spawn objects and creatures from the game.  The game does not help the player aside from the "overseer", who gives some help about where to go. The player also has a map to check where they are in the huge world.

 Downpour 
The Downpour expansion adds five slugcats. Each slugcat has different abilities. Spearmaster can create spears at any time, but using them on predators is the only way that it can eat. Rivulet is nearly twice as fast as Survivor with a higher jump and better movement, but has short days. Gourmand can craft and can damage creatures by falling or sliding into them, but too much movement cause them to become weak where they must stop to take a break. Artificer can double jump and create explosives, but can't swim well and is locked at the lowest karma level, forcing them to use other methods to pass karma gates. Saint has a grappling tongue that gives them large amounts of speed, but can't to use spears or eat meat. Downpour also adds three new game modes. The first is Safari mode, which lets players freely wander the world without worry and control any living creature within it. After that is Challenge mode, which provides 70 different scored challenges with preset conditions. Finally, there is Expedition, which is a semi-roguelike mode with random missions that give experience points when finished. Downpour'''s release also included the free Rain World Remix upgrade, which makes the game easier.

 Story 
The player is a slugcat, who wakes up in an abandoned, destroyed world. The story of the Monk and Survivor are similar. When a group of slugcats is separated by the rain, the Survivor falls into a pit. The Monk is the Survivor's sibling and tries to find the Survivor. Eventually, the slugcat finds Five Pebbles, a huge supercomputer called an "iterator". Five Pebbles explains that, like all animals, the slugcat is in a cycle of death and rebirth and wants it to end. He then tells them of a place where it can free itself from the cycle. The slugcat goes underground and finds a sea of "Void Fluid" where it can ascend, escaping the cycle. In Downpour, both the Survivor and the Monk can instead go to Outer Expanse, a jungle without rain, and reunite.

More of the story is found by giving pearls to another damaged iterator named Looks to the Moon. She explains that the society that once lived in this world wanted to escape the cycle and succeeded, abandoning the iterators. She and Five Pebbles are artificial intelligences created by them to find a way for all animals to ascend. Iterators must use a lot of water, which they release as rain.

One day, Five Pebbles decided to use too much water to find an answer to the problem. Because of this, Looks to the Moon, who shared water with Five Pebbles, no longer had enough to live. To save her life, Looks to the Moon sent a forced message to Five Pebbles. Pebbles then messed up his plan, which released the Rot inside of him, a cancer that can spread inside of iterators. Looks to the Moon couldn't make Five Pebbles stop him from using the water, and she ended up collapsing, leading to her death.

The Hunter's story takes place before the other slugcats. The Hunter starts with a pearl, a green "Neuron Fly", and a 20-day time limit before they die. The Hunter gives the Neuron Fly to Looks to the Moon, reviving her and restoring some of her basic functions. If the Hunter also gives the pearl, its message reveals that a third iterator, No Significant Harassment, sent the Hunter to help Moon. If the player ascends in the Void Sea before the time limit ends, a black substance is seen coming out of the Hunter. If the player doesn't ascend, the Hunter dies and grows into a red type of the Rot.

 Downpour 
In Downpour, the player can play one of five new slugcats, each with a different story. The story's will be told in the chronological order here. 

 When the Rot starts destroying Five Pebbles, he stops talking with the other iterators. Another iterator, Seven Red Suns, sends the Spearmaster to give a message to Five Pebbles, telling him to stop using so much water. However, when the Spearmaster reaches Five Pebbles, he refuses and the slugcat is kicked out. Spearmaster goes to Looks to the Moon. When given the pearl, she writes a new message and tells Spearmaster to find a communications array. At the location, the message says that Five Pebbles has made her collapse imminent. After the message, Spearmaster returns to Seven Red Suns.

 The Artificer sees the death of their children to ape-like scavengers. Once the Artificer finds Five Pebbles, Pebbles lets them enter the city on top of him, Metropolis, to kill the scavengers in it. Artificer murders the scavengers and kills their king. Without water, Looks to the Moon's collapses, leading to her death.

 Gourmand's story is after the Hunter's, where Looks to the Moon has been revived. While looking for food to bring back to their family in the Outer Expanse, Gourmand meets Five Pebbles, who sees that they do not wish to ascend. Pebbles unlocks the exit to Outer Expanse and lets Gourmand leave.

 The Rivulet's story is after the Survivor and Monk's. The Rivulet must survive through short rain cycles. When the Rivulet enters his almost destroyed structure, they take the "rarefaction cell" that powers him. Without it, Five Pebbles accepts his eventual death, and asks that the Rivulet give the cell to Looks to the Moon. After going through Moon's submerged superstructure, the Rivulet turns on the cell, causing Moon to get her basic functions back.

 The Saint's story takes place many cycles after the Rivulet's, when the rain has been replaced by snow. After swimming through the Void Sea and waking up on the surface, the Saint finds "echoes", the ghosts of ancients that have failed to ascend. After meeting enough echoes, the Saint becomes able to ascend others. If the player wants, they can go to Looks to the Moon or Five Pebbles, who has collapsed, to ascend one or both of them. The Saint tries to ascend itself, but is instead sent to the region called Rubicon, full of now-deadly void fluid. When they reach the top, they enter a room; if the player ascended either of the iterators earlier, they briefly meet with them. After leaving the room, the Saint enters the Void Sea. Wings grow off of the Saint similar to an echo, and they wake up again at the starting location.

 Development 

Before making Rain World, Joar Jakobsson worked in Sweden and learned how to animate. He had played few games and had little industry experience when development began in 2011. He began with a drawing of a long cat, which was called "slugcat" by one of his YouTube viewers. Jakobsson was interested in abandoned environments. Thinking of when he lived as an exchange student in Seoul, South Korea, a main idea was to recreate the life of "the rat in Manhattan". This rat knows how to find food, hide, and live in the subway, but does not understand the subway's purpose. Jakobsson and his development partner, James Primate, wanted players to feel like they were close to understanding environment, but not fully. Jakobsson wanted Rain World animals to be separate to the player, in which they look for food and struggle to survive, rather than be problems for the player. Enemies wander randomly, and in final playtests,the developers saw how some players had more or less fun based on how lucky they were with animal behavior.

Jakobsson served as the game's artist, designer, and programmer. At one point, Rain World included a multiplayer mode, and separate story and custom modes. The development team successfully crowdfunded some of the budget with Kickstarter in early 2014. By early 2015, about four years into development, the team had changed to the Unity game engine and released a test version of the game to its Kickstarter supporters.

 Music 
Primate, who is also known as James Therrien, wrote Rain World music, handled the indie studio's business, and designed levels. Primate first found the game on an indie game Internet forum. He wanted to make a chiptune-style soundtrack with his musician partner Lydia Esrig, but turned to field recordings for otherworldly sounds. Rain World music is lo-fi and electronic. Primate wanted the music to be similar to the game's visuals, which include industrial, science fiction, jungle, and other elements. Rain World story is partly told through its soundtrack. The early game music is based on the slugcat's feelings of fear and hunger, and changes to describe new areas. Rain World has over 3.5 hours of music across 160 tracks. When the slugcat is in danger, between eight and twelve tracks will layer at the same time to respond to the slugcat's in-game context. In December 2018, a vinyl edition of the soundtrack was released by Limited Run Games.

 Release Rain World was in the last phases of creation in early 2016. Animations from the game became popular on social media because of their "uncanny fluidity". The game was developed by Videocult, published by Adult Swim Games, and released for PlayStation 4 and Windows on March 28, 2017. Some compared Rain World to other games, including the difficulty of Super Meat Boy, the soundtrack of Fez, and the gameplay to Metroid and Oddworld.

Videocult made many major content updates, which were planned for release in 2017. Planned additions included multiplayer, 50 new rooms, and two new slugcats.  The '1.5' updated, which contained all of those features, was released on December 11, 2017. Another '1.7' update in late 2018 added two new game modes that either increase or decrease the gameplay's intensity. In 2018, Videocult and Adult Swim Games released Rain World for the Nintendo Switch on December 13, 2018. Limited Run Games released a physical edition of Rain World for the PlayStation 4 later that month.

In January 2022, Videocult announced that due to problems with Adult Swim Games, Rain World was now being published by Akupara Games after a long legal dispute. On March 28, 2022, the first DLC was announced. Named "Rain World: Downpour", it added five new slugcats with their own stories, over 1000 new rooms across ten new regions, and three new game modes. Downpour is a bigger version of the "More Slugcats" mod and was created by several community modders. It was released for PC on January 19, 2023, while it released for consoles July 11, 2023.

On March 28, 2024, the creation of a second DLC titled "Rain World: The Watcher" was announced, with a new playable slugcat. On September 19, the release date was announced to be on March 28, 2025.

 Reception 

The game, before getting cult status, had mixed reviews, according to Metacritic. Reviewers enjoyed the game's art and hated the difficulty, particularly its common deaths, annoying enemies, and hard food requirements. Eurogamer compared its survival gameplay to Tokyo Jungle.Rain World difficult gameplay frustrated reviewers, who often lost their will to play. IGN wrote that the of the game's difficult parts alone would be "tough but fair", but together, they ruin the game. Reviewers were bored by the exploration and deaths. Polygon was miserable while playing. Reviewers hated how the slugcat's weird animations and controls led to many deaths. Many said that while some players might enjoy the tough gameplay, Rain World ignored a large audience with its design choices, and that it was unfair to most people. Rock, Paper, Shotgun called the game's checkpointing among the worst in modern platformers. Rain World karma gates, which need players to have slept a lot, wasted the player's time according to GameSpot. Making players wander through an area many times, IGN argued, is bad in a game in which exploration itself is the reward. PC Gamer reviewer saw Rain World controls not "bad design", but "appropriate" because the game trying to make the player weak.

Some reviewers remembered moments where they learned the game environment's unwritten rules. Not knowing what most things do, Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviewer liked treating new encounters as puzzles. GameSpot reviewer enjoyed the game letting the player find things out on their own. Those critics considered these mysterious interactions to be among the game's best features, though far outweighed by Rain World difficulty.

During development, Rain World's animations became popular on social media, which reviewers continued to praise at release. IGN described the slugcat's animations as beautiful. They said it was among the best aesthetics in a 2D game, with each screen showing much detail. The graphics were interesting to Polygon reviewer, who also praised the limited color palette. While some compared the game's design to that of Limbo, Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviewer felt that Rain World had more in common with Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee visuals. Rain World successfully depicted "the cruel indifference of nature", according to GameSpot. Its landscape recalled the spirit of games like BioShock and Abzû, in which the reviewer was attracted to the artistic detail.

Accolades
The game was nominated for "Best Platformer" in PC Gamer''s 2017 Game of the Year Awards, and also for "Best Platformer", "Best Art Direction", and "Most Innovative" in IGN's Best of 2017 Awards.  

It was also nominated for the Statue of Liberty Award for Best World at the New York Game Awards 2018, and for "Excellence in Audio" at the Independent Games Festival Competition Awards.
Notes

 References 

Category:2017 video games
Category:Crowdfunded video games
Category:Indie video games
Category:Multiplayer and single-player video games
Category:Nintendo Switch games
Category:Platform games
Category:Post-apocalyptic video games
Category:PlayStation 4 games
Category:PlayStation 5 games
Category:Survival video games
Category:Video games about artificial intelligence
Category:Video games about cats
Category:Video games developed in the United States
Category:Windows games
Category:Video games about time loops