Rain World Review (Hyphesus)
Rain world is a good game, let's get that right.
Unforgiving climate with it's extremely dangerous flora&animals, impeccable sound design, unnecessarily deep mechanics, extremely well designed background systems, weird yet satisfying procedurally generated animations... Rain World is 'one of a kind' kind of product.
You play as a slugcat, which is a member of this ecosystem's food chain. As a slugcat, you can hunt(?) grab, poke, jump and do some other stuff for your survival, but you are at the bottom of this food chain; the game makes you remember that every so often.
The atmosphere is SOOOOO GOOOD, which made me buy the game as soon as i saw it. Even though most of the time there is a lack of background music, after getting used to it, you don't want to have that since that silence is also another part of the immersion here. The areas are beautiful yet spooky, the ruined world feeling in this game is totally different than what Nier:Automata has and this is a welcome surprise.
Basically you are seperated from your family and you are in search of them. The game tells you that you should eat, hibernate, and jump. After that, there is 0 handholding. And when i mean 0; i mean ZERO. Let's address some issues from my experience of Rain World.
Even though I have finished the game, I have no idea of what the story was, what the hell happened to me throughout the game nor what was the final cutscene. For those who know, I'd like to define this game as 'outer wilds but there is no text and your controls are unnecessarily complicated'. The problems for me was:
- Controls felt bad for like %80 of my run, and the remaining %20 was just 'its fine, whatever'.
- The guide thing for the player that pops up(the yellow guy) is SO inconsistent, It was almost always not on my screen whenever i was tracking the path it shows me. I'd rather have it in my UI.
- Game encourages you to experiment the systems it has, but the punishment is too severe. If im gonna experiment, I'd love to be able to save the game often but the count of hibernating points are not enough for experimenting. In the end, my experimentations got ruined most of the time because i couldn't save the game.
- There is absolutely no text for Karma system, all the stuff i saw on the saving screen didn't make any sense until i turned up wiki. At least write some name on them so that we can have a guess on what the hell that is.
- Map. The idea for map is cool; the slugcat concentrating on the surroundings and map showing up gradually. It's cool but thats it. Not useful enough, looks messy, and the layer thingy is really disturbing for me. After half of my gameplay time, I downloaded a complete map from web and checked that out since that made much more sense than what we have in the game.
Overall, besides from the lack of handholding and some problems with no QOL at all, the game is so good. The feeling of climbing that food chain ladder, hunting other predetors, figuring out systems and interacting with them in a unique way that you didn't even think that was possible, the game is a unique and fun experience. 8.5/10.