Rain World

Rain World is a maddening thing, because of quite how special it could have been. Beautiful environments, incredible animations and enticingly hazy mechanics are fantastic, but the sheer cruelty of how it's pieced out to the player transcends challenge and becomes an unwanted trial.

An endearingly designed creature and a captivating world in ruins cannot save this 2D platformer from its punishing gameplay.

Relentless and brutal, this post-apocalyptic pixel art survival quest is a gruelling, if often beguiling, challenge.

Few will see the more remote corners of Rain World’s relentlessly dire stretch, but those who do are unlikely to forget the experience.

With core systems opaque and unnecessarily limited, all I ever felt equipped to do in Rain World was fail.

There was a big part of me that didn't want to stop playing and maybe I'll pick it up again some day, because there is so much to love about discovering the laws of nature behind this huge, ruined ecosystem. But with each random death, each accidental roll off a cliffside, each checkpoint drought, that love turned to ash. There is so much beauty and intrigue and diversity of life in Rain World. It's a pity the game doesn't want you to see any of it.

I feel so badly for this game in a way. It seems so close to being something special and wonderful, but is just undermined at every turn by baffling design choices, poor controls, and frustration. Maybe some of these issues will be addressed in a future patch and Rain World will become the game it feels like it should have been. Someone else will have to let me know. As far as I'm concerned, my days of being a slugcat are officially behind me and I won't be looking back.

The end result is complicated: it's a game we bounced off quite a lot but one we still greatly appreciate. The game does something new with the genre and it does it well for the most part, making the game worth at the very least giving a look.

Overall, Rain World is highly recommended as a piece of art, even just to check out its gorgeous visuals. Its gameplay is unforgiving, but not to the extent where it becomes unplayable. It certainly will take some devotion and time to get good at it, but with a world this beautiful, is that such a bad thing?

Rain World is a formidable experience to fans of the survival genre, and one that you can now take with you on the go via the Nintendo Switch.