Rain World PS5 Port Review
Contributed by DJMMT
You’re probably asking yourself why am I reviewing an indie survival game from 2017? The answer is pretty simple. They only just ported the game to PS5 and the publisher, Akupara Games, provided me a review key for the port. So let me start by saying that the game runs great, as far as performance is concerned, on PS5. I didn’t encounter any errors, lag, stuttering, or any other performance issues. If you’re already sold on Rain World and just wanted to make sure that the game runs properly on PS5 before spending the $25 (+ $15 for the new Downpour DLC), then read no further. You can definitely buy the PS5 version of the game worry free. If you aren’t already familiar with Rain World, then read further for my review.
I have never played Rain World before being provided this key. I have seen it mentioned a number of times since its release, and a friend of mine constantly sings its praises. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to do this review was so that I could finally tell him I played it, so he would stop badgering me about it. Essentially, I went into the game completely new. I hadn’t really researched it and didn’t know entirely what to expect, and that is how I prefer to review games. So while this game has been around for a while, I’m not really aware of how the game was received overall, save for my friend’s opinions of it.
The graphics in Rain World are very nice, from an artistic standpoint. They’re 2D, which is not a problem, and work very well for the style the game is going for. The creepy, awkward looking monsters over a post-apocalyptic backdrop of dilapidated cities, both below and above ground, work really well to set the tone of an animal focused survival game. This is not a horror game. There are no zombies or overly stylized settings to push forward that idea. You’re playing as an animal in a world of other animals. What I like about the graphics is that they really support the animal concept. One of your biggest obstacles as a player is not other animals but the landscape itself; and, I believe, this is by design.
So much of this game is about finding a way forward. Searching out paths to move on to the next area, without getting lost, lest you end up unable to find shelter when the rain comes. More on the rain when we get to the gameplay section of the review. This is a game about the little things. Noticing a pole to climb on, or a hole to crawl through. Finding weapons scattered about the ground. I can’t tell you how many times I got stuck in an area just because I was unable to see a path forward, even if I was standing right next to it. It’s impressive how much is hidden within such simple graphics. That does get annoying though. As you’re constantly fighting time, not being able to move forward because you can’t see something to climb on, in, or through can be really off-putting.
I love the designs for the creatures in this game. They’re odd, but they work very well. Some of them are almost astonishing. For instance, I was killed by a creature that could camouflage itself as a climbing pole. As irritating as it was to die, I was super impressed by this creature, because I had no idea that it was alive. I walked up to it, tried to climb it, and got eaten without warning. The design worked beautifully. It was like one of those videos where the giant fish pops out of the sand and swallows a smaller fish whole.
The movement graphics are good too. Your creature is an odd-looking rodentlike mammal, called a slugcat. It kind of slinks around, but can climb, stand upright, crawl, and jump. Changing the direction of your movement is when you really notice the animation quality of the creature. It bends and stretches like a real animal. Each creature has its own type of movement that make sense based on its body and species type. I really appreciate the level of detail that went into the creatures.
Rain World is very minimalist in its UI design. The menus are just a few transparent rectangles or circles with white text. When you pause, you can see the controls, which aren’t customizable, and two options. You can’t change anything mid-game. But there is an options menu at the title screen. During play, the HUD is just a few white circles and a line in the bottom left corner. Occasionally, simple white text pops up in the bottom left corner to give you the smallest bits of direction. More on that later.
When it comes to writing, or storytelling to be precise, the graphics do literally all the work. There is no dialog in Rain World, that I’ve seen, and the text is only to give you directions about the gameplay. The story unfolds visually, usually with beautifully drawn still images. The game opens with a sequence of them that tells the sad story of how your character came to be alone in a cruel unforgiving world of rain and predators. As you play through the game, you get more still images between hibernation cycles. There are also these trippy rapid fire image sequences shown to you by a guide creature, that I haven’t really gotten a narrative explanation for, as of yet. When it comes to a game about simple animals trying to survive, I think this game’s less is more approach to storytelling works. I care enough about my slugcat to want to help him find his way back to his family, and that’s really all you need as far as motivation and plot for a game of this scope and style. That is to say, while this is a game with a story, it’s not a game where you prioritize the story as your reason for playing it. That’s true for a lot of games in this genre, usually to my dismay. However, it works here given who/what this character is. The motivation of just trying to survive and find other members of your species is enough for a small mammal that can’t talk.
Like with the writing, this game takes a very minimalist approach with sound. However, this approach doesn’t work to the game’s advantage in this department. Personally, I think it could do with a little more effort in the audio department. The opening sequence of several still images doesn’t have any sound. No effects and no music. The images are powerful, but the experience could have been so much more with some somber background music. There’s just the smallest amount of music that occurs occasionally while playing. Usually, it’s when you go into hibernation. Otherwise, you only get sound effects. And even the effects present while playing are limited. Some of the other creatures make sounds, but not all of them. What’s funny is that the options menu shows sliders for effects and music, and the defaults are set to almost max, but that’s functionally irrelevant when the game is so devoid of sound. In my opinion, the lack of sound effects are a bigger detriment than the lack of music. Nature is noisy. If you’ve ever walked through a forest or jungle, which I have, you know that there’s a lot of noise. Bugs buzzing, birds cawing, wind howling through trees. There’s lots of sounds. And animals are cognizant of many of those sounds. That’s missing from this game. Though I will acknowledge that the game is set in an abandoned industrial zone rather than a forest or jungle.
I have to be honest and say that the gameplay was the most off-putting part of Rain World for me. I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn’t find enjoyment in it. Full disclosure, I don’t enjoy most survival games. There are some that have grabbed me over the years, but the bulk of them prioritize struggle over enjoyment in the design. And that’s how this game feels for me as well. I’m not struggling to survive. I’m struggling just to play the game a large amount of the time. This is a platformer, but the jumping sucks. I get it. You’re a tiny rodent-like thing with a slinky body. But this is still a video game. And plenty of rodents can actually jump really well. So the fact that I’ve died so many times just from missing small gaps is frankly unacceptable. I’ve been playing platformers since Super Mario Bros. (1983). I love platformers. It’s one of my favorite genres. Falling happens. But it happens way too often in this game because the jumping isn’t good.
You have two types of jumps. Your regular jump is single button press and responds fine, but it’s way too limited. Then you have an advanced jump, and it’s super troublesome to use. You have to lay down on your stomach, hold the jump button for several seconds, and then release the jump button without aiming your jump with the joystick. This means that you can only large jump forward. I don’t know how anyone thought this was a good mechanic for a platformer. Just make one jump with a single button press; and make it the largest possible jump. Or add a double jump if you want to make things slightly more dynamic. You can shout “skill issue” all day, and that might be a valid argument for why I keep dying. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a bad jump mechanic. It doesn’t line up with literally 40 years of established platforming design expectations.
Overall, the gameplay isn’t super complicated. You can jump, climb, grab things, throw things, and eat things. Everything is very responsive. There is some built-in lag with certain things, in order to make things more challenging. For instance, eating has a delay. It definitely doesn’t make the gameplay more fun, but it’s not a detriment to the experience. It’s an intentional design choice that I can understand. However, it’s another example of making things more challenging for the sake of them being more challenging, not more enjoyable. The climbing and grabbing work fine. Very responsive and easy to use. Throwing, I guess it works, but you definitely wish you could aim your throws manually in a number of scenarios. For example, you can throw spears into walls to make climbing bars. This is a really cool mechanic. It allows the player to create their own paths forward. The problem is that you can only throw in the direction you’re facing, and the throw is always straight. Meaning that if you need to place a spear somewhere not directly in front of you, then you either can’t do it or have to try to do it while jumping/falling, and usually end up missing. And you can’t take spears out of walls after you’ve thrown them. So if you did miss, and there’s no other spears around, you’re shit out of luck. You have to backtrack and try to find another spear. Or some other way forward.
This is a hardline survival game. Meaning that pretty much everything you’re not able to eat is trying to kill you. What I like a lot about the gameplay is that the creatures, specifically the predators (meaning anything that can kill you), are a combination of dynamic and seemingly realistic. This is not Dark Souls. Enemies do not keep respawning in the same places and doing the same things over and over again. Just about everything is random. One cycle a giant vulture can attack you while you’re trying to avoid getting eating by two lizards competing for a meal. The next cycle that same area can be completely empty. I really like this system, because, at least in theory, there are no hard walls concerning difficulty of the predators. Just because you died to something in one cycle doesn’t guarantee that it will be what ultimately kills you in the next one. You might not even encounter it.
The other thing about the creatures I like is that they behave like animals rather than enemies. What this means is that they see you as food when they’re hungry. But they’re not constantly hungry. It’s very common to see a predator taking a nap. Sometimes they’re fighting with other predators. Just because you see a predator doesn’t mean you’re automatically in danger. You can also interact with predators in multiple ways. You can jump on them and run away. You can throw weapons at them. I was really unhappy with how weapons work in this game though. When it comes to killing prey, they’re great. You can take out your food pretty much instantly with a spear. But a lot of your food doesn’t even require you to use weapons to get it. You can literally jump into the air and grab two of your main sources of food, no weapons required. The real value of weapons should be that you can use them against predators. But they do very little against a majority of predators. I have speared so many predators, and I haven’t managed to kill a single one. Lizards, vultures, camouflaged plant monsters; none of them seem to die when I throw spears at them. Some of them I’ve even managed to hit with multiple spears in the same encounter, and they still won’t die. Hitting them with spears definitely stuns predators, making it possible for you to escape from their pursuit. But they don’t ever seem to die. Sorry, but that’s not realistic. If you hit certain types of animals in the face with a sharpened piece of metal or wood at high enough velocity, they are going to die. That is a fact. So my inability to kill predators in a reasonable amount of hits to the face with a spear really irritated me. Why even waste the time trying to land a hit if it’s not going to do any lasting damage? At least cripple the predators if I hit them.
Basically, your overall goal in Rain World is to survive cycles. Cycles are periods between rains. When a cycle starts, you are hungry. You can store energy by eating food. Eating one food adds one energy to your energy pool. In the monk difficulty, you need three energy to hibernate and can carry a maximum of five energy at a time. Unused energy carries over to the next cycle. So if you collect five energy and then hibernate, you will start the next cycle with two energy. Meaning you will need to find a minimum of one energy to hibernate in the next cycle, but can find up to two extra energy to carry over to the next cycle. In the survivor difficulty, the second of three available when you start the game, the system works the same but the numbers increase to four and seven respectively. The hunter difficulty is locked when you first start the game, so I can’t say what those numbers are, because I never managed to unlock it.
Cycles are timed. You have a limited amount of time to get enough food to hibernate. Once you have enough food, you must find shelter before the cycle ends. The cycle ends when the rain comes, thus the game’s title. If you don’t make it back to shelter with enough food in time, you die. If you make it back to shelter before the rain comes but don’t have enough food, you can still hibernate, but your progress will not be saved. Though there were many things about this game I didn’t like, it has one of the best save/respawn systems I’ve ever seen in a survival game. The game automatically saves at the end of every successful cycle. When you die, you always respawn at the last saved cycle you reached. While you can still lose a lot of progress forward when you die, the ability to respawn at the same start point as your last cycle is super convenient.
The game doesn’t do a good job of explaining it, but there is some sort of progression system. I believe it’s called karma, but this is not actually expressed in the game. Not that I saw anyway. At the start of each cycle, you have a symbol. This tends to change between cycles, but I couldn’t figure out exactly how it works. To me, it didn’t seem random, but online I saw multiple people say that it’s random. I don’t fully understand why it matters, but I did encounter locked areas in the game that were tied to these symbols. However, I couldn’t consistently figure out how to open these areas, even when I had the correct symbol. This system really angered me. There is nothing worse in a game than moving forward and getting stuck behind a wall that you have no control over opening. I encountered these locks more than once. Sometimes they opened for me, and sometimes they didn’t. I still cannot tell you why or how these locks worked, as the game didn’t provide a clear explanation on the subject.
I defined the goal of the game as moving forward. Trying to reach hibernation shelters farther and farther away from the starting point. I believe there’s a bit more to it than that, but I couldn’t accomplish any other goals the game may or may not have pointed me towards. The guide creature isn’t nearly as helpful as I’d like it to be. It kept implying that it was leading me to find another creature, but I couldn’t find it. There was always something that prevented me from moving forward in that direction. Ultimately, I gave up on that goal and just went in whatever direction I could actually manage to move forward in. That very well made have caused me not to make progress as quickly, because I was going in a harder direction that I wasn’t ready for, but that’s a game design problem. If the game isn’t going to tell me what to do. And it’s not going to tell me how to get where I need to go. Then I can’t be blamed for going the wrong way. Communication is a major problem in Rain World. The tutorial text gives the bare minimum about what you’re actually supposed to be doing and just leaves you to fend for yourself. Better communication with the player would improve the experience considerably for me.
Like with most survival games, there is a ton of replay value in Rain World; but it’s mostly due to dying over and over again. There are multiple difficulties, if you want to play them. There is also DLC and special mods that allow you to alter things about the game. Plus there’s a multiplayer mode, which was interesting but not actually the part of the game I cared about. When it comes to single player mode, I wanted to like it, but I just couldn’t connect with the gameplay. It never stopped feeling like I was fighting the game rather than the predators and starvation. I couldn’t truly enjoy what Rain World had to offer, because I was too busy not enjoying the core gameplay.
I’m sure that I’ll get flak for this, but I want to play the studio version of this game. The general ideas are there, but Rain World lacks things that a larger team production would have had. More in the way of QoL features, less troublesome jumping mechanics, and clearer goals for the player from the start. Notice that I did not mention graphics. My issue with this game is not that it’s indie. It’s that it defies modern game design conventions in a number of ways that I just don’t see as making the game more enjoyable. And I believe that many of those decisions wouldn’t have been made in a studio setting. Ultimately, I don’t think Rain World is badly made so much as I think it wasn’t made with player enjoyment and accessibility as major priorities. I am glad to have finally tried it, but I just did not enjoy playing it. I give it a 6.5/10.
