Rain World is a well-known platformer survival game where you play as a small creature called a “slugcat”. As this slugcat, you will fight enemies, scavenge for food, trade with the more intelligent lifeforms, and unlock new slugcats to play as. You are supposed to use your agility to outmaneuver predators, traverse difficult terrain, and to better use the grabbable objects scattered around the world. 

Sounds simple, right? 

Many game critics have given this game a negative review for how difficult the game is, and its steep learning curve. The enemies you face can easily kill the slugcat, and remain a consistent and persistent threat throughout the entire game. Some parkour sections are completely impossible to beat without the help of certain creatures, objects, or obscure skills. Despite this game’s difficulty, however, it is one of the best games I have ever seen. 

The art in this game is beautiful, as is the story. As you unlock the different slugcats featured in the Downpour expansion, you get more glimpses into the overarching story as you play in different time periods, the map changing slightly or even significantly. The attention to detail in this game is immense, as even doing one tiny thing differently at certain points can alter the dialogue of the two characters other than you. The enemies are not just mindless creatures that chase you down relentlessly until you die or kill them, but have simulated intelligence and act like real animals. Every subspecies even has their own personalities, and it varies in individuals as well. You can scare off predators with plants that make loud noises, or tame them using other dead creatures and keep them as companions.  

And even despite the intended difficulty, they make the game more accessible to those who have disabilities that make the game impossible to play. For example, those with hearing issues, like me, can enable a feature that shows the threat scale as red dots at the bottom of the screen rather than just through the threat music. On top of everything the Downpour expansion offers, the community has an active modding page, maintained and supported by the developers themselves. You can always add more content to the game if you get bored, for infinite replayability. Almost any problem you can find in the game, the community has a solution for. 

As much as I love this game, though, I do have to say that it is not for everyone. Some people simply do not find the genre interesting, or do not have hours of time to dedicate to fully learning how to do all the necessary movement tricks. The game can be time-consuming thanks to the difficulty and size of the map, so completing a single campaign can take days. The tutorial is short and does not go over all the needed skills. This game does not hold your hand, so it is not for those who wish to play casually. 

Overall, I recommend this game to everyone who would like a genuine challenge or would like to feel immersed in an incredibly detailed ecosystem. This game does an excellent job of achieving what it wanted to achieve with quality.