This post contains minor spoilers for the game Rain World. Play it first. It’s worth it.
Rain World is a vast game, and brutally punishing. Nearly every hostile creature has the ability to instantly kill you, returning you all the way back to your last save point (often quite far) and reducing your ability to pass through gates to new regions. Furthermore, the movement is precarious and fiddly, made even less clear by the procedural animations, and the constant ticking clock of impending deadly rains makes playing with excessive caution non-viable. All of these mechanics mean that exploration, the game’s core objective and appeal, is a slow and challenging struggle. However, this means that finding new regions is always an incredible moment. The dynamic of long slow struggle followed by revelation of a whole new area with new decorations, level design principles, creatures, and often lore implications, creates a thrilling feeling that kept me coming back to the game despite the overwhelming number of setbacks I faced. There is a specific part of the game that will always stick with me, after I had been playing for quite a number of hours and thought I had found most of what the game had to offer (I had seen less than half, as it turns out). Without spoiling too much, I found a new region that was environmentally utterly distinct from all the others I had found so far, in a way that completely recontextualized the world I was exploring and my expectations about what kind of game I was playing. Rain World lives and breathes the aesthetics of discovery and challenge. Without struggling in the mud for long enough to beat a lesser game, I would have missed the life-changing experience of finally ascending beyond the clouds.
