Rain World Reviews
Relentless and brutal, this post-apocalyptic pixel art survival quest is a gruelling, if often beguiling, challenge.
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.
Few will see the more remote corners of Rain World’s relentlessly dire stretch, but those who do are unlikely to forget the experience.
An endearingly designed creature and a captivating world in ruins cannot save this 2D platformer from its punishing gameplay.
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.
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?
Sadly, despite its pretty aesthetic, Rain World is a confusing and sluggish platformer that failed to give me any reason for what I was doing and just left me feeling bored and bewildered.
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.
One of the best-looking 2D games ever made, but the beautiful animation can’t compensate for the tediously unfair gameplay.
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.
The bountiful promise of Rain World's grim world and the assortment of cunning creatures which inhabit it are summarily undone by fiddly controls and an overwhelmingly punishing level of difficulty. Underneath it all there's an assuredly decent effort here; it's just a shame that all but the most masochistically inclined will ever summon the requisite determination to plumb its intimidating depths.
The monsters are vibrant and suffused with poisoned grace
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.
Rain World finds a lovely little home on the Switch.
Rain World will probably establish a cult following, which is great because it deserves a fan base for its thoughtful ideas. Unfortunately, too many factors get in the way of what very well could've been one of 2017's most interesting indies.
There are definitely some cool ideas in Rain World, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is far too unsatisfying to wholeheartedly recommend.
Rain World is not an easy game and that can only be good. The experience puts emphasis on the difficulty level and thanks to its very well designed game world, Rain World is set to quickly grab the player's attention and become a very cherished game, despite its difficulty sometimes reaching rather frustrating levels.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Rain World is a charming and beautiful game held back by its overly punishing gameplay. Imprecise controls and cheap deaths contribute in making this survival platformer way more frustrating than it needs to be.
A gem of a platformer featuring an adorable Slugcat. Rain World is both brutal and challenging.