Rain World

Well, you're not really Batman, but it is fun.

As beautiful as brutal, but the world's ambience keeps you coming back for more. AND THERE'S now an add-on DLC for multiplayer!!

Development for Rain World started with a prototype. In the prototype, you had to survive for 120 seconds while other wildlife hunted you. The difficulty was set so that surviving those two minutes was difficult but plausible, and easy for someone who played a lot of it. They then took this prototype, and without changing any of the balancing or controls made a ~2000h narrative masterpiece, and punished the player for dying. The phrase"git gud" doesn't quite do it justice, since the whole idea of the game is to be an uncompromising ecology simulator on top of all this, which means some times you are just plain unlucky and cannot do anything to save yourself, and then you get punished for it. It is my belief that if a game takes something from you because of failure, forcing you to play longer in order to recoup losses, it is automatically garbage. Rain World does this, and so the gameplay, to me, is garbage. (I realise even people who have never played it already hate me already because that's how that works but wait) And yet, it is an absolute cinematic masterpiece. If it didn't punish you for trying to experience it, it could very well have achieved widespread recognition as the greatest piece of video game art in history. This is what makes it so difficult. The story is far and away the greatest out of any game I have ever seen, yet I will never experience it myself, and even if I did, I would not appreciate it due to that experience being mixed with "decision optimisation", exploits and exasperation. Even with mods to disable the punishments (karma), it is still far too difficult and disjointed to fully appreciate the art of its story and atmosphere. If you played it or not, either way, look for a video recounting the story. It will make you cry among other things, but it will put you in awe most of all; that someone somewhere had the creative genius to bring forth something like this. Rating: story +100/5, movement tech +3/5, gameplay design -101/5

The game feels more like survival sim than a gamey platformer. The animations of the animals and the ambient sound are great, makeing the game feel real. The backgrounds well designed, giving the game an uneasy atmosphere. The sparse hint system and unexplained mechanics (like karma system) make the game feel more realistic, but are also frustrating for new players. A look at a wiki for some objects and mechanics seems inevitable. The controls with mouse and keyboard also need some time to get used to.

worth every penny