Rain World is one of my favourite games of all time. The story, in-depth enemy AI, the ecosystem and the advanced movement system are all stellar. The one caveat however, is that almost nothing about this game is explained to you.

Rain World is a highly complex game, where you play as a slugcat trying to survive in the desolate Rain World. This game simulates a complex ecosystem, where predators and prey will go about doing their own thing even if you're not in the room. The only things you're told when you enter Rain World are your basic actions, how to eat and sleep, and how to perform a long jump. That marks the end of the tutorial, and it's definitely not enough to help you survive.

The point of this game is to figure out, through trial and error, how the game actually works. You'll have to study each new creature you encounter to figure out what it exactly is, and what it does. Same with objects and structures and anything in this game, everything has a purpose and it's all on you to figure it out.

Obviously, this does not make a great new-player experience. The ritual pretty much everyone who's played this game has gone through is playing the game for a couple hours, giving up frustrated with the game because it's too hard and you have almost 0 direction, then picking it back up months later only to actually start to piece together how Rain World works to find a truly amazing game.

If you want a game that's super difficult, unfair and unforgiving with no help from the game itself whatsoever, this is the game for you. If you think you'd like figuring out mechanics so obscure it seems as if the game itself doesn't want you to discover them, give this game a shot. Just keep in mind that the first 3-5 hours of this game are hell. You won't make progress. You'll die over and over to the most basic enemies. But if you persevere, and make an effort to trying to figure out Rain World, you'll have an excellent time, I guarantee you.

If you can, also pick up the Downpour DLC while you're at it. You'll get 5 new slugcats to play as, each with their own abilities, campaign, and story. All of them are fantastic and play very different from base survivor, which is nice.

I would recommend Rain World and especially its expansion to anyone that likes platformers and post-apocalyptic vibes. However, the base game with the default settings has some major issues, resulting in the time you spend being angry & frustrated, questioning why you haven't un-installed the game already, being longer than the time you are excited & impressed, which is never good. To avoid these issues, do the following:

Install the “SBCameraScroll” mod from the Steam workshop. By default, the camera is not centred on your character, and instead jumps abruptly when you reach the current edge of the screen. If there is an enemy right past said edge, you won't be able to see them in time to react to their attack (and your character always dies in one hit). I can not emphasise enough how annoying it is to die this way, and this mods fixes the problem by adding a smoothly scrolling camera. As a bonus, it also creates a parallax effect in some areas, making them look even more impressive.

Also install the “No Expedition Permadeath” mod, if you wish the play the expeditions game-mode (which is lots of fun). There is a lot of RNG in the game, which often leads to your death, especially for new players. If you can immediately continue playing from the last checkpoint, such RNG is a source of laughs, but if you instead lose 30 minutes / an hour / three hours of progress this way, you might never play the game again. Do yourself a favour and get rid of permadeath with this mod. For the same reason, if you wish to play the Hunter’s campaign (boring – play the DLC campaigns, expeditions, or challenges instead), you should set “Hunter Cycles” in the Remix tab to some high value, like 999.

Many improvements can be unlocked through the in-game Remix tab, which allows players a lot of customisation. Feel free to experiment with it, but the two settings I always enable are “Visual breath meter” (so you actually understand when you are drowning) and “Pull spears from walls” (aiming is challenging – this way you will get another chance to throw your spear by being able to recover it).

Lastly, read an online movement guide (all should be spoiler-free), as the game is awful at explaining even the basic movement controls. For example, when your character somehow enters a tunnel ass-first (which slows you down by a lot), you can press the jump key plus an arrow key to reorient yourself in the right direction.

I hope this review hasn’t put you off from the game, as Rain World really is quite special once you get the hang of it - it keeps on drawing me back even after hundreds of hours of gameplay.

i've been nothing but sincerely miserable and on the verge of crashing out since i've started playing this game. this will not stop me from finishing it however :)