Rain world: Disgustingly beautiful
How often in games do you come across worlds to which, no matter what, you want to return?? Although it would seem that everything that fills it is trying to rid you of it. Of course, many will mention the Souls and Bloodborne series and they will be right. These games draw you in with their mystery, atmosphere, their plot, which is not on the surface, and their written lore. And of course, don’t forget about call, what will be thrown at the players who decide to watch it anyway: "What kind of animal is this??"
However, how many of them do you know? 2D worlds? Worlds where everything, from controls to almost every creature inhabiting its expanses, strives not only to complicate the game for you, but to make it as uncomfortable as possible. And those little things that are sometimes designed to make the gameplay easier are just a reason to relax at the wrong time, which this game will never forgive you for.
But! I am not writing this blog to condemn these qualities of the game called Rain world, but just the opposite, in order to show that sometimes even the most unpleasant aspects of the game can serve only as a cloud hiding a truly wonderful new world, without which it would not be complete.
One day, walking through the expanses of the art portal, under the banner of the tag "pixel art", I came across something that for me personally was very different from the general picture of 16-bit: clouds, dungeons and space nebulae. It was a shot from a game that no one on the portal had heard of and even the person who posted it didn’t know what kind of game it was. I became interested and decided to look in more detail to find out what kind of surreal picture is depicted on it. And what was my joy when I found out that this is not just nameless art, of which you can find thousands on the Internet, but a full-fledged game, moreover, a game that my let’s say not heroic laptop can run!
Actually the screenshot itself:
After the first hour of playing, I realized that if the game was designed for a keyboard, then only for one whose length would not allow it to be broken on the knee, and it was decided to switch to a gamepad. It didn’t become much easier to play, but I stopped falling from any object and simultaneously throwing at it what I managed to collect around.
My first impression of the game was entitled this text: "Disgustingly wonderful!».
Mesmerizing backdrops, excellent work with the color palette and play on contrasts, as well as the sounds of a world as empty as it is teeming with life, that’s what became the hook for me that pulled me deep into this mysterious world.
But the highest complexity, inconvenient controls, creatures, most of which move so strangely and frighteningly that they simultaneously fascinate and repel, as well as the absence, as it seemed to me then, of a clear plot with the exception of: " You must find your family in the open world", (the devil Fen just said this in my head), were placed on the opposite side of the scale with a rather heavy load.
But still, the visual style, which forced me to take screenshots at almost every new location, made me continue this rise of the hero of the spear.
I never liked games about survival, or rather games where you have to keep track of food, water, resources, etc.d. But one day I played Don’t starve and I liked how survival in this world was thought out, that this world was completely new and I was not so much attracted by the goal of survival itself, but by: "What is hiding behind the horizon of the map??" "What new creatures inhabit this part of the forest??"or banal"What happens if. ?"
The game I found on the art portal turned out to be different. It intrigued me with its open spaces and made me ask the same questions as Don’t Starve. But from every corner of these pixelated landscapes there was a danger, everything in this world wants, if not to eat you, then to avoid the fate of being eaten. Every living thing that can move does it for food or for shelter, and only we do it for research.
Slugcat which we are entrusted with managing is perhaps the cutest food in this world. However, no matter how attractive we are to local predators, they also do not disdain their brothers in intimidating the player. And therefore:
The bestiary in Rain World is very rich, both in the number of its representatives and in the number of surprises they present. Camouflage is the first rule of survival, so don’t be surprised if, after walking through half the location and finally fighting off one lizard, you are eaten by a second one that has merged with the background. And not just merged, enemies in Rain World are trained, and the same trick may not work several times. So be creative when dealing with open confrontations, or better yet, avoid them altogether.
It is also important https://playdoitcasino.co.uk/ to note that such unfriendliness of all living things is due to the fact that everything in this world spends almost its entire life in hibernation, hiding from the deadly rain, which is the name of the game. That’s right this is not rain in the world, this is the world of rain. Everything here obeys him, and nothing can survive unless it finds shelter, having first filled its belly in order to survive the next hibernation. While the world drowns again and again, washed by this machine of natural selection, the strong – survived, the weak – died.
But we will return to the flora and fauna, because no matter how interesting it looks, no matter how creatively it hunts you, all this is just a tool for creating an atmosphere of paranoid fear and anxiety for your life. No matter how difficult Dark souls is, over time you will learn to find an approach to the enemy, acquire better equipment, and in the end you will simply learn to play better. Maximum what you will be able to do better by the end of Rain world is to check dangerous places by throwing a stone, or just learn ahead of time to distinguish vines from beetles, and poles from centipedes.
With every stone thrown and every rain that fell, somewhere in the depths of my head I heard the cry: "Be careful Stalker!". However, there were no saves on F5, so I just walked to the next shelter at the other end of Skyrim, trying not to end up in another local “anomaly”, not to be devoured by a lurking mutant, and not to receive an olive in the form of a spear from another “group” of scavengers living in a landfill.
A lot of ways to present the plot in a work have been invented throughout the history of world culture. However, I always liked the one in which it was necessary to assemble a picture of the world piece by piece, relying not on the straight line of the plot narrative, but isolating from it the key points that would later form a whole picture.
The plot as such, in Rain world, is nothing special, but is only an impetus for the player to explore the world. But over time, more and more questions accumulate in my head, which pushes narrative game design.
I remember the moment after which the game from a damn beautiful open-world survival game turned into something for me truly intriguing. Namely, at some point our guide stops showing us visions from our past, and begins to throw up incomprehensible pictures of strange creatures, hinting to follow him. Having reached the final goal, we discover a flooded complex, in the depths of which we are met creature, perhaps the first is not aggressive and not afraid of us. However, we cannot understand what exactly he needs from us.
Then our observer gives us a new course. Having overcome perhaps the most difficult locations of this already difficult game, we find ourselves in something that resembles an ancient sanctuary. Descending below we find rooms with zero gravity, in the center of which there is a creature similar to the one we found earlier. And it speaks to us.
Let me just say that by this point I had played about 35 hours, and I didn’t even realize that the text in this game is found anywhere other than the main menu. And from that moment on, the game began to blossom for me. Narrative design began to appear clearly here and there. The world began to tell me its story, and I began to greedily absorb it.
In order to avoid spoilers, I will only tell you in general terms what exactly this bizarre and fascinating world hides within itself.
Rain world explores the concept of Buddhist teachings about the cycle of birth and death, as well as the search for ways out of it. The ancients who inhabited this world came to the conclusion that what keeps us on earth is our own desires and attachments. It is precisely by desiring that we exist. And therefore, in order to get out of the cycle, you need to get away from desires, renounce everything worldly. But the desire to break the cycle and solve the problem was the very paradox, that he didn’t let anyone ascend so easily. It was called "Great problem"and with all their might they looked for ways to overcome it. And at some point they found him! However, this path turned out to be imperfect. After all, those who were still strongly attached to the earth could not leave it, no matter how much they wanted to do so. And it was decided to leave the issue of the “Great Problem” cars.
And now, thousands of years later, we find ourselves on the ruins of a former super-civilization, whose only problem was existence itself.
Like the ancients, like everything in the game, we live and die in the vastness of this beautiful wasteland, our cycles change one after another, and our goal is still far away. And like the ancients, we turn to machines, but they only tell us that they themselves are paradoxes in their own matter, since they were created with the desire to renounce them.
As described earlier, the game is made in a 16-bit style, and is something between an arcade game, a hardcore survival game and a generator of beautiful screenshots for your desktop 😀
But seriously, in the pitch-black forests of pixel indie Rain world rises largely due to its visual style. Smooth animation, which reveals the local bestiary in all its disgusting splendor, contrasting palette helping many images from the game stay in your memory for a long time, and working with backdrops about which has already been said enough.
All this together gives the game a memorable and extremely surreal look.
But not just the visual. While many praised the new Zelda for its abundance of mechanics and different ways of interacting with the world, I, deprived of the opportunity to touch this creation, admired the fact that even on the third playthrough, this rainy world managed to surprise me. Nothing here was created just like that. Spears can be used as supports, stones and debris to check the area, food to lure creatures. And another creature that for once does not intend to feast on you, it turns out, can be used as a grappling hook so as not to fall into the abyss!
If the game presents you with something new at a location, it means it’s for a reason. And if not right away, then you will definitely need it later. The main thing is to figure out how to use it, because, like in Zelda, you are only given general rules and no one will lead you by the hand.
From the above we can conclude that the game does not give you a specific path to its passage. Moreover, it also doesn’t talk about any of its mechanics, besides the basic ones. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult not to wonder: “This creature that lies there in the corner, it will eat me, or it will be useful to me?". Which, it seems to me, encourages us to explore local beauties even more.
When trying to somehow evaluate sound design, I came to the following comparison. I really love an anime called "Shoujo shuumatsu ryokou", and in many ways it became iconic for me precisely because of its sound.
This was the first time that the soundtrack hooked me so much that I listened to it on repeat regularly. I even bought it and it was my first digital purchase. This anime is in many ways similar to the game we are reviewing today, with only one difference, it is intended to show warm and kind sadness, serene hopelessness the last people left in a world that continues to live no matter what. While the Rain world soundtrack aims to evoke alarm And feeling of constant danger, sometimes emphasizing the most phantasmagoric moments with equally otherworldly sounds. Howl of the wind — blowing through long-abandoned wastelands and complexes, thunder — punctuated by the metallic clang of swifts scurrying tirelessly in search of food, sounds of rain — inexorably approaching in order to once again wash this already flooded world.
All this makes you feel uncomfortable. It’s like you’re alone in the world. And this world itself is alien, hostile. The leitmotif of these two works is the same – the world we knew has fallen, and in its remains a new world is being born. But in the first case it is dawn, and in the second it is mutation. I can’t rate the music in this game as something outstanding in comparison with other representatives, I will only say that it added to my small collection of licensed music.
Thanks to the harmonious synergy of the above-described moments, something was born that kept me in the game until its very end – her soul.
To sum it up, I would like to express the following thought.
Art, no matter what form of presentation it has, is aimed at causing emotions. It doesn’t matter what kind of emotion it is: joy, sadness, fear or dislike to the object of creativity. And if the work is perceived absolutely smoothly, then it is not art, but simply a product. And therefore, those rare works that are not only remembered, but even inspire something completely new, are perceived by me personally with very great enthusiasm. That’s right, Rain world turned out to be the very work for me that inspired something that was completely out of character for me, namely this text. You can perceive it as ode the world that gave me new emotions that were unusual for me – interest mixed with disgust and admiration, and also, he intrigued me with his story so much that I began to read works about the Buddhist concept of the world and their worldview.
I, a person very far from religion, but I became extremely curious about how those who realized the paradox of the human being before others look at the world.
Time after time I asked myself the question, what exactly makes me return to this bizarre and extremely unfriendly world, even after I completed the game for the second time. And the answer was extremely simple – inspiration.
This text was not intended to be half as long. However, now that I have said, perhaps, everything I wanted, I will ask the opening question differently: How often do you encounter worlds in games that inspire you??