What fate a slugcat?
January 19, 2023 2:21 PM Subscribe
Almost 6 years after its release, Rain World is getting a DLC expansion. Downpour, which was released today, adds new slugcats, new areas to explore, co-op, and more, to this strange and beautiful game which is quite unlike any other.
To call Rain World an open world survival/action platformer would be accurate but would not capture its strange and idiosyncratic qualities. You play a slugcat, an omnivorous hybrid feline creature exploring a harsh and dangerous post-post-apocalyptic world. You must survive by avoiding the eponymous rain, and by foraging and hunting for food. The slugcat is both predator and prey, capable of catching and eating smaller animals like bugs, but also hunted by larger carnivores, some of them monstrous and alien. You can fight back, using spears and rocks, but mastering the game's (largely optional) combat is not easy, and its movement system alone is remarkably full of nuance.
This vibrant ecosystem is simulated with meticulous detail, and the various non-player creatures behavior according to their own motivations, sometimes ignoring the slugcat and instead interacting with each other. The AI is tightly coupled to the animation producing life-like and organic motion, which makes the game sometimes feel like a nature documentary from some ruined wasteland, albeit one in which you are an active participant and not a passive observer.
Although these survival and exploration elements are rich all on their own, Rain World has a mysterious back story and is filled with sometimes inscrutable lore (warning: spoilers), and its themes touch on such lofty ideas as transhumanism, the perils of technological advancement, and climate change. The experience of struggling for survival among the denizens of its world is lonely, melancholic, but also often rewarding and occasionally breath taking and awe inspiring.
Rain World is not easy, in fact its frequently punishingly frustrating, and not in the kind of "tough but fair" way some other games are. But its open world design and lack of emphasis on combat encounters gives the player lots of options to engage with its systems. And if that's not enough, there are numerous mods, some of which soften the sharp edges, and the game got an accessibility update last year with lots of granular options, some of which may make the game less of a slog. The fan wiki is full of spoiler-ific details but might help you from getting lost or devoured.
(title from the unusually phrased narration in one of the original trailers)
To call Rain World an open world survival/action platformer would be accurate but would not capture its strange and idiosyncratic qualities. You play a slugcat, an omnivorous hybrid feline creature exploring a harsh and dangerous post-post-apocalyptic world. You must survive by avoiding the eponymous rain, and by foraging and hunting for food. The slugcat is both predator and prey, capable of catching and eating smaller animals like bugs, but also hunted by larger carnivores, some of them monstrous and alien. You can fight back, using spears and rocks, but mastering the game's (largely optional) combat is not easy, and its movement system alone is remarkably full of nuance.
This vibrant ecosystem is simulated with meticulous detail, and the various non-player creatures behavior according to their own motivations, sometimes ignoring the slugcat and instead interacting with each other. The AI is tightly coupled to the animation producing life-like and organic motion, which makes the game sometimes feel like a nature documentary from some ruined wasteland, albeit one in which you are an active participant and not a passive observer.
Although these survival and exploration elements are rich all on their own, Rain World has a mysterious back story and is filled with sometimes inscrutable lore (warning: spoilers), and its themes touch on such lofty ideas as transhumanism, the perils of technological advancement, and climate change. The experience of struggling for survival among the denizens of its world is lonely, melancholic, but also often rewarding and occasionally breath taking and awe inspiring.
Rain World is not easy, in fact its frequently punishingly frustrating, and not in the kind of "tough but fair" way some other games are. But its open world design and lack of emphasis on combat encounters gives the player lots of options to engage with its systems. And if that's not enough, there are numerous mods, some of which soften the sharp edges, and the game got an accessibility update last year with lots of granular options, some of which may make the game less of a slog. The fan wiki is full of spoiler-ific details but might help you from getting lost or devoured.
(title from the unusually phrased narration in one of the original trailers)
This game is so, so cool, but it's also so, so hard.
I believe that, whether you get Downpour or not, the base game is getting an update (Remix?) that apparently adds accessibility options, so that may make the game a bit more approchable for many users.
posted by xedrik at 5:05 PM on January 19, 2023
I believe that, whether you get Downpour or not, the base game is getting an update (Remix?) that apparently adds accessibility options, so that may make the game a bit more approchable for many users.
posted by xedrik at 5:05 PM on January 19, 2023
The (original) game is pretty amazing but it also is pretty clearly an auteur-style project that Has Something Grandiose To Say and insists on doing it in a fairly inscrutable way that absolutely does not not respect the player's time.* To be more specific, the game it self generally does not respect the player's time, but much of that is because it's to a large extent a simulated/procgen stealth survival game. The lore, however, spit's in the player's time's face, as it requires probably 2-3x more playtime repeatedly backtracking across the map in order to bring little colored pebbles to one of the two speaking characters in the game.
More generally, the game is a good case study for the (internet-)age-old question, How Much Do You Read The Wiki? Which here ends up being a frustrating negotiation between game developer, who of course knows the game so well that they've lost all perspective on what it feels like to play as a new player, and who clearly gleefully disregarded the views of the playtesters that bounced off the game because of its inscrutability, and the actual player, who has to gamble that they payoff for trying to figure out the game's (many, in this case) inscrutable systems will be worth it.
For me, I'd say it was mostly worth it, with a few caveats:
* If you want to see what I'm talking about, and you don't care about (exceedingly abstract) spoilers, go watch a youtube video of the ending level, without looking at the total time or watching the progress bar.
posted by ropeladder at 5:36 PM on January 19, 2023 [5 favorites]
More generally, the game is a good case study for the (internet-)age-old question, How Much Do You Read The Wiki? Which here ends up being a frustrating negotiation between game developer, who of course knows the game so well that they've lost all perspective on what it feels like to play as a new player, and who clearly gleefully disregarded the views of the playtesters that bounced off the game because of its inscrutability, and the actual player, who has to gamble that they payoff for trying to figure out the game's (many, in this case) inscrutable systems will be worth it.
For me, I'd say it was mostly worth it, with a few caveats:
- don't worry about the colored pebbles and just look up the lore afterward (and read the wiki a bit when you get to the thing on the mechanical arm, before you eat anything)
- and, once you've familiarized yourself with the base level of difficulty and unforgivingness, don't push too hard in one direction when the game is offering you another path. The game tries to guide you generally in the right direction but it doesn't too a great job of it if you're stubborn -- so don't be too stubborn. (though to be fair, you have to be pretty stubborn to make it more than 20 minutes in the game)
* If you want to see what I'm talking about, and you don't care about (exceedingly abstract) spoilers, go watch a youtube video of the ending level, without looking at the total time or watching the progress bar.
posted by ropeladder at 5:36 PM on January 19, 2023 [5 favorites]
Funny this has been out for 6 years cuz it's still on my mental "that sounds cool I want to check it out" list from launch.
posted by grobstein at 11:15 PM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by grobstein at 11:15 PM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
Wow. This game is really, really, really not interested in telling me a single thing about how to play it beyond the very most absolute basics of "left stick to move, these buttons on your controller do a thing". And not in a fun way like Tunic. It looks pretty but I sure feel like I have about as much idea of what is going on with anything in this game as I did when I was a kid hitting every key on my C64's keyboard to see if it did anything in a game I'd just pirated. Except I just blew twenty bucks on this thing. The wiki feels like it expects me to already know how to play the damn thing too.
How does one get to the accessibility menu? "Options" on the main screen just gives me audio sliders. There isn't even a brightness setting, which would be really nice. Is it only in the Steam version and not in the PS4 version? I'm not seeing any of the loading screen tips the accessibility link suggests I should be seeing, either.
posted by egypturnash at 10:55 AM on January 20, 2023
How does one get to the accessibility menu? "Options" on the main screen just gives me audio sliders. There isn't even a brightness setting, which would be really nice. Is it only in the Steam version and not in the PS4 version? I'm not seeing any of the loading screen tips the accessibility link suggests I should be seeing, either.
posted by egypturnash at 10:55 AM on January 20, 2023
is there any way to speed up this damnable airlock animation, I am so fucking tired of watching it do its thing as I repeatedly enter a new area and fail to find a respawn point before dying
posted by egypturnash at 12:31 PM on January 20, 2023
posted by egypturnash at 12:31 PM on January 20, 2023
It doesn't look like the Downpour DLC is available on Playstation yet, and the accessibility options are apparently part of that (though they also apply to the base game and you don't have to get the DLC to get the accessibility options). On PC, at least, you enable them this way.
I don't think there is any way to speed up the airlock animation though it looks like the DLC does have an option for faster shelter openings. (If you are going up from the first area, try going right instead.)
posted by ropeladder at 5:43 PM on January 20, 2023
I don't think there is any way to speed up the airlock animation though it looks like the DLC does have an option for faster shelter openings. (If you are going up from the first area, try going right instead.)
posted by ropeladder at 5:43 PM on January 20, 2023
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