CHENNAI: On somedays, we might perceive living as a lonely struggle to survive. We exist to ingest for energy, trawl through a crowd of creatures like us playing as both predator and prey, avoid the downpour of potential problems, and at the end of the day, find a dark, quiet and empty corner to hibernate. ‘Rain World’ is the game manifestation of this feeling. Only, the environment is a hundred times darker. Although Rain World released in 2017, its resurfacing during the Steam sale is a good thing — it has been a while since eerily atmospheric platformers have been discussed on this column.
In RW, we play as a Slugcat — a fitting portmanteau of two animals which best survives in the dingy and murky darkness of the dystopian world filled with pipes and rain. The procedural animation makes Slugcat fluid. Slugcat crawls through narrow pipes and climbs ropes with ease. Slugcat can also capture its enemies with one swift motion. And Slugcat looks elegantly deft when it does all these things. But the fluidity makes things difficult too — it takes time to get a good hold of the controls and make Slugcat do exactly what you want.
RW captures the terror of hopelessness through its very intelligent AI. The map evolves, and it’s never the same creatures in the same place. The creatures exist in the world, even outside of slugcat’s map. They survive for their own reasons, and not to serve the purpose of fuelling game and character satisfaction and level-ups. This makes the game more realistic and just as dangerous. The lizard creatures don’t get destroyed if you break its limbs, they just move slower. The AI seeks alternate routes to get the better of slugcat.
The ecology of the game is stunning, creating a satisfying sludginess in the post-rain dry period of the world. The evolving maps and the varying rain counter makes the game even more difficult to master. The controls and the lackluster tutorial seems to do little to help us understand the magnitude of RW. For many reasons yet to be discovered, I give the game a score of unpredictable out of 10 for its AI.
Anusha Ganapathi
@quaffle_waffle
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)