Rain World
Review
2026-07-06
There's a red X on my map. Rain World tells you nothing--no objective, no tutorial, barely a nudge--so this X is all I've got. It must be the goal. I crawl through tubes, scurry past lizards with snapping jaws, starve a little, die more than a little. And when I finally claw my way to the X, there's no goal there. There's a corpse. My corpse. I have been making a pilgrimage to my own dead body.
That's the whole game in one image: Rain World watching you misunderstand it and offering absolutely nothing to set you straight. You play a soggy little slugcat in a simulated ecosystem. Even the way the inhabitants are animated, all shuddering and morphing like a physics simulation, hints at their inner life. And those same monsters--that all one-shot you--will happily fight each other if you bait one into another's room. Hidden rules like this abound if you're willing to root around in the muck. The first time I jammed a spear into a wall and climbed on it, I muttered "you clever bastards" out loud on a plane. There's a vibe here, wet and indifferent and quietly alive.
And then there's the part where you actually play it. The loop: find food, find shelter, sleep, advance your karma. Die and you lose karma. To open the next gate you need a minimum karma level. Since dying is a way of life, we must embrace samsara: eating bugs and dying, eating bugs and dying, karma up, karma down. Over and over and over and over. The platforming is slow and sloppy, the rooms are sparse--hope ya like crawling through tubes!--and there are no new mechanics coming to save you. The only reward for learning this game is knowing more about this game.
Right when I was about to quit, the game handed me its idea of progression: a yellow plant announcing "Here is a strange energy." I ate it. A symbol flashed in the corner. I slept. The day advanced. I progressed! Wrong. Nothing happened, and nothing was explained. A little yellow guide-fairy flashed me a symbolic slideshow and wanted me to head west into certain death (no thanks, dawg). Ignoring them I found a gate, stuffed my slugbelly with flies, and slept long enough to karma-ize myself adequately to open the thing. Arcane machinery buzzed and whirred, revealing a whole new area. With no rewards. Nothing but new threats to murder my pathetic slugcat. Nothing is drawing me forward.
My deaths are for nothing, but they are also unfair. I survived an entire pack of monsters once--a career highlight--and then the rain came and I simply died. There was no planning for this, there was no efficient path to safety. The placement of monsters meant I'd always end up backed into a corner and dying. A blue lizard killed me at the door of a save-room with zero warning--which feels against the Geneva Conventions--and when I respawned a different blue lizard snapped me off a ladder a room later, also with zero warning. Complain about this anywhere on the internet and a fan will drop out of a pipe in the ceiling to explain that you've got it all wrong: "It's a life simulation, it's not supposed to be fair." But unfair-by-design implies the deck is stacked and the dealer is honest. Some of these situations simply cannot be won, regardless of skill or knowledge, and no amount of ecosystem is going to make that feel like anything but a rip-off.
Somewhere around cycle twelve I wrote a poem. "Drudgery, fudgery, cat in my stew. I don't play dogshit--why would you?" That's where this game put me mentally and spiritually. And still, I get why a person could love it. Somebody out there wants exactly what Rain World is selling: to scurry around like a little rat in a beautiful machine that owes them nothing, learning which predator eats which, discovering through sheer persistence that jellyfish are edible if you dodge the stingers. I know this because I read their forum post. "Wow! That sure is cool!" I say, staring with hate at my newly respawned slugcat as I bang it repeatedly into the pneumatic sleep-hole door, waiting for its interminable opening animation to finish.
God bless that player. God bless all y'all. I'm just standing out here after a dozen cycles wondering how, with all this rain coming down, all I can smell is shit.