Downloadable titles have been getting better and better lately, and last year was probably the best year for these titles, with Journey and Unfinished Swan taking the world by a storm, and The Walking Dead sweeping a hundred gazillion (if that is even a number) game of the year awards. Apart from 400 Days, one of the downloadable titles I looked forward to the most this year was definitely Rain. The concept and visual characteristics of the game simply appealed to me and made me long to get my hands on it.
The premise is pretty straight forward; you are basically an invisible boy lost in a town. The boy is chased by evil invisible entities, which are also out to get an invisible girl who is lost as well. They can only be seen when walking under the rain, and to avoid being taken by the evil entities, they have to use the environments around them to get to safety.
The pacing of the game is fantastic, the puzzles and platforming segments are good, but the controls are a bit unintuitive to honest. The fact that the camera is fixed is frustrating, as it makes jumping from one place to another that much harder. The environments are very well designed, but I really feel like the game would have been better if there were more collectibles, a sort of incentive for exploration. Another aspect of the game which I didn’t particularly enjoy was the fact that there was no dialog, and the narration was all written. I thin that the developers wanted the user to bond with the characters as much as possible with only the sound of the rain and classical music audible, but unfortunately the narration wasn’t powerful enough for the experience to execute quite as well as Journey’s.
Overall the game didn’t disappoint, but I don’t believe it delivered either. It might be that Journey and Unfinished Swan created an experience which is hard to match, but with such a premise I really believed Rain could have been better. All in all I would still suggest this game to anyone looking to purely blow some steam off.
Overall Rating: 7/10
Written By Matthew C