/games/ - Games

The newest expansion for Rain World has released highly flawed. After finishing both the endings I can say I did not like it. It's clear there was passion here but it has come out totally unfinished, they are saying they will release updates to fix it but still it is rushed here. The expansion feels like a collection of modded regions. It is nothing like base game Rain World, which is what I think everyone was hoping for. It's not nearly as good as Downpour either. There are some really cool stuff here but its not enough. Tbh it feels a lot like Yume Nikki in some ways.

So many parts feel unfinished. Lots of the creatures are really dumb and uninteractive, either being literally nothing but a nuisance or only interacting with the player rather than the other creatures. I am talking mainly about the whistling crabs that shock you. Lots of it is cool, and there are some great creatures, but it just feels like it needs more work. Some of the spawning is wack, with the crabs and the moths mainly. In general there are so many bugs, I was glitched out of bounds constantly which I have never experienced before except when making my own mod.

Half of the regions added are from mods. I just don't think this should be acceptable. And most of the time these regions are not even improved, in fact they are made way worse. Badlands lost all of its identity and feels way less cool now. Aether Ridge is chopped up and completely disjointed. But to talk about this I need to bring up the worst part of the mod, the portals. Instead of having a cohesive world connected through karma gates, you just go through portals to get everywhere. This is legitimately deadly for the game.

One of the most important parts of Rain World is the emotion in the level design (qouting a video yeah I know). But moving through the world is an emotional arc on its own. Firstly, the emotional arcs of the modded regions have been ruined by how they've been butchered like this. The mods were all better as mods then they are in this paid expansion. In Coral Caves you descend through layers of coral, into a buried facility, and then into secret dark and flooded caves beneath lit up by beautiful coloured lights. It also lost the little lizard things that used to be there. And don't get me started on Aether Ridge, which has been turned into like 5 different regions. I can't even begin to explain how badly this has affected the region as a whole. The only part that feels fun and playable is The Surface, because that has stuff actually added to it with the blizzard mechanics. But still, it has been completely destroyed.

But the excellent original regions are also ruined by this. It all feels pointless and meaningless. They feel like a collection of cool modded regions stuck together. Rusted Wrecks would be a 10/10 modded region, Verdant Waterways and Fetid Glen would be considered amazing mods too. But this shouldn't be a mod pack. It's an official expansion. And there is just no world here. There's some cool places strung together, but nothing more than that. Not pearls either.

The only regions with actual meaning is a spoilery one and Outer Rim, which is pic rel. It's like a special region that kind of has a dark souls vibe. Outer Rim is beautiful, really cool and I love it, but you are sent back here multiple times and there is absolutely no danger unless you have low scav rep. You just walk to the right until you get to the coolest looking screens in the game… and do a bunch more walking and climbing with almost no danger to get to a spoilery place. I actually don't mind Outer Rim but a lot of people do.

The issue with all of these places is still the same though. It's not a cohesive world. Even lore pearls won't fix this. And so, even though there are 1924978 trillion regions, it feels small. The Base game and Downpour (except metropolis, I think that was handled wrong) world is MASSIVE. And that's not just about amount of rooms in regions. It's that you can go from the filtration system to the top of Five Pebbles. It's a specific part of the planet and it is just so big. It's like, you can see things in the distance in some of these maps. But it's just meaningless. I have no reference to what these 'starcatchers' are. But at the top of the wall, when you look out and see all the other iterators… you just feel so small. The map is so big and you have just seen a miniscule part of the world. The things in the distance are so detailed, it makes your imagination go crazy. What's life like there? The lighting underneath is just like in the underhang. Is there a slugcat climbing up the side of that megastructure too? Each one of those is an entire map in of itself, just waiting to be discovered. And then there's the tree view in Outer Expanse in Downpour, showing Five Pebbles. That screen was unironically a better reward for playing something than anything I have ever experienced. It just puts everything into perspective.

Then there is the other critical flaw the expansion fails in, which is what I was really hoping for. It fails at the ludonarrative cosonance. This is what Downpour failed most at too, even though it had good regions. But so many people are saying this is like base game when it is nothing similar. I'm not even going to get into how base game lore was really clear and this is really vague, but the biggest difference is that you feel like the slugcat in vanilla. You feel exactly like survivor, you are the slugcat, the little rat. At first you're looking for your family, but as your own curiosity grows it naturally evolves into looking for the end of the game, ascension. This is so intriniscally linked to the level design too. Survivor was unironically a religious experience for me first time playing, I was so completely immersed in the world.

And then there's hunter, which is the perfect hard mode. I've never seen a challenge mode done as well as this, even though the map is exactly the same it actually made it even more fun. I was on a quest, a total crusade and I was so invested it was insane. Like I planned out my route before hand, had cycle qoutas, and failed so many runs. When the succesful one finally came I was shitting myself literally all the way through it. I cried so hard at the end. Literally the only time a 'do it again but harder' has ever worked, because I FELT like the hunter. I had been immersed as the survivor, then the game was done and I could never be immersed in the same way again. But now I knew the map, I knew the controls (well, not really but I thought I did), and I knew where it was going. I can't be lost again, so instead of being a lost slugcat, I'm here to fuck shit up. The hunter is not nerfed in any way other than some shelters being unavailable. You're way stronger in every way. This is why hunter works as a high stakes, impactful on the world playthrough when lots of the Downpour campaigns don't. I am a hunter at that point.

Do I feel like 'the watcher'? I guess in the way that nothing matters and I am just kind of passing through a bunch of areas as a tourist. If that's what they were going through… eh. It's certainly hard and frustrating, which I would want and expect, but its not really fitting. I'm someone playing the watcher, being kind of unconvinced at the type of story being told. It didn't work in Downpour except for Saint (which feels like the ending of Rain World tbh), but that expansion held up in other ways. And it doesn't work here. I didn't care about the story that much. The echo you follow has kind of whatever dialogue. But the story could have been a lot better… especially the rot stuff.

Major spoilers: **Ancient Urban is awesome and I'm glad we got to see it. This was probably the only time I felt excited in the expansion. That ending, seeing the ascension as the echo moves on, is cool. I think it ruined a lot of people's fan theories though, I know because I was arguing against them. So many people would just not even touch buddhism when looking at the game, saying echoes were trapped due to technical issues or something rather than attachement to the world, which btw Downpour did get right completely (past echoes echo is the coolest thing ever). Anyway that ending is kind of fine to get, you just find the echo a few times. I actually missed two of the original regions doing this xd. Also daemon is so cool.

Anyway the big problem is the rot ending. Firstly its really really boring. You have to spread the rot to every region in the most tedious way imaginable. I would not have finished it if I wasn't a megafan, I don't grind in games or play really repetitive shit so it just felt awful. Secondly they've ruined the rot. It was scary as body horror. It is not scary as a world eating cosmic threat. This completely goes against base game lore. The rot could never survive outside of Five Pebbles before. Over time it just withered away. It was not literally going to ascend him, it was a mistake trying to self destruct his tissues. The Downpour Rot feels so much scarier, you are in a dying god and it feels like it. In general the lore was completely all over the place and was fumbled. A rotted void worm swimming inside rotted FP? It just makes the void worms less scary, more mundane, if even they can be got by the rot. This all ties together with everything else wrong with it tbh**

All that being said I'm glad they did something different. As stated earlier it feels a lot like Yume Nikki. It's just a shame they abandoned almost everything that made the game good to do it. The issues with this expansion are a lot deeper than its unfinished release.