Rain World (NSP, XCI) ROM + v1.9.13 Update + Downpour DLC

Rain World is a 2017 survival platform game developed by Videocult and published by Adult Swim Games and Akupara Games for PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS in March 2017, and for Nintendo Switch in late 2018. Players assume control of a “slugcat”, an elongated felid-like rodent, and are tasked with survival in a derelict and hostile world. The game features a simulated ecosystem. The slug uses debris as a weapon to escape predators scavenges for food, and tries to reach safe hibernation rooms before the deadly torrential rain arrives. The player is given little explicit guidance on how to survive, which was the intention of the developers, who wanted players to feel like rats living on subway tracks.

In which they learn to survive in an environment without grasping its higher-level function. Rain World received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its art design and procedural animation but criticized its brutal difficulty, inconsistent save points, and imprecise controls. Some of these criticisms were addressed with later updates. Despite the aforementioned mixed reviews, the game garnered a cult following. In January 2023, a downloadable content pack titled Rain World: Downpour was released for PC. Downpour was released for Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox on July 11, 2023. The expansion pack received generally positive reviews from critics.

GAMEPLAY

The slugcat can use spears and debris to defend themselves from predators in the hostile, ruined, and obtuse 2D world. The player is given little explicit guidance and is free to explore the world in any direction by entering pipes and crawling through passages that span across over 1,600 static screens that each spawn their creatures in set locations. These creatures can then move freely around the region. The slugcat can jump, swim, and climb poles to avoid enemies while foraging for sparse food, which is used to hibernate in scarce, designated safe rooms called shelters. Hibernating resets the time limit and saves the player’s progress. If the player does not reach the shelter before the end of the day cycle, the rain will come, crushing the slugcat or causing them to drown in one of the many now-flooded rooms. Additionally, if the slugcat does not eat sufficient food by the end of the day, the game will not save, and the slugcat will wake up in starvation mode. In starvation mode, the slugcat is much slower, does less damage when throwing spears, and faints if it jumps too much.

Starvation mode can be exited mid-cycle by filling up the hunger bar, but if the slugcat doesn’t fill up the hunger bar by the end of the said cycle, it will starve to death when it tries to hibernate. Upon death, the slug returns to the last save point. The player also loses one karma, which is indicated at the bottom of the screen. Karma is gained upon successfully hibernating, and the player can shield their current karma level by eating a yellow karma flower. The flower appears in set locations around the map and is re-planted wherever the slugcat dies while under its effects.  The player needs to meet a specific karma level to go through karma gates, which lie at the borders of every region in the game. Predators range from camouflaged plants to large vultures to Komodo dragon-like lizards and large aquatic creatures. Many enemies can incapacitate the slugcat in one hit, and some species have different variations, such as the different colors of lizards, which all have unique characteristics. Creatures spawn from dens in set locations and can move freely throughout the region, meaning the player is sometimes faced with problems that they can’t avoid.

All the creatures in the game possess dynamic AI and exist in the game’s world perpetually, even when not on the same screen as the player. Players are expected to mainly evade the enemies, but they do need to experiment with spears to climb walls and knock fruit off of vines. It is possible to kill predators by repeatedly hitting certain parts of them with spears, though attacking them is mainly used as a way to ward them off. However, killing creatures becomes almost a requirement in the base game’s hardest campaign. Hunter, where the slug is a carnivore and must eat the flesh of other creatures to get meaningful amounts of food. The slug, if holding an object in each hand, can swap its places by pressing the grab button twice. It can also eat mushrooms, which grant status effects, such as faster reaction times (shown in-game as time slowing down) and increasing how far the slug jumps.

The player can choose between two campaigns at the start: Monk and Survivor. As Monk, creatures are less aggressive and the slug needs less food to hibernate. Beating either Monk or Survivor unlocks the third character, Hunter, with a difficult campaign featuring more powerful and hostile creatures. as well as a 20-cycle time limit for the player to beat the game before the campaign permanently ends. Monk and Hunter were added in the 1.5 update, and Monk was created to address concerns about the game’s difficulty. The 1.5 update also added a local multiplayer arena mode and a sandbox mode where players can spawn objects and creatures from the game. The game offers very little to guide the player aside from the overseer, who gives some hints about where to find nearby shelters and lore-related events. The player can also view a map to check their location in the vast in-game world.

PLOT

Rain World’s setting is destroyed by ecological catastrophe and illustrated in pixel art. Its story is communicated through details in the environment, dreams that the slugcat can have during hibernation, and holograms from the worm-like overseer that guides the player. In-game, the player assumes the role of a slugcat, who wakes up in an abandoned, desolate world. They can choose to play as the Monk, the Survivor, or the Hunter, each of which has a different narrative and set of abilities. If they select the Monk or the Survivor, their plot follows the same basic outline. When a group of slugcats is caught off-guard by the rain, the Survivor is flushed into a pit, becoming separated from the others. The Monk is the Survivor’s sibling and jumps after the Survivor. Eventually, the slugcat reaches Five Pebbles, a massive, decaying, semi-biotic supercomputer, called an iterator.

After climbing up Five Pebbles’ exterior, the slugcat falls into Five Pebbles’ puppet chamber. Five Pebbles explains that, like all creatures, the slugcat is trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth and wants it to end. He then directs it to a place where it can free itself from the “great cycle.” Following his guidance, the slugcat travels underground and enters a sea of “Void Fluid” where it can ascend, escaping the cycle. With the Downpour DLC, both the Survivor and the Monk can instead go to the outer expanse, a lush jungle without lethal rain, and are reunited. More information about the setting can be obtained by bringing pearls to another damaged iterator named Looks to the Moon. She explains that the ancient civilization that once inhabited the world sought to escape the eternal cycle and succeeded, collectively ascending from existence and abandoning the iterators.

She and Five Pebbles are artificial intelligence created by them to calculate a way for every living organism to ascend. Iterators use vast quantities of water as a coolant, which they then release as vapor. This vapor then falls back down in the form of the rain. The iterators’ functions are also the only source of heat on the surface. Eventually, Five Pebbles decides to create an organism to overwrite the “self-destruction taboo,” a law written into all of the cells of all iterators to stop them from self-destructing. To achieve this, he needs to run an extremely large amount of parallel processes, which causes him to use much more water to stop himself from overheating. Because of this, Looks To The Moon, who shares a water source with Five Pebbles, no longer has enough to sustain herself. In an attempt to save her life, Looks To The Moon sends a forced communication to Five Pebbles as a last resort. This results in him fumbling his experiments, which releases the Rot inside of his structure, a cancer-like collection of cysts that can spread inside of iterators.

Looks To The Moon was unable to make Five Pebbles cease his increased water intake in due time, and she ends up collapsing, leaving her in a comatose state. The Hunter’s narrative takes place before the other main campaigns. In-game, the Hunter starts with a data pearl, a green “Neuron Fly” containing “slag reset keys,” and a 20-cycle time limit before the Hunter permanently dies. The Hunter delivers the Neuron Fly to look to The Moon, reviving her and restoring some of her basic functions. If the Hunter gives Moon the pearl as well, its message reveals that a third iterator, No Significant Harassment, sent the Hunter to help Moon. Looks To The Moon warns the Hunter of its shortened life that will end in just a few cycles. If the player ascends before the time limit ends, a black substance is seen oozing out of the Hunter. If the player doesn’t ascend, the Hunter dies and grows into a red version of the Rot that becomes available as an enemy in the DLC’s Gourmand campaign.

DOWNPOUR

In the Downpour DLC, the player can assume the role of one of five new slugcats, each of which has a different narrative. Although the story is not told in a sequential fashion in-game, this section is in chronological order.

• The Spearmaster campaign begins when the Rot begins to destroy Five Pebbles’ structure, causing him to angrily cease communication with the other iterators. Another iterator, Seven Red Suns, uses the Spearmaster to transmit a message in a pearl to Five Pebbles, telling him to reactivate his communication and cease his increased water intake. However, when the Spearmaster reaches Five Pebbles, the message is refused and they are expelled. Therefore, Spearmaster travels to Looks To The Moon, which is functional. When shown the pearl, she overwrites the message and orders Spearmaster to reach the nearest communications array, so she can send her final message to the local iterator group. At the array, the message states that Five Pebbles’ actions have made her collapse imminent and that she will lose all communication and functions. After the broadcast, Spearmaster returns to Seven Red Suns.
• The Artificer campaign takes place soon after the story of the Spearmaster. The Artificer witnesses the death of their two children to a tribe of ape-like scavengers, causing the Artificer to have an intense hatred for the scavenger species. Once the Artificer reaches Five Pebbles, Pebbles sees use in the Artificer, permitting them to enter the ancient city, Metropolis, to wipe out the scavenger population that has overrun the city. Artificer massacres the scavengers within Metropolis and defeats their king. Lacking any water to prevent overheating, Looks To The Moon’s structure completely collapses, leaving her in a comatose state.
• Gourmand’s campaign takes place after the Hunter campaign, where Looks To The Moon has been revived. While scouting for food to bring back to their slugcat colony in the outer expanse, Gourmand meets Five Pebbles, who infers their unwillingness to ascend from existence. Pebbles unlocks the exit to the outer expanse, asking Gourmand to prevent further slugcats from meeting, and letting Gourmand leave.
• The Rivulet’s campaign takes place after the Survivor and Monk’s campaign. The Rivulet, an amphibian version of slugcat, must survive through incredibly short and rough rain cycles caused by Five Pebbles’ attempts at removing the greatly expanded Rot with his increased water intake. When the Rivulet enters his barely functioning structure, they take the “rarefaction cell” which sustains his power. Without the cell, Five Pebbles accepts his eventual death, and requests for the Rivulet to deliver the cell to Looks To The Moon. After traversing Moon’s submerged superstructure, the Rivulet activates the cell, causing Moon to regain her basic functions, memory, and communication. Moon initiates a broadcast to the local iterator group and Five Pebbles communicating her revival.
• The Saint’s campaign takes place many cycles after the events of the Rivulet campaign, where the rain has given way to snow that envelops the world. After emerging from the sea of Void Fluid and waking up, the Saint visits multiple “echoes”, the ghosts of ancients that have failed to ascend. After meeting enough echoes, the Saint becomes able to ascend creatures. If the player chooses to, they can travel to Five Pebbles’ and Looks To The Moon’s locations to ascend one or both of them. The Saint attempts to ascend themselves but is instead transported to the otherworldy Rubicon. As the Saint travels through the Rubicon, they see regions the player experiences in other campaigns. When they reach the top, they enter a puppet chamber; if the player ascended either of the iterators earlier, they briefly reunite with them. After leaving the chamber, the Saint enters the sea of Void Fluid. Wings branch off of the Saint resembling that of an echo, and wakes up again at the starting location.

KEY FEATURES

• Explore 1600+ rooms across 12 regions, uncovering ancient secrets and hidden dangers.
• Test your reflexes with intense encounters against primal predators. Limited resources and constant rain add to the challenge.
• Unique challenges with procedural design and individualistic AI for every playthrough.
• Play as The Monk or The Hunter, each offering different playstyles.
• Engage in multiplayer battles with up to 4 players in Competitive and Sandbox modes.
• Discover new dangerous predators and delectable prey in an updated bestiary.