The parade of indies destined to captivate equally the imagination of players of yesterday and today continues these months so loaded with releases of quality.
It is the turn of Rain World, one of the most desired of the year in the independent scene, we would say that with the presence of all the elements that define it ,
as it knows by heart the habitual of these minority projects: crowdfunding, prolonged development , study with few members, great expectation for its visual impact and the latent desire to give a new twist to the usual mechanics.
A cocktail that has not stopped being used lately thanks to proposals that hit squarely on occasions, but in others they squandered everything
the good thing that they could contribute by design choices more than debatable. Rain World, unfortunately, is closer to the second, although it can not be affirmed with completeness that it is exempt from the former .
The luminous world of the now classic Fez has been devastated by some kind of environmental catastrophe. This could perfectly well be the origin of the ecosystem through which a kitten-caterpillar moves (yes, it is a cat and a kind of slug) separated from its family in a moving scene, beautifully drawn, which presages a new prodigy of the two-dimensional .
It is obvious that there is a lot of good in everything that Rain World puts on screen, with graphics that make detail their reason for being and manage to transmit at all times the feelings of desolationthat are proposed.
Tribute, according to its authors, to the aesthetics of the 16 Bits, there is something in which Rain World fully hits with its careful artistic presentation: in a matter of seconds we are surrounded by mystery , with hardly any company in a world without words, desolate, gloomy, with two guidelines that set the tone for everything that will happen in our adventure.
The first, survival , since the environment is openly hostile to the poor lost gate, left to his fate in the midst of a nature in which he is not at all at the top of the food chain. The second, the exploration, since the final objective is none other than to bring the protagonist back to his family. And this is where the game begins to give one of lime and another of sand.
Abandoned in a bizarre hostile ecosystem
Rain World takes to the end a concept that ends up being a double-edged sword: that of explaining almost nothing to the player .
Apart from the basic controls, we will learn about their mechanics very little by little and rather on the basis of dying many times until we understand how things really go in this world of secrets. The game lets us freely explore a mapped interconnected by pipes that take us from one side to another in a desperate search for food and shelter. T
his last of obligatory form in spite of being a game that bets by the exploration, since every little time it comesa terrible rain from which it is impossible to escape if we do not hibernate in a safe place, which acts as a point of storage and which incidentally has a cost in resources.
Locating the shelters is, in this way, the way to expand our knowledge of the map that we only keep in them, in a similar way to the classic storage points of a Metroidvania.
Even with such a powerful resemblance, Rain World does not convey feelings of Metroidvania at all . Its designers have opted for predators (lizards, vultures, evil plants) that we can rarely eliminate, that always follow changing behaviors from one another and live freely on the stage, also in an eternal search for food and a place to shelter from the destructive rain.
This behavior of enemies, which may well reminiscent of Alien: Isolation, will provide undoubted moments of fun, always varied and with moments of secrecy frankly glorious, but also provokes the feeling that will end up invading the player sooner rather than later: frustration .
