Rain World
Rain World is a 2017 survival-platform video game developed by independent studio Videocult and published by Adult Swim Games and Akupara Games. It was released for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows in March 2017 and Nintendo Switch in December 2018. The player controls an agile "slugcat", an animal resembling a cat and slug, that is burdened with survival in a derelict and hostile world. The slugcat traverses the remnants of an industrialized ancient civilization as it searches for its family. It uses debris as weapons to evade lethal predators, scavenge for food, and reach safe hibernation rooms before deadly torrential rain arrives. It can be played alone or with multiple players; there is also a sandbox mode.
Beginning in 2011, Rain World was in development for over six years by a two-man team who intended to simulate a unique, realistic ecosystem; creatures act independently from the player and perpetually roam the environment. Rain World uses procedural animation and conveys much of its narrative through environmental storytelling, adopting an adaptive low-fi and electronic soundtrack. The player is given little explicit guidance so that they would feel like "a rat that lives on subway tracks", learning to survive in an environment without comprehending its higher-level function.
Rain World received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its art design and fluid animation but criticized its difficulty, checkpoint system, and controls; some of these concerns were addressed with later updates. The game was nominated for awards and garnered a cult following and modding community. In January 2023, a downloadable content pack titled Rain World: Downpour, which was adapted from a popular community mod, was released for PC and ported to various consoles on July 11, 2023, adding five slugcat characters with unique abilities; it received positive reviews from critics. A second content pack titled Rain World: The Watcher was released on March 28, 2025, for PC and ported to consoles on September 25.
Gameplay
Rain World is a procedurally animated two-dimensional survival-platformer where the player controls a "slugcat", an animal mirroring a cat and slug. As part of a nonlinear game, the slugcat freely explores screens shown individually; each screen spawns creatures that wander the region. The slugcat can jump, swim, and climb poles to avoid enemies while foraging for food which must be consumed to hibernate in scarce, designated safe rooms. The slugcat uses spears and debris to defend itself from predators in the ruined and obtuse ecosystem. Hibernation spots serve as checkpoints where the slugcat returns to after death; if the slugcat does not reach a shelter before the end of the cycle, rain will come, killing the slugcat in the ensuing flood.Upon death, the slugcat loses one "karma" level, which is gained upon hibernating. The slugcat can prevent losing karma by eating a yellow "karma flower". The flower appears in set locations and is replanted wherever the slugcat dies after eating it. It must meet a specific karma level to pass through gates set at the borders of the game's 12 regions, allowing further progression.
Predators range from camouflaged carnivorous plants to gas-producing vultures and colored Komodo dragon-like lizards; some creatures are friendly but easily provoked, such as the "scavengers", which are mobile like the slugcat and equipped with explosive spears. Enemies can kill the slugcat in one attack. Some have variations, such as the differently-colored lizards, which possess unique characteristics. All creatures possess dynamic behavior and perpetually wander independently from the slugcat, occasionally battling and hunting each other; without a set path for predators to explore, the slugcat is faced with problems they cannot avoid. The slugcat may carry three items at a time: two in their hands and one in their stomach. It can swap the items' places and uses its right hand first when throwing. Some foods grant status effects when eaten, such as slowing down time.
Along with the default slugcat, the player may choose to play as the Monk and Hunter slugcats. As the Monk, creatures are less aggressive and the slugcat needs less food to hibernate. The Hunter, a carnivore with a bigger appetite, must also compete with more powerful and hostile creatures. Other game modes also include a multiplayer arena mode, where up to four players battle each other, and a sandbox mode, where the player freely spawns and interacts with objects and creatures.
Rain World post-apocalyptic setting is plagued by ecological catastrophe and illustrated in pixel art. As a form of environmental storytelling, the narrative is told through its environment, dreams during hibernation, and holograms from a worm-like creature that monitors the slugcat. The game offers little to guide the player, apart from the worm creature that points towards food and story-related events; this assistance becomes rarer as the game progresses. The player may view an in-game map to review their exploration progress.
Downloadable content
Rain World has two downloadable content packs, the first being Downpour. Tripling the game's world size, Downpour adds five slugcats and ten regions, accessed separately from the original game's content. Each slugcat features a different set of abilities. The Artificer can jump twice midair and create explosives. The Spearmaster produces an infinite amount of spears, but piercing other creatures is the only way it receives food. The Rivulet, a semiaquatic slugcat, has increased agility, but must deal with more frequent rain. The Gourmand requires a tremendous amount of food, but has access to a crafting system. The Saint has a tongue that can grapple onto objects, granting it high mobility, but cannot throw spears and is prone to freezing to death.Downpour also adds three game modes: Safari mode allows the player to spectate the ecosystem and control any living creature. Challenge mode provides 70 scored challenges with preset objectives. Expedition provides random missions that award experience points upon completion. Downpour release was accompanied by full local cooperative multiplayer functionality and the free Rain World Remix upgrade, which added accessibility options, ways to customize game difficulty, and modding support so that players could modify the game easily.
The second DLC is the Watcher, adding regions, creatures, and the titular slugcat.
Plot
A family of slugcats is struck by the rain. They are separated from two of their childrenincluding the player's slugcatas they are flushed into the decaying remnants of an industrialized ancient civilization, now long abandoned.Eventually, the slugcat stumbles upon Five Pebbles, a massive, infected, superintelligent, and semi-biotic artificial intelligence called an "iterator". After climbing above the clouds and traversing through his megastructure, the slugcat meets his avatar. Pebbles explains that, like all living things, the slugcat is trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth. He infers that the slugcat wants it to end and directs it to a place where it can free itself from the cycle. Following his guidance, the slugcat travels underground and enters the ethereal "Void Sea", a body of "Void Fluid", where it can "ascend".
More information about the setting is obtained by bringing pearls—that contain ancient logs and other information—to a damaged iterator named Looks to the Moon, whose structure had collapsed and submerged into the shoreline.
The Hunter's story acts as a prequel; it begins with a pearl, a green "neuron fly", and a 20-cycle limit before the Hunter can permanently die of sickness. The slugcat travels to find a comatose Looks to the Moon. With the neuron fly, she is revived. The pearl reveals the Hunter was sent by an iterator named No Significant Harassment.
''Downpour''
Downpour individual narratives, though presented nonlinearly in-game, are shown below chronologically.- In a plan to self-destruct, Five Pebbles overexploits his water source shared with Looks to the Moon; Moon interrupts Pebbles, botching the experiment and infecting his structure, making him cease communications with the local iterator group. The iterator Seven Red Suns sends the Spearmaster to deliver Pebbles a pearl ordering him to end his overuse of water. The message is refused and the slugcat is expelled. Given the pearl, Moon overwrites it and orders the Spearmaster to bring it to a communications array; Moon's message announces her imminent collapse.
- The Artificer witnesses the death of its children to primate-like scavengers. Stumbling upon Five Pebbles, Pebbles sees use in the slugcat, sending it to exterminate the scavenger population overrunning the city atop his structure. The Artificer massacres the scavengers and defeats their chieftain.
- Gourmand's story takes place after the Hunter's. Stumbling upon Five Pebbles, Pebbles infers the slugcat does not wish to ascend. He unlocks the gate to a slugcat colony and asks Gourmand to prevent further slugcats from meeting him.
- The Rivulet's story takes place after the original game's. The Rivulet, a semiaquatic slugcat, must survive through short rain cycles. Eventually, the slugcat enters Five Pebbles's infected, barely functioning complex, and takes the "rarefaction cell" which sustains power. Without the cell, Pebbles accepts his eventual death, and requests the cell be given to Moon. By traversing her submerged superstructure, the slugcat activates the cell, restoring Moon's functions. She initiates a broadcast to the iterator group, signalling her revival.
- Far into the future when Pebbles collapsed and the rain has given way to fluctuating blizzards, the Saint emerges from the Void Sea but awakens on the surface. The slugcat explores to visit "Echoes", the spirits of the ancient civilization who entered the Void Sea but failed ascension. Eventually, the Saint gains the ability to ascend creatures. It attempts to enter the Void Sea but is transported to the hell-like "Rubicon". The slugcat roams and finds the Void Sea; wings sprout from the Saint resembling an Echo's and it awakens on the surface again.
Development
Rain World was conceived as a single-room multiplayer platformer where the player would hunt one species of prey as they run from one bigger species of predators. The game strayed from that vision as it was expanded, taking many "unexpected twists and turns", but had always retained the concept of the slugcat and the "grimy, wet industrial environment". Jakobsson and Primate hoped the player would feel as if they were close to making sense of the game's abstraction of an industrial environment without fully understanding it. Jakobsson did not intend for the game's extreme difficulty, which resulted in its mixed reception.
Jakobsson favored a pragmatic approach to creating art in game design, treating programming as a means to an end. Rain World enemies were designed to be unpredictableliving their own lives in which they hunt and struggle to survive rather than serve as obstacles for the player. Enemies perpetually and dynamically wander without a set path, and in playtests a week before release, the developers noticed how some players became more or less interested in the game based on how lucky they were with enemy behavior. Primate explained he disliked conventional enemy behavior where they acted merely as an adversary, preferring the predators to act like hungry animals in a realistic ecosystem like the slugcat, eliciting empathy in the player. In a PlayStation Blog post, Jakobsson added that the creatures in the ecosystem "are also individuals that can learn to recognize you". He took this concept into account when developing the scavengers in particular; they are initially distrustful of the slugcat, but eventually ally with it if the slugcat assists with combat or provides pearls. Placed in middle of the food chain, the slugcat is intended to avoid combat while evading enemies through stealth and flight. To differentiate Rain World from Metroidvania video games, the team emphasized the powerlessness of the slugcat in gameplay, foregoing traditional progression wherein the player would become powerful overtime. Except for the worm creature and small tutorial, the player is completely unguided and forced to progress through experimentation.
Procedural animation was a necessary factor to creating Rain World natural and "believable" ecosystem. It allowed the game's artificial intelligence to create unintentional behaviors such as moments of "frustration" in creatures failing to hunt the slugcat, personifying them. The game was written in the Lingo programming language before switching to C# early on with its own independent game engine. Jakobsson's levels are made by hand in a standalone level editor. The editor brushes recurring, cloned elements, such as plants and chains, onto the map, as well as combining and processing shadows. At one point, the original release of Rain World was planned to include a multiplayer mode with separate story and custom modes upon release. The development team crowdfunded some development costs via Kickstarter in early 2014 and quickly surpassed its goal, being greenlit in five days and picked up by Adult Swim Games. By early 2015, the team had switched to the Unity game engine and released a test version to its Kickstarter backers. A seven-minute trailer was released by the end of the year.
Music and sound design
Though Rain World soundtrack would originally be chiptune, Primate felt that "arcade bleeps and bloops and retro concepts" did not fit with the naturalistic mood of the game and instead aimed for a more "moody, immersive atmosphere". The final product resulted in a low-fi and electronic soundtrack. He and his musician partner Lydia Esrig turned to field recordings of urban ambiance for both the soundtrack and sound effects, along with litter and metal for otherworldly sounds. Primate aimed for the music to approximate the game's eclectic visuals, which mix industrial, science fiction, jungle, and architectural elements.With little dialogue or narration, Rain World story was partly communicated through its soundtrack to contribute to its environmental storytelling. The game's beginning uses primitive drums based on the slugcat's feelings of fear and hunger before transitioning to describe new areas. Rain World has over 3.5 hours of recorded music across 160 tracks. When the slugcat is chased by a predator, between eight and twelve tracks will simultaneously layer to create ambiance and respond to the slugcat's in-game context, which Primate names "threat music". While the creatures of Rain World are animals like the slugcat, the torrential rain was designed to represent "oblivion incarnate", a threat no creature could survive against. To contribute to this, a collection of sampled rainstorms with varying intensity layer up as the rain develops. The storm's climax introduces pipe organs that give a "biblical wrath-of-god vibe".
Release
Videocult announced the last phases of development in early 2016 and posted another trailer on December 5. Rain World animation was popularized on social media in praise of what IGN attributed to its "uncanny fluidity", contributing to the game's popularity pre-release; Primate partially attributed this virality to GIFs, noting one that was posted on Twitter and retweeted over 15,000 times. A final trailer was posted on March 8, 2017, revealing its release date; Rain World was released on March 28, published by Adult Swim Games for PlayStation 4 and Windows. Previews compared Rain World design elements to other video games, including the difficulty of Super Meat Boy, the environment and soundtrack of Fez, and the puzzle-platforming of Metroid and Oddworld.In April 2017, the game received an update to alleviate its difficulty. A major content update was planned for release later in 2017. The update was planned to include the local multiplayer arena mode, featuring over 50 rooms, and the Monk and Hunter. The update was released in beta in November for Windows and published officially on December 11, 2017; it was also ported to PlayStation 4 on December 21, 2018. Following speculation in January 2018, Rain World was ported to the Nintendo Switch on December 13 in the United States and December 27 in Europe. Limited Run Games released a physical edition for PlayStation 4 later that month. In August 2025, the game was released to the Xbox Game Pass.
In January 2022, due to conflicts with Adult Swim Games, Videocult announced that Rain World would be published by Akupara Games from then on after a prolonged legal dispute. On March 28, a DLC was announced. Titled Rain World: Downpour, it would add five playable slugcats with individual storylines, over 1000 rooms across ten regions, and three game modes. Downpour is an expansion of the "More Slugcats" mod and was developed by nearly 40 community modders over the course of five years. It was released for PC on January 19, 2023 and consoles on July 11, 2023.
Downpour development started before the Monk and Hunter update was released, according to lead programmer Andrew Marrero. A major theme of the DLC was the passage of time and how the hostile world transforms as catastrophic events occur, placing the five slugcats' environments across different periods of time. Marrero intended for the Challenge mode to teach the player the game's mechanics. The structured challenges with predetermined tasks act as an easier practice than the "spontaneous challenges" of the unpredictable main gameplay. Lee Moriya, the creator of the Expedition game mode, said that the given quests encouraged the player to do things they would not have done normally and rewarded them with experience points. Marrero created Safari mode to allow the player to observe the simulated ecosystem without the stress of surviving or being pursued.
On March 28, 2024, the development of a second DLC titled Rain World: The Watcher was announced with a teaser trailer, featuring new regions, creatures, and a playable slugcat named the Watcher, also called the Nightcat. The DLC was developed by Videocult and modders that worked on Downpour; its marketing adopted alternate reality game puzzle elements for fans to decipher. The DLC was released on March 28, 2025, for PC only with content adapted from community mods. Console ports and a content update released on September 25.
Reception
The game received mixed reviews upon release according to review aggregator Metacritic with 43% of critics recommending it according to OpenCritic. Video game journalists praised the game's art design, but criticized the harshness of its gameplay mechanics, particularly its unpredictable deaths, ruthless enemies, and time-consuming hibernation requirements.However, Rain World active fanbase earned the game cult status and a large modding community. Downpour was received positively by critics, andas a DLC made of community-created contentsignificantly contributed to Rain World status as a cult hit according to journalist Simon Carless; Downpour sold 182,000 units on the video game distribution service Steam in the months surrounding its release and 280,000 units from March 2022 to February 2023.
Gameplay
Rain World gameplay frustrated reviewers, who often descended into apathy. Considering the sudden deaths, infrequent checkpoints, frequent repetition, punitive rain, inexplicable enemy movements, and clumsy controls, IGN wrote that these elements taken alone would be "tough but fair", but when considered together, "the odds are stacked so high against the player that it risks toppling the entire structure of the game". Though Game Informer recognized the game's intent to simulate the slugcat's suffering in a punishing, mysterious environment, they felt the lack of assistance, terrible controls, and unpredictable enemy movements ruined the resultthey did not complete the game to provide a score. Reviewers were bored by the repeated navigation of rooms with random enemies after each death, which tempered their urge to explore. Polygon reviewer was miserable following the loss of her multi-hour progression. She wrote about futility as a central tenet of Rain World and felt that she was not given the proper tools to survive. Critics especially lamented how the slugcat's jerky animations and imprecise throwing mechanics led to unwarranted deaths; Rock, Paper, Shotgun compared hypothetical instructions for those throwing mechanics to a "bizarre legal document".Reviewers concluded that while some hardcore players might enjoy its gameplay, Rain World excluded a large audience with its design choices. Paste compared the controls to Devil May Cry due to their required specificity, which would have frustrated even the most experienced of gamers, especially in partnership with the game's checkpoints. Rock, Paper, Shotgun called the checkpointing among the worst in modern platformers, and its challenge, unlike the similarly punishing Dark Souls, without purpose. Rain World karma gates, requiring a positive hibernate-to-death ratio, were arbitrary goals "disrespectful" of the player's time, according to GameSpot. Making the player trudge through an area a dozen times, IGN argued, is "antithetical" in a game in which exploration is the reward. In contrast, PC Gamer reviewer, with time, saw the game's cumbersome controls less as "bad design" than as "thematically appropriate" given the game's intent to disempower the player. The "thrilling desperation" of Rain World made it one of the best games of 2017 to PCGamesN reviewer: after hours and hundreds of deaths, he found that learning from each death was worthwhile. Though Rain World was a "beautiful, forward-thinking game", Paste concluded it should have been more accessible in regard to the game's "puzzles" that gave only "half of the pieces".
Some critics fondly recalled unique in-game encounters as they learned the game environment's unwritten rules. Unaware of how foreign figures would react, Rock, Paper, Shotgun treated new encounters as puzzles. This led to moments of fearful scrambling across a room to avoid a new, encroaching enemy type and discovering that others are harmless if left alone. Rain World was abundant with opportunities for a player to demonstrate ingenuity, according to GameSpot, whose highlights included making a mouse into a dark room's lantern, using weapons as climbable objects, and luring enemies into battle to distract from the slugcat. This factor was lacking in mainstream gaming according to PCGamesN, highlighting that learning to "manipulate and criss-cross the behaviours of Rain World menagerie" resulted in exhilaration. Nintendo World Report, reviewing in 2019, believed the unpredictable creature behavior deserved its "own level of praise", which differentiated it from the "typical goombas" of other games. Likewise, Shacknews 2018 review praised the game's pacing, where intense action from stumbling upon random beasts were sparse in between Rain World quiet gameplaythe reviewer likened this experience to a realistic ecosystem. Those critics considered these mysterious, perceptive interactions to be among the game's best features.
Art design
During development, Rain World animation became popular on social media for its "uncanny fluidity", which reviewers continued to praise at release. IGN described the slugcat's animations as beautiful and reactive to the angle and physics of movement, from clinging to poles to squeezing through ventilation. The reviewer said it was among the best aesthetics in a 2D game, with each screen showing abundant detail and meticulous craft. Its dark and sinister atmosphere was elegant to Eurogamer, who described the "floppy grace" of the slugcat and predators as pleasing. Kotaku had much anticipation for the game's graphicsespecially with the "pixellated cuteness that is the slugcat"despite falling into frustration with its gameplay. Nintendo Life 2024 review found the game's visuals beautiful enough to exceed its repetitive gameplay; they praised the opening cinematic's music and wordless storytelling, saying how it could function as its own short film. Though Nintendo World Report "fell in love" with Rain World gloomy and melancholic art style, the graphics were more interesting than beautiful to Polygon, who praised the limited color palette's role in distinguishing the slugcat, prey, and enemies from the environment.While some may compare the aesthetic to that of Limbo, Rock, Paper, Shotgun felt that Rain World had more in common with Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee : both featured dark yet attractive worlds, scary yet fascinating characters, frequent inter-enemy conflict, and frustrating controls. Rain World successfully depicted "the cruel indifference of nature", as described by GameSpot. Its imaginative and compelling landscapesurreal inhabitants in a bleak, alien atmosphererecalled the spirit of games like BioShock and Abzû, in which the reviewer was too attracted to the artistic detail to contemplate the credulity of the man-made environment. Paste and Eurogamer drew connections to Tokyo Jungle, which featured parallel themes of a savage ecosystem in a post-human environment. PCGamesN also complimented the game's narrative, describing how its simple survival premise turned into "a sci-fi epic that has you meditate on both the futility and beauty of life". Wandering Rain World landscape brought frequent feelings of loneliness to Shacknews reviewer, who appreciated the game's soothing soundtrack. In retrospective assessments, Eurogamer found surprise the game did not garner the same cultural significance as Hollow Knight ; the player's unique powerlessness in the post-apocalyptic ecosystem was praised especially. In a review of Downpour, PC Gamer summarized Rain World as a "daunting game, but a mesmerizing one to inhabit".