[REVIEW] Rain

Falling on my head like a memory.

Rain‘s premise immediately caught my attention. An invisible protagonist who can only be seen as an outline when the rain pours down on him? This could go so many interesting places, and I was eager to see what the developers did with the concept.

On the run from terrors of the night.

The game’s introduction is done as a watercolour storyboard, telling about a young sick boy who looks out his window one rainy night to see a girl only made visible by the falling rain. She is chased off by a terrifying beast. The boy follows, and is drawn into a world of night and rain where he, too, is invisible, only seen in outline when he stands in the rain.

You play the role of the boy in Rain, at first trying to catch up to the girl you first saw, then working with her to try to find safety from the pursuing creatures known as Unknowns. Some are beastly, some are more humanoid, all looks like they’re made of bones, and all of them are just as invisible as you are. You survive by staying one step ahead of them, hiding under overhangs so the rain doesn’t touch you and thus you’re invisible again, running far enough that you’re out of reach, which is necessarily because you’re in a one-hit-kill situation.

Fortunately dying has no real consequence, as if you’re caught you merely start over from the most recent checkpoint, which are very frequent. There is no death counter; you just try again. Most of the time to way to avoid things is very obvious, and the deaths come from little mistakes like poking a toe out from under shelter too quickly, or getting caught on a little piece of street debris as you run. Rarely are the puzzles anything other than obvious.

The few times they are a bit ambiguous, though, it’s usually a flaw in the environmental design. And I saw flaw because if I could see first-person, through the boy’s eyes, some deaths simply wouldn’t have happened. I would have been able to better judge the distance between me and the thing I’m trying to climb onto, or been able to tell the difference between a wall and a gap in the fence when I’m trying to get to safety. Especially when the cityscape you’re running through is rainy and grey, with colours washed out and dim lighting, and you yourself may only be visible as a human-shaped blur in the downpour. Sometimes not even that; you’re damp footprints on the ground.

But really, with the game’s numerous opportunities to try again, it doesn’t get that frustrating. And the game itself is relatively short, with even new players generally being able to beat it within a few hours.

Tell me a story.

The game itself is narrated as it progressed, making the style similar to a story being read from a book rather than an adventure being lived. This works well with the opening and ending watercolour scenes, and also with some of the more fantastical elements at play in Rain‘s story.  Why do most of the Unknowns end up locked in cages later in the story? It doesn’t matter. Why are the Unknowns harmed by light? They just are. Why does it stop raining when the first falls unconscious? That’s just part of the story.

I’d say you don’t really question these elements because of the game’s storybook feel, but that wouldn’t entirely be true. Most of these revelations come at you hard and fast toward the end, yielding questions with no answers. It’s interpretive, and that can work really well for some players, but I personally prefer things to be a little bit more concrete in their explanations. I know some things about the game without really understanding the why behind them, and that makes it difficult to really talk about the game’s final chapter.

Spoilers ahead!

The game is broken into 8 chapters, and as you go, you discover that both you and the girl have physical forms that are tucked up in bed, unable to awaken. There are hints that the girl was also sick, as her ghostly form is seen coughing a few times. The Unknowns not only want to hunt you down and hurt you, but one in particular seems very intent on keeping you from waking your physical self up, and thus leaving the rainy night world in which the Unknowns typically live.

In Rain‘s final chapter, you confront the last remaining Unknown as you try to get through brightly lit doors and return to the waking world. At one point, the girl is knocked unconscious, and the rain stops, starting again as soon as you revive her. As a gameplay element, this is interesting because you have to find an unmoving body without the rain to tell you where she is or even really where you are; it demonstrates just how lost you are even though you’re so close to the end. But it suggests that the girl, despite being here because she’s currently unconscious and ill, is tied to the reality of the rainy distorted French cityscape you’ve been running through the whole time. Which has also changed a couple of times throughout the game. Is this the Unknown’s world? Are you interlopers? Is your very presence screwing with the fabric of reality there and the Unknowns are just trying to get rid of you so their lives can go back to normal? Are you actually the bad guy here?

Your plan, as narrated by the text on the screen, is to drag the last Unknown through the lit doors and out into the real world, where the light will hurt it so severely that it can’t hurt you anymore. Okay, but then what? Will it still be invisible in the waking world? Will it be visible only during the rain even there? There seems to be no worry of consequences, and yes, you can chalk that up to it being a plan devised by two frightened children, but it’s demonstrative of the way the narrative falls apart at the end. There’s only so far a person can suspend their disbelief. We saw in the opening scene that Unknowns can be physically manifest in the waking world, as they were chasing the girl when you stared out the window.

Ultimately,  the Unknown is dragged through the doors and the children resign themselves to living in a world of rainy twilight to keep the last monster at bay. When suddenly the Unknown bursts back through the door, collapses on top of the boy, and dies. Trapping the boy beneath its body. A short scene later, and the boy is awake in his bed, and he runs outside to find the girl’s house, as for a time the rainy world mirrored the real world. She steps outside to greet him, and all is right once again, as they have, somehow, both been freed from the nightmare because… reasons, I suppose.

I said earlier that parts of this game were very interpretive, and though I like a lot of the symbolism in the last chapter, it comes across like somebody getting quickly bored of their story and rushing to finish it, just to get it done. The tone of dreary perseverance and loneliness changes to something more action-based as you run and run with no end in sight, until there needs to be an ending so the game can finish. It feels rushed, and, again, leaves me with more questions than answers.

When I have to fill in the blanks with a load of maybes and twists of logic, things were not explained properly.

And yet…

For all that I have problems with the end-game narrative, I still did enjoy the creative approach to the game. Having to plan ahead and dodge mud puddles so your feet don’t become visible, or track your footprints so you know where you are when you’ve taken cover were great elements that brought a lot to what would otherwise have been just another action game with a slight gimmick. The storybook feel worked well for it, allowing you to suspend just enough disbelief to go through most of it without feeling like too much was out of place. The art style, especially in the watercolour scenes, was simply gorgeous, and it was plain to see that a lot of love and attention went into  the game’s aesthetic design.

It was a decent game. The controls were tight and smooth, the Kanno Yugo soundtrack lent a wonderful ambiance (along with the constant sound of falling rain), and aside from the ending, the pacing was good and even. It’s not a perfect game, but it was a good one, and I enjoyed my time playing it, immersing myself in the atmosphere. There’s some replay value, too, as on the second time around, memories are scattered throughout the city for you to collect and uncover more secrets and story. It’s a good way to get players coming back for more, and to add interest for those who don’t just feel like doing the same puzzles over again for no additional reward.

A game worth playing at least once, though probably not more than twice.