There are puzzles or monsters lurking around nearly every corner, and they will often require a lot of circling back or retries after death. While it's likely possible to beat Rain World in a much more condensed span of time, the game has the ability to engross for tens of hours despite a relatively small world.

This can be prevented by seeking shelter, where the player will hibernate until the rain is done - but they need to be properly fed to successfully do it and save their progress, or else they risk resetting to the last cycle that they had a full stomach on if they die. If a player takes too long on any one cycle, the world threatens to be deluged with rain, which spells an instant game over. The protagonist, the Slugcat, needs to eat to hibernate properly, and food is scarce. Rain World is a platformer at its heart, and it behaves like one for the most part, although it incorporates a heavy amount of survival genre tropes on top of the typical gameplay one might expect from a game that is ostensibly about traversing one environment to the next while avoiding enemies. Related: Nidhogg 2 Switch Review: A Match Made in Heaven Given how bleak Rain World can be, and how punishing its design is for anyone who doesn't feel comfortable with constantly dying to learn what to do in specific areas, those little breaks aren't even that unwelcome anyways. Even while lizard enemies repeat the same cycle of climbing, stumbling across a platform, and careening off of it to the floor, it's more humorous than gamebreaking.

Sometimes the enemy AI is, to put it mildly, totally ridiculous, their behavior borderline unexplainable, but then again, the world of Rain World is such that it's difficult to explain anything and be certain its the correct assumption. It's not hard to see that even when Rain World struggles, it does it in a way that is at the very least more endearing than frustrating.

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