'Rain' Review - Not Splashy, But A Quiet, Artistically Composed Fable

Rain beguiles with its aesthetic and novel mechanic, but suffers from a lack of variety.

Rain is a product of Sony'sSNE -1.37% PlayStation C.A.M.P program, where ideas can be submitted and, if successful, see them converted into a game. In this case, Acquire, known for the Tenchu and Way of the Ninja franchises, were brought in to help realise the creator’s vision. Previous C.A.M.P games such as Trash Panic and Tokyo Jungle have shown an offbeat sensibility, and Rain, although orthodox in much of its execution, brings its own peculiarities to the PlayStation platform.

Claire de lune

Rain begins in a slow, quiet, dreamlike and oddly European way, with the story of a boy leaving his sickbed in the middle of the night after seeing a translucent girl pursued by a monster, only to discover that he has himself become invisible. This introduction is told in splashy, raindropped watercolors as accordion music plays in the background. The city the boy is exploring feels initially French, but as you proceed it becomes clear that it is a mashup of European elements – gothic cathedrals, Italian graffiti, English warning signs. In essence, the game takes place in a sort of atemporal Ghibliverse – somewhere in an indefinable decade in a Japanese confection of European elements.

The arches and passageways of the city provide meaning to the game’s core mechanic. The boy, and the frightened and equally invisible girl he is chasing, are being hunted by strange beasts. In the unending rain, they are visible, so they can escape their pursuers by finding cover. However, those pursuers also become invisible without rain falling on them, so an unwary trip through a covered area can be fatal. The player has to watch for footprints – their own and those of their pursuers.

Throughout each of eight levels, the hunt is led by the Unknown – a terrifying, overlarge humanoid with one sharp, extended finger, used to sense the air for the children, and a huge, clublike arm to crush them. As the game goes on, the boy can find ways to fight back against the monsters, although there is never an attack button – running and hiding is nearly always the best and only plan.

The monsters are beautifully designed – dog-dinosaurs with whirls of bone for bodies, and the genuinely frightening Unknown. Hiding in a locker when it opens the door and stares at the empty space where you are standing is a nerve-wracking experience. The game in general does an excellent job of connecting mood and design: the labyrinthine city’s mix of elements and languages has a dreamlike quality, and the boy and girl, despite their translucency, are as winning as a pair of children in peril in a video game should be. Little animation touches – the boy stumbling as he runs, or steadying himself against a wall, or raising his arms against the rain – are neat pieces of emotional design.

The core mechanic also feels genuinely fresh, although really it is only swapping darkness for cover in a stealth mechanic. Throughout the game, blocks can can be moved or boards lowered to create spots of shelter and emergency hiding places.

Wet through

The problem is that the same shelter and the same hiding places recur, within the game and from game to game. There is a right way to solve the puzzles in Rain, and it is always the same way. The splash caused by running through a puddle will lure a hunting beast away from an entrance. The scaffolding always has to be smashed by leading two of the bone dogs head-first into it. The block always needs to be moved to create a bay of shelter. The Unknown can only be distracted by playing the church organ. Combined with this is the fixed camera, which is necessary but gives the impression that what you see is not only what you get but all you get.

When the girl joins your character, around halfway through the game, it opens up a new, collaborative element, just when the game was starting to lag. However, although she add a number of options, the implementation feels familiar. You may be pressing the circle button to boost her up to a high ledge so she can drop a ladder down for you, but outside its animations this process differs little from jumping and climbing a lower ledge. The sense of cooperation works in some more set-piecey areas – such as a spooky circus tent stalked by the Unknown – and there is an edge to being separated from your companion and having to run parallel to her, trying to reach her as the Unknown stalks after her. However, the artifice is too easily seen through – if you keep pushing the stick in the right direction, you will meet up with her again, in time to drop a board to allow her passage or concealment.

Put simply, Rain is very linear. Played in bursts, this should be less noticeable, but in a single, three-hour sitting it provided a definite sense of repetition. By the last level, although the art style changed again to an equally accomplished remix of the earlier levels, I felt I had had enough, mechanically,  of the puzzles, which too often involved running to the glowing object on the screen and manipulating it in the permitted fashion. The various mechanics – large, placid monsters that can be walked under as mobile cover, rhinoceros-like monsters prone to charging and ramming, puddles of mud which makes the player character visible until it can be washed of – are introduced and quickly discarded. And, since the gameplay is linear, the replay value of the game will be limited – collectable “memories” are added, but it may be a while before the urge to collect them returns.

Shower with praise?

Rain is a hard game to judge. The things it does right are often magical things, but they seem to be accompanied by a related failing. At times, it touches on the magical – conveying the confusion and anxiety of a child lost in an unfamiliar world. But that world’s assets repeat to the point that one catches oneself saying “oh, I felt that sense of anxious wonder half an hour ago, didn’t I?”. The girl, first a quarry and then a companion, is clearly referential of Ico, and the wordless, companionable child’s romance between the two characters does a little heartstring-tugging – but at the same time being paired up with her involves a lot of standing in place and boosting her up. The narrative is mysterious and evocative, but as it goes on concern grows that it will not actually evoke anything - that it will be a sphinx without secrets. The play with visibility and invisibility at the core of the game is beguiling, but trying to navigate by your own footprints, when your view is sometimes obscured by objects in front of the character in the fixed camera view, can be a pain.

Rain is a pretty, precious little game – although it is little both in play time and in variation. It is perhaps best thought of as a story to be dipped into over a few evenings, never intending to be so difficult as to slow your progress or push you out of its fragile immersion, with stealth mechanics and platforming that, while never complex, will have your heart in your mouth when the vulnerable boy and girl are running towards a jump with the Unknown chasing them down, despite the linearity of the trail you are being led down.

Rain

Platform: PS3, PS Vita
Developer: PlayStation C.A.M.P, Acquire
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Released: October 1 2013
Price: $14.99
Score: 7/10