this is an interesting video and it kind of reminds me of games on the opposite end of the spectrum with the exact same problem. which if i had to give a name to would be "open world survival sims." games like Dwarf fortress, Kenshi, and project zomboid to name a few. games that have comprehensive tutorials but are so big that they can be overwhelming to new players who just want to jump in and enjoy the game without having to research how not to die for 5 hours. all before they even get what's so fun about the game.
that’s why rain world is the best survival game i’ve played. it literally tells you how to jump, move, and pounce. the rest is to be found out by yourself. 11/10 game
@@znoopsy Back flipping was like the first thing I did when I first got control over my slugcat for the first time. I couldn’t do it again until the wiki taught me.
Rain World is something special. I think the main problem is that the barrier to entry is quite high due to the nature of the game's difficulty and people who just want cool, fast action aren't willing to put in the time to learn all the mechanics. It's just the way things are, but atleast it's getting appreciation here.
@@mythmakroxymore1670 Nothing wrong with that, there's a reason why games like Doom are so popular. I meant that it's difficult to attract most people to your game when your game is difficult to access for someone unfamiliar with it.
Rainworld doesn’t completely feel like a game but like a Buddhist exercise honestly. It’s a test of perseverance and patience. Work really really hard and get little reward, or just straight have that progress erased.
@@htwo1 wait is it not? I haven't gotten around to playing it yet but I've seen quite a few videos talking about it and how it has some of the best ai in gaming so I always assumed it was relatively popular for an indie game
Rain World's actually gonna get a free update to coincide with the upcoming DLC, which adds a ton of quality of life options to give the game more of a broad appeal. I couldn't finish it because of how long, frustrating and punishing it was, but this update might get me to finally pick it up again, maybe even buy the DLC.
As a rain world fan, I would say a big reason that the game isn’t more popular is that it isn’t quite fair. You can near the end of a cycle in an area such as sky islands that has very far apart shelters, and a gang of vultures just decide to chill in a room that you need to go through. Some people are into this though. It’s definitely a flawed game and nowhere near perfect, but it’s a pretty damn good ecosystem sim.
I was told to play the game blind, that there's "Nowhere in specific you have to go", just to end up in drainage early and be told "YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO GO THERE", and that apparently this happens to a lot of players. There was a part in sky islands where, if I went as fast as I could, I could reach a 3-way split that, no matter what, I'd only have enough time to explore one of before it would rain. Several attempts later, I learn the hard way the third path I took is the one with a shelter. Felt like I was playing Mario Maker and I was presented with a level you can only beat by picking the right door and praying you got it right. I think I made it pretty far into the game (where gravity starts turning on and off), but spending 20+ hours exploring and feeling like you haven't been rewarded for it yet, only punished, is very exhausting. I'd have loved to finish it, if not for the fear of sinking more hours in only to be rewarded with a dead end because I didn't know any better. Thankfully the game is actually getting a free update alongside the DLC that adds a ton of QoL settings to customize the experience. So at this point, I think sweeping these problems under the rug by saying "It's just not for everyone, that's the appeal of the game" is just silly.
@@delaneyelekes8660 it’s a great game tho. I recommend exploring that zero gravity area that you are in a bit more. That’ll give a much better understanding of what you should do. Just be prepared for quite the struggle.
@@cryobyte2170 Nah I'll just wait for the QoL update to drop, I think it'll make the game nicer for me lol. I don't have a deep appreciation for the unfair design like some people do, I'm more interested in the world and exploration, so I don't mind the game being easier.
Also I always figured that the game had a very set path it wanted you to follow. That path for me was always outskirts, industrial, wastes, shoreline, citadel, exterior, pebbles, chimney, sky islands, farm arrays, and subterranean. This places sky islands very far into the game, which I think explains why it’s so difficult. I won’t lie, I actually love the challenge of sky islands, the only issue is the karma gate into it.
Hi! Ex World Record holder here, thanks for showing Hyper Demon to more people! On the topic of why some games are niche is due to target audience - all games shown are made for very specific type of people who enjoy challenge and improvement through experimentation and discovery. Especially with Sorath titles, the games are inherently arcade titles, with no story nor clear goal - the gameplay loop revolves around trying to improve your score, so do source movement games where the goal is to get the best times. But I usually think the games being niche works in their favour; HD and DD communities are small yet dedicated it's always exciting to check the leaderboards whenever someone gets a new PB, and in case of HD, the top is REALLY contested with new scores being set in top 10 almost daily. In the end, good games don't have to be popular, rather, good games will easily amass dedicated yet small playerbases. And their size even works in their favour, where every community member gets to know eachother, and in case with HD it makes the competition that much more exciting considering everyone from the top knows one another. I recon the same magic wouldn't be here were there too many players to count. It applies to many communities, even the mentioned Source movement games and Rain World, where people share their progress, experiences and discoveries in their enthusiastic circles. The niche titles will remain niche since they weren't made with intent of being a hit or an approachable experience, but rather something one-of-a-kind that's targeted to a very specific group. Thank you for showing both DD and HD to more people, I can't wait to see more people join the cult of the dagger :)
I did a community service by getting four younger children into rainworld and they loved it! Somehow they got over the difficulty and one of them that was seven years old got to shoreline by himself without my help.
@@VoidWorldGaming that's a funny question considering I walked in on that exact situation of them getting chased by a vulture, and then out of the depths came a leviathan that then ate the vulture barely missing them. they were screaming.🤣
@@jeremyfitzhugh2897 lol that must a wild first encounter I can imagine it already, getting chased by what you think it the biggest creature only for a bigger fish to show up and devour it leaving you speechless as you didn't know that thing existed and you could of been devoured alongside the previously thought to be biggest creature
@@jeremyfitzhugh2897 That sounds like the perfect inroduction to a leviathan you could have, other than getting eaten by one as you cross a screen border
I like my games to be hard to learn. When I play a triple A title, 9 time out of 10 I just turned my brain off like I'm watching TV. Thanks Rain World for helping me to take care of these 2 neurons I've left.
There are games that have a sort of progressive tutorial. It Steals is probably the best example, because while it gives you an objective, it remains vague about how to play against the monsters. You have to either rely on clues in the map itself or, after dying a few times, resort to the “hint unlocked” page, which gives a detailed explanation. It’s a step in the right direction, made by a horror game which got some massive popularity after its first year of quiet existence. It doesn’t always tell you outright, not if you don’t want the help. You can figure it out for yourself if you want, but it also allows you to stumble through figuring the game out on your own. It Steals is a game that will try to respect your decision to stay as blind as possible, and i highly recommend you give it a shot.
I disagree with the take about the barrier to entry being part of the charm. I think games like Outer Wilds, Portal, and Antichamber do a great job of not explicitly teaching players mechanics, but placing them in a controlled environment where they can learn about them. I played Rain World, and learning mechanics either felt incredibly obvious, like spiders being stunned by flash plants, or hidden to the point where it should have been told, like throwing an object in the air violates newton's second law and gives you forward momentum. When you learn about the storms on Giant's Deep in outer wilds, you're not only placed in an environment where you can focus your attention on it, but you're also able to recover from dealing with it incorrectly much easier.
Rain World is also getting a QoL update too, so people who keep saying "The unfairness is part of the appeal" can finally stop saying that. Like sure, maybe it's part of the appeal to SOME people, but you can 100% fix that for others.
The barrier to entry doesn't give the charm, it's that the methodology of not teaching both gives the game charm and creates a barrier to entry. While the games you mentioned (and The Witness) are about executing teaching better, the games in the video are about games that don't teach at all, and still choose not to compromise by lowering the difficulty. They're two different types of games for two different tastes, of which a person might possess both, none, or one. Rain World is a unique case where the people who originally got into the game liked it for the latter appeal, but as the game spread via word of mouth and countless artworks, the game became "indirectly accessible". Now the game will introduce a QoL update which internalizes the information that surrounded the game, begging the question, will the de facto new player experience actually change? Is it possible to have an experience that appeals to people who prefer to teach themselves for more than a few years?
Another fun thing in Rain World is that if you master the controls you can get past more or less any creature, regardless of their position, spawn rng, etc. It makes mastering the game feel so rewarding because the movement rewards you by never showing you the death screen, and giving you some high adrenaline clutch escapes.
rain world was one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had. The fluid gameplay and seeing the world and creatures interact with each other is incredibly satisfying and I honestly doubt Ill ever get so see something like that ever again. Cannot wait for the DLC
Coming back to it after the update and DLC I can say that the new player experience looks a bit better. For starters the prompts between hibernation cycles giving you hints about mechanics that would be hard to discover alone work really well without feeling like a huge dump of information. The way the yellow overseer works seems to have been tweaked too since the prompts directing you to the right regions appear more often and seem to immediately try to direct you out of an area if you're going the complete wrong way (hopefully less players wandering into wrong regions early on and quitting). I also noticed that the suggested path away from Moon to FB has changed entirely and is much nicer to follow. Overall I'm not a fan of wiki games and having to search for answers online definitely takes away from a game for me. I'm glad to see that rain world has added QOL improvements while still requiring a lot of patience to work through. I'd be more hopeful of new people picking it up now than I was in the past.
I don't fully agree with the wording of the games "not telling you anything", because these games put a lot of effort into telling the player what is happening. The catch is that these games don't tell you what's going on in English or any other human language. They tell you how the game works through the language of gameplay, which is not a language everyone speaks fluently. I think Hyper Demon and Rain World are much more complex and nebulous with the way they present information to the player, perhaps not in a good way imo. There's dozens of tech in those two games you'd have no chance of understanding without reading a guide, watching footage, or stumbling upon it through experimentation. Devil Daggers, on the other hand, is simple and there's plenty of people who learn all the mechanics without any help. If you pay attention to the sound cues, visual cues, enemy behaviors, read the key config menu for controls, it's all there. One thing I love about this design approach is that it forces players to talk to eachother. There's something very nostalgic about having to actually interact with other people to understand how to improve at the game.
Fans: "Rain World FUNDAMENTALLY cannot have mass appeal, the unfair design is what makes it great!" Dev of Rain World: "'By the way I'm gonna add a quality of life options menu to go with the DLC, I understand the unfairness isn't for everyone and I hope this is a good compromise that lowers the barrier of entry."
The reason why I won't beat Rain World (for now) is not because it doesn't hold my hand, it's because it's so gruesome and gutteral. It made me more paranoid of bugs than ever, it really feels like an ecosystem where there is no rest ever and it made me more stressed than any horror game, and I'm literally scared to play.
Oh gosh, I too share this feeling. Even baby centipede scared me before I learned of their nature. And that's just one creature, because when you catch sigh of a new not-gentle-looking creature, it's natural to be scared of them. The first time I crossed path with a monster kelp, it was one in the drainage system, guarding a couple of passages, I immediately turned back and didn't return; there was the jetfishes too who seemed very dangerous at first. Then one area I got past, the Shaded Citadel... Oh gosh the nightmare. I somehow managed to get one lantern from a scarvenger (by pure luck, simply that. It passed there, I crouched and let go of my spear, he dropped one lantern, and left.), and even then it was incredibly, utterly terrifying. The spiders. Oh god. And the centipedes. I do not want, nor WILL come back there. It's dark. It cramped. It will awake your inner arachnophobia and turn it to eleven.
I had that on my first playthrough. It kinda went away after I completed first playthrough. If you can make it to the end, I highly recommend it, the end is spectacular and the DLC game modes are awesome! Also, I recommend avoiding Shaded Citadel the first time around, it is a cool area but pretty tough. Chimney Canopy and The Wall are a lot easier.
@@big_sis_moon I think my first playthrough of Rain World was one of the wakiest of them all. I went everywhere BUT the iterators, to the point I didn't visit the wall (I upgraded my karma only with the echoes). It went like this: outskirst > drainage system > garbage waste > industrial complex > shaded citadel > shoreline > subterranean > drainage system > outskirt > farm array > sky islands > chimey canopy > sky islands > farm arrays > subterranean
Rain world is genuinely one of my favourite games, I’m so happy I decided to get it when it came out despite all of the negative reviews it got! The movement took me about an hour to get used to the basics but when I noticed I could boost off of corners in pipes and would randomly do backflips when turning to run in a panic I began to realise how deep the movement actually was. Then when I started to catch onto what my goal was and seeing all of the new creatures I was completely hooked. The hardest thing I’ve ram into with this game is recommending it to friends and getting them to actually play it. I also have devil daggers and found that quite fun. Nice video!
Hollow knight introduced me to these kind of hard, single player 2D story games. I never really understood how much I cared about a games appearance until I was fascinated with hollow knights graphics. Recently got Rain world and it is the most beautiful pixel art I’ve ever seen.
Devil daggers & Hyper Demon are two of my absolute favorite games. I love them so much, and I am so glad that I found them. Went out on a limb grabbing DD when I seen it on sale for like $5. I thought “Ah man, that looks kinda like the original quake, I’ll give that a try” oh boy was I wrong. Devil Daggers is one of the most hardcore shooter arena survival games I have ever played. Hyper demon, well, that’s a whole other game I have yet to wrap my head around. As for Rain World, I have heard of it but, I have yet to grab it and play it. It looks absolutely incredible, and like I could sink countless hours into it. This was a great video my man, keep it up! Stay gaming!
I enjoy all of the games you have mentioned and I think part of the charm is the obscurity of the games. I started playing among us the week it came out in early access on mobile years ago and it was fun until it became popular. The community of smaller games is much better than the community of bigger games, imo. The lack of a tutorial is also crucial to some games. If you need to learn how to get good, then you need to learn.
I would rather have no tutorial than a god-awful one (looking at you TF2, i have seen many many engies turtle and i know damn well they played the shitty tutorial)
on january 19th, there will be a free update with sort of accessibility settings like "extra turorials" or "loading screen tips" i just hope they wont be toggled by default, but if not, it might just solve a part of the issue
Rain World absolutely does not have a grueling or unduly punishing new player experience. You already know that the fact that it does not hold your hand through every single learning curve is an artistic choice, but I'm here to tell you that it's not painful if you aren't preconditioned to feel averse to such experiences. I've been playing it intermittently with a friend's daughter who isn't even 10 yet and lacks almost all of the fundamental gaming training that we all take for granted, so she's already lost and unprepared *just to play a game with a keyboard instead of an iPad on-screen-controller.* The magical thing is, Rain World *already knows* she's lost. It *expected* that. She can barely use the basic movement system, but she doesn't care. She's already hiding from lizards and watching them and making inferences about their thought patterns and behaviors based only on the simple audio-visual information the game provides about its world. Even as far as platforming is concerned, the best solutions in Rain World are almost always the easiest, most reliable platforming mechanic. It really never *requires* you to use anything more advanced than wall to wall jumping. Most of the hardest challenges in Rain World only require the patience and creativity you could bring to bare if you weren't so bogged down with decades of assumptions and conditioning. The reason it will "never be popular" is not because of a barrier to entry, there is no barrier to entry really at all. You just enter the game, and if you're actually still open and inquisitive, it's instantly exciting and transports you to another world.
you've actually sold me on Rain World now, i've known about it & watched your other vid on it but i actually do want to play now. time to wait a year so i forget all those mechanics spoilers
i feel like Dwarf Fortress fits into the category of "obscure complicated hard game that has little to no handholding" as well. I mean it has a wiki but it's not much help
Hyper demon looks like it was designed to Trigger people's epilepsy. I don't have that but still it hurts my eyes and I can barely comprehend it at least devil dangers is comprehendable
Song name is "Out of Whose Womb Came The Ice?" By Chris Christodoulou. It's part of the OST for Risk of Rain 2. Another masterpiece of a game, this one is.
Everything about Rain World is incredible. I highly recommend it to everybody. Even if you're not one for difficult games, I still recommend it, because you can at least play the Monk, which is the "easy" mode. If you have to look up some tips and tricks or guides or whatever, then do that. It's a one of a kind experience.
I have like 3 hours on Rain World so far, and it has clapped my ass unfairly so many times already, it takes effort to launch it again. I remember leaving the outskirts, looking around at the new place I just discovered, and just before I went to sleep there, a lizard has dropped 3 stories, right onto my head, and killed me instantly. Ofc I had to go back grinding the Outskirts again.
Crypt of the Necrodancer is a game who could fit, but different from the games on the list, the game is not hard because you need to learn everything alone, but is because the game is just very hard. Most of the people who played it didn't played much, and said they recommend the game because the ideia is cool (almost half of the players haven't the zone 1 achievement). I still love it though, but sadly most people didn't got so far on the game
Absolutely agree with the second point you made, about community content using one program to do something it's not meant for. As somebody who's (trying) to make a parkour map in Raft, an open-world survival game with not-so-great physics and basically 0 ground for writing text, teaching advanced tech that actually makes the gameplay fun is so fruiting to work around. Still fun to make though 👍
I think Noita, although a very different game, has a very similar deal, Its tutorial literally is: on this rock is written that awsd, also mouse, Switch item slots like this, and this button does something, look its a kick, What you got to curios, switched wands, shot and did not run from the bomb you produced, get gud scrub, I like the fact that the game introduces itself this way, it is hard yes, but also rewarding when you figure something new out.
@@funguy398 try killing the fire wizard with the starting wand, Also I would argue that a lot of the danger in noita comes from the envoirment, fire hydrants and regular fire for example, deal a lot of damage, in addition, in noita it is really easy to be a danger for yourself, by for instance using any electricity or explosive spell its real easy to end your whole career.
“Wow, this slugcat looks so cute and the movement feel so smooth! Oh look, a guide on Steam called ‘how to move’ it’s probably going to be another joke guide that says how to jump and move left and right. Wait, why is this so long…?”
I wanted to play rain world for myself, and im a very impatient person so i looked up longplays, and ignored spoilers just to see what the game was about. And i regret that decision so much, because now i know everything! How Karma works, what echo's are, how each slugcat plays, etc. I still plan on getting and playing the game one day, but the experience will be very simple now that I've ruined the challenge for myself. If anyone reading this wants to get into rain world, don't make my mistake and go in blind.
Honestly, I think Rain world is really cool. I like the story a lot and I like it's design philosophy, everything. But I just can't play it myself. I don't have the attention span for it, and I'm just not good enough at games in general. I feel like it would frustrate or bore me long before I ever got good enough at it to make significant progress. But I still appreciate the game itself, and I REALLY like the story and the way the mechanics of the game tie into the interesting narrative the game tells.
As a person who was only able to enjoy rain world after some visits to the wiki, it didn't feel like "learning", but trying absolutely random things in hopes that one of in a million of them works. Like, if you don't want to rely on randomly discovering game mechanics with low chance of occurrence, you'd need to bang your head against a wall and hope that in 10 square kilometers you'll eventually find a hole. This is literally how discovering movement tech feels like. Is that really a rewarding learning experience?? I have platinum on downpour, so it's not that I'm bad or lack dedication to learn, I'll forever hate this absurd lack of clarity in some aspects that leads to massive wastes of time on the player's part (on my first playthrough i went outskirts - drainage - subterranean - depths and was stuck there for a while, yeah, SO fun) Obviously I'm hard malding, but i don't think rain world should be praised for it's lack of accessibility. There must be a better way to implement the sense of discovery in a game than this
Rain world holds a place in my heart, despite starting to play recently. Also, i don't understand how people say that artificer's easier than Gourmand. i've litearly made no progress in artificer, while i litearly got to chimney canopy as Gourmand. Also, my main food are lizards now...
I actually found Rainworld thanks to some artist i followed, and as soon as i saw how the game sort of worked, i decided to play it myself all blind. I'm still on the learning but uff, gotta say this game was exactly what i've been looking for.
thanks for spoiling part of the discovery you were gushing about 🤣 for real though, great video, I just wish I hadn't clicked on it before finishing my first playthrough of Rain World
Rainworld couldve been Hollow Knight, both games got me into indie games in general and both captivated me with both gameplay and atmosphere but while games journalists chose to adore HK, treating it like the Dark Souls of indie games, they chose to say ''rainworld too hard'' and doom rainworld to be a niche game, its odd how sometimes difficulty makes people like a game ''its the dark souls of whatever genere'' ''this game doesnt hold your hand, it respects the intelligence of the player'', Rainworld couldve gone mainstream, thats what pains me the most, its not so wierd that its necesarily forced into being obscure.
It's not that you suck, the game can just be really unfair. Don't listen to people who say it just requires mastery- A lot of the mastery involves techniques you wouldn't know unless you looked it up, and there's still a lot that can trip you up. There's a reason the dev plans on updating the game to add QoL changes.
Gotta admit the game has a very steep learning curve, like, in the beginning its really-really hard since you don't know nothing about: the surrounding location, what hazards are to be awared of, what enemies exist and what can they do, hell, even what your slugcat can do wont reach you from the start 😅 Once you get used to this dangerous world and what to expect from it, you really start to enjoy the game since you're prepared and have tools to manage your journey go on. My problem with such games was always a fear for my character, too afraid to loose it - and that's why my progress at the beginning was thaaat slow, I was just scared to risk and learn stuff. Tried to collect as much karma as I could in hopes to keep it like that. But a better strategy was to stay level 1 karma and just explore what are limits of my char and enemies, die a lot of times, but to learn not just about the game, but also to overcome the fear. Remember how I was scared AF those flying noodles but turned out those were just an easy prey 🙃
That begs the question how league of legends became such a popular game. The tutorial is basically useless and if you don't have friends that explain the game to you, you have to learn over 160 champions with 5 abilities each, items, builds, combos, jungeling etc. It also doesn't add much to the game, it just makes you lose more games than you should.
I mean, that's technically not true, because YT has already dozens (if not hundreds) of videos about Rain World, some of them contains few thousands views, other contains hundreds of thousands and few of them got even million of views, and videos about RW starts to poping out in my recommendations more and more recently, which means it's in fact becomes more and more known, same goes to Oneshot, which people still calling underrated and unpopular but their videos actually has hundreds of thousands and millions views. Comparing to 8 billions people living on Earth 1-2 millions are not much, but by itself, without comparison it's a damn huge amount of people, who actually know about this and other games.
Me and my over a thousand hours of this game in just a couple months (most played game ever for me, on Steam anyway) can confirm that Rain World is amazing lol
Full disclosure, I came into the game on recommendation for a game to explore and get lost in, and I can only speak for myself since I dropped it around the halfway mark; the skill ceiling was not the hard part for me. All it took was doing some searches for guides to fix any misunderstanding. My main issue with the game was the map was gigantic but had no incentive to explore it, the only things you got were unlocks for the Arena. Going off the beaten path was cool, but it was kinda dumb that the path they wanted you to follow was the first that had silkworms, something fun that used its silly physics to their advantage. It also didn't help that their version of a fast travel was locked behind in game achievements and was limited to like.. 8 uses; so you have a colossal map that you have to go through by foot. I get that it would lessen the harsh survival aesthetic but that also makes it less fun to explore personally. A lesser gripe was that if you held a spear, other spears wouldn't be highlighted if you passed them which means you had to really pay attention to the pure black foreground for something that could just be a random pole shape and not a spear. It also means you'd have to go in to pick up and stab the creature you just hit with it, leaving yourself open to instant death, lowering your meditation level and having to grind that back up if you wanted to pass any roadblocks. And the final nail in the coffin was that because the AI was either smart or so stupid it was smart, the damn things would camp tunnel exits. Or you'd come out of a Shelter to dreadfully get back to the new area you were figuring out just for a centipede to hog a narrow corridor to the quickest route. Or worse case, I'd have a big centipede in a Shelter. A Shelter. I think the final nail in the coffin was getting to the top of The Leg just to get rained on, or it was reaching the very bottom of the map just to have no clear exit. I remember both of those experiences leaving me very defeated.
Personally I didn’t like how it pretty much tells me to go to drainage system because it is a lower cycle, I get all the way through it, get to subterranean, get all the way through it, get to depths, and pretty much the game just says this was all pointless and I need to go across the entire map to get more karma then go all the way back. That thoroughly killed the experience for me honestly
Haven't even watched the video yet, but if we're talking about Rain World, I gotta hand in my 63 minutes of playtime and say it. Too difficult, I've been raised on high-octane shooters so of course I like hack n' slash and light strategy games. Rain World attracted me initially due to it being a Metroidvania, but I never actually expected the game to have such a high skill floor that'd need a significant amount of time to actually get past to start properly playing. Controls were a bit annoying but isn't as big of a reason as what I already mentioned. I'm still wondering if I should give it another try any time soon...
to be honest rain world really isn't a metroidvania; it doesn't share any of the common characteristics besides non-linear regions. Honestly I feel like the metroidvania comparison is detrimental to the game, because If you go in expecting that hollow knight-esque experience, you're bound to be disappointed. However, if you treat it as an exploration game, where you experiment and are rewarded for your own discoveries, it can be an incredible experience. Personally it's my absolute favourite game, the complexity of both the enemies and movement make it very rewarding to get good at. there's a DLC coming out pretty soon, that will also include a free update which adds optional tutorials and other improvements to make the game more accessible to newcomers. So if you're still interested, maybe give it another try after Jan 19!
I had the worst experience playing the game, and I wanted to enjoy it. I entered Drainage and the Sky Islands early, and was told I was "going the wrong way." You're told to follow the yellow worm but, the yellow worm doesn't appear in EVERY room, and the second you veer off track as a result, it stops appearing, meaning you can go hours without realizing there's even a hint system at all. And complex movement sounds fun, but you're not gonna figure out speedrun strats without looking up all the complex moves you can do, so as cool as that is it's not something everyone can appreciate. The game also goes VERY long periods of time without rewarding you with anything, but it CONSTANTLY throws dead ends at you to waste your time. Thankfully the game is getting a QoL settings menu as a free update to go along with the release of the DLC. So people can stop saying "The game being hard to get into is a good thing, it's the nature of the game and it can't be changed."
@@vixian3127 Oh yeah, definitely not a Metroidvania. Instead, I like to think of it as a "Metroidbrainia" (not my term but I forget where I got it from). Basically, instead of gaining mechanical upgrades, you’re building up a base of knowledge as you progress. The end effect is similar in that you expand your toolset over time, but with a Metroidbrainia, you take that toolset with you into future playthroughs. It’s why you can only truly experience a game like Outer Wilds once.
I once accidentaly stabed a white lizard in the mouth on The Wall on my first playtrought, after trying to replicate it and learning how I did it changed how I faced lizards completely 15/10
i looked at the rain world wiki when i played i remember that i still learned a lot by my self but still this game "hyper demon" seems to fit my bill quite well i might try something new and this time avoid my previous mistakes
I want to like Rain World really hard. I also (normally) like exploration and finding stuff out by myself. I played through fckng Bleak Faith: Forsaken and liked it, so my patience and my resistance to junk clearly isn't the problem. I'm now 100 min. into Rain World. I like some parts of it, found some stuff out, but am mostly just frustrated. At the beginning area the most important things seem quite understandable to me. After the gate also shown at 8:16 in the video i'm now in an area where my best option seems to be suicide running in random directions until i find a way onward. (It's not fun after half an hour.) Half of the yellow hologram-creatures doesn't make any sense to me or flicker to brief to be readable to me. And when i actually tried to not die a few times, i enter a pipe from an empty room, that leads to an other empty room, but as soon as i am in the second room a purple lizard just spawns into me, like it followed me through the pipe (even though there was nothing in the room before). Another time i jump somewhere down and find out, that there is fall damage, when you fall out of some (inconsistent) screens. So i slide down the wall and ... just die anyways, because the killbox don't likes me, even hearing the sliding-audio while dying. Like, ... i know, some stuff surely makes sense after further observation, but the stuff that feels just like bugs, or inconsistent design breaks the experience quite a bit. It's so sad, i genuinely believe, there is a good game behind all this and i want to experience that, but i don't know if it's worth the effort. Sorry for complaining so much. I'm just a bit frustrated.
On my first playthrough it took me 14 hours and around 100 cycles until i reached the end, in the process i felt like giving up sometimes but im glad i didnt lol
I feel you. I’ve completed the game multiple times and I still have to be in a particular mood to play it. If I can offer you an unsolicited tip, try to take your time and pay attention to the little intricacies of how different creatures behave, both on their own and around each other. You just might be able to use that knowledge against them.
The new update, Remix, released a bunch of difficulty-altering and accessibility options, perhaps try playing around with those until the game feels more comfortable
Rain World lost my interest years ago when I played it - I knew there was cool story stuff past the early barrier, but I had no reason to do it. Then Downpour revealed new slugcats with cool abilities, and now i've played over 200 hours of it. Sometimes, it won't be about the game having a high skill ceiling and no handholding, sometimes it's about having something to look forward to. But, that can also be to the detriment of a game. In the case of me playing Downpour, it was a major benefit. Another game that does very little handholding, is VERY difficult to talk about due to ... Reasons relating to Knowing things, and rewards people who know what they're doing, is Tunic. Also Outer Wilds. I suppose I wouldn't call either particularly difficult, but they're crippled on the fact it's Hard to talk about them with someone who doesn't know anything without breaking their experience. B'yea, before Downpour, Rain World had the video's crux issue with me. After? Cool scugs.
I personally love the game because of the unique ai, so fascinating to watch them route and move throughout the environment, even when buggy I like the way it glitches, so unnatural
This is how old school games did it no tutorial you just had to figure it out yourself and sometime you talked to other kids about it and helped each other out.
I came here to figure out why I don't have friends because not a single person in my school even knows what rain world is. I still dont know why nobody knows what it is. Can someone help out?
Rain World is Beautiful landscape Filled with everything to explore from Studying creatures to throwing rocks at lizards. (by the way the end of the game is WEIRD so go play it)
I've beaten the game twice as monk and artificer. I had to use the wiki because not noticing a shelter is nearby is fatal for the later areas due to how sparse they were. I'm not sure how anyone can play the game blind. Imo Monk felt fair and balanced (assuming you used the wiki map of course). Artificer however nearly broke me lol. Fighting scavs feels like playing a Counter Strike match where you're alone and every one on the other team has AWPs
why did this get recommended to me if... i have 500+ hours in rain world and the dlc, downpour and all campaigns beaten.. (surv, monk, hunter, etc etc.) and also 170+ mods (DMS, regions, cosmetics, game modifiers, etc etc) *lolll...*
"You should play this and learn the mechanics of the enemies for yourself" lists the mechanics of multiple enemies (I know you had to to get your point across I just thought it was funny/ironic)
Rain world Is absolutely one of the best games ever made, but the argument is bonkers. High entry barrier is not what makes it good. Its emergent complexity and absolute freedom make it so memorable. The high entry barrier is merely a consequence of this complexity, and it's absolutely in our power to tune that down to humane levels. The game could have taught you much better indirectly. Lots of mechanics rely on you grabbing things, yet things aren't universally grabbable. There's just too little stuff to grab to reliably establish "grabbing" as the main progression paradigm. That's why people routinely hit the wall with grappling worms or raindeer. Not because they're stupid peons afraid of exploration.
I'm okay with Rain World not becoming super popular, i want people to know about it but also popular games end up becoming toxic/gaining a at least somewhat toxic fanbase
I love games that are fast paced with lots of combat and it's even better when ya add the acid trip like look to it just looks like so much fun btw is hyper demon free or do you gotta pay for it?
So glad I went into Rainworld completely absolutely blind. All I knew about was the slugcat and 2d platformer. That is what sold me Worst decision of my life
@pezvonpez I was more confused and relieved. I didn't care or caught up with the story at all. By the end of the game, I was very annoyed by constantly needing to look up guides for directions. Sure, the game gave me a slight idea of where to go, but at one point, I got lost for a day in am area that was completely optional. I was more of a fan of the gameplay and atmosphere. The game did a really poor job getting the player interested in the story.
I thought the ending was strange, but I was more confused wondering "oh, did my family die? Did I go to the afterlife to be with them?" Because the game doesn't really have you complete your mission.
