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Rain World is a 2017 survival game-platform game video game developed by Indie game 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 a "slugcat"an agile cat-like animalthat is tasked with survival in a derelict and hostile world. The slugcat traverses through the remnants of an industrialized ancient civilization as it searches for its family. It uses debris as weapons to escape from lethal predators, scavenge for food, and reach safe hibernation rooms before the deadly torrential rain arrives. Other game modes include multiplayer.
Beginning in 2011, Rain World was in development for over six years by a two-man team and funded through Kickstarter, who intended to simulate a realistic ecosystem; creatures act independently of the player and perpetually wander through the environment. Rain World uses procedural animation and conveys much of its narrative through environmental storytelling, adopting an adaptive Lo-fi music and Electronic music. 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 understanding its higher-level function.
Rain World received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its art design and procedural animation but criticized its difficulty, checkpoint system, and controls; some of these concerns were addressed with later updates. Despite the mixed reviews, the game 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, receiving generally positive reviews from critics. A second content pack titled Rain World: The Watcher was released on March 28, 2025, for PC.
Upon death, the slugcat loses one "karma". Karma is gained upon hibernating, and the player can prevent losing one karma by eating a yellow "karma flower". The flower appears in set locations and is replanted wherever the slugcat dies while under its effects. The slugcat must meet a specific karma level to pass through karma gates, which lie at the borders of the game's regions, allowing further progression.
Predators range from camouflaged carnivorous plants to vultures and Komodo dragon-like lizards. Many enemies can kill the slugcat in one attack, and some have variations, such as the differently-colored lizards, which all have unique characteristics. All creatures possess dynamic behavior and perpetually wander game's world independently from the player, occasionally battling and hunting each other; without a set path for predators to explore, the player is faced with problems they cannot avoid. The player is expected to evade predators but can injure them by hitting weak points with spears. The slugcat may carry three items at a time: two in their hands and one in their stomach. When throwing an item, the slugcat uses its right hand first and can swap the items' places. 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 game mode, where the player freely spawns and interacts with objects and creatures from the game.
Rain World post-apocalyptic setting is destroyed by ecological catastrophe and illustrated in pixel art. As a form of environmental storytelling, its 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 a map to check their progress in the world.
Downpour also adds three other game modes: Safari mode allows the player to freely spectate the ecosystem and control any living creature within it. Challenge mode provides 70 unique scored challenges with preset objectives. Expedition provides random missions that award experience points upon completion. Downpour's release was also accompanied by full co-op mode functionality and the free Rain World Remix upgrade, which added accessibility options, ways to customize game difficulty, and better modding support so that players could modify the game more easily.
The Watcher DLC adds the titular slugcat, new regions, and creatures. The DLC's additions are significantly larger than the original game.
Eventually, the slugcat stumbles upon Five Pebbles, a massive, infected, sentient, and semi-biotic supercomputer 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 a sea of "Void Fluid", where it can "".
More information about the setting can be obtained by bringing pearls—that contain Logbook and other information—to another damaged iterator named Looks to the Moon, whose structure had collapsed and submerged into the shoreline.
Originally, Rain World was conceived as a single-room multiplayer platformer where the player would hunt one prey as they run from one bigger predator. 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 designed Rain World enemies to live their own lives, in which they hunt and struggle to survive, rather than serve as obstacles for the player. Enemies dynamically wander without a set path, and in final 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 traditional 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 once trust is established. Placed near the bottom-middle of the food chain, the slugcat is intended to avoid combat while evading enemies through stealth and flight.
The game was initially written in the Lingo programming language in 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 Crowdfunding 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, about four years into development, the team had switched to the Unity game engine and released a test version of the game to its Kickstarter backers. A seven-minute trailer was released by the end of the year.
Without dialogue or narration, Rain World's 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".
After its release, the game received an update to alleviate its high difficulty in reaction to the game's reception. Another major content update was planned for release later in 2017. The update was planned to include the local multiplayer arena mode, featuring over 50 new rooms, and the Monk and Hunter, which make the game easier and harder, respectively. The update was eventually released in beta release in November for Windows and finished officially on December 11, 2017; it was also ported to PlayStation 4 on December 21, 2018. Following speculation in January 2018, Videocult and Adult Swim Games ported Rain World 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 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 of that year, a DLC was officially announced. Titled Rain World: Downpour, it adds five new slugcat characters with their own storylines, over 1000 new rooms across ten new regions, and three new game modes. Downpour is an expansion of the "More Slugcats" mod and was developed by 40 community modders over the course of five years. It was released for Windows 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 new 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 elements for fans to decipher. The DLC was released on March 28, 2025, for PC with content adapted from community mods. Videocult intends to add post-release updates and a console release.
Rain World frustrated reviewers, who often descended into apathy. Considering the immediate kills, infrequent checkpoints, frequent repetition, crushing rain, inexplicable enemy movements, and clumsy controls, IGN wrote that the game's challenging 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 and terrible controls ruined that intent; they 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 many unwarranted deaths, with Rock, Paper, Shotgun comparing hypothetical instructions for those throwing mechanics to a "bizarre legal document".
Multiple reviewers concluded that while some hardcore players might enjoy the tough gameplay, Rain World excluded a large audience with its design choices. Paste Magazine 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, which require the player to have 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, began to see 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 the best game 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. Not knowing how foreign figures would react, Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviewer 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 other enemies 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. PCGamesN believed this factor was lacking in mainstream gaming, highlighting that learning to "manipulate and criss-cross the behaviours of Rain World menagerie" resulted in exhilaration. Nintendo World Report, reviewing the game in 2019, believed the unpredictable creature behavior deserved its "own level of praise", which differentiated it from the "typical goombas" of other games. Those critics considered these mysterious, perceptive interactions to be among the game's best features.
During development, Rain World animations became popular on social media for their "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. The game's 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 like that of their colleagues. Nintendo Life 2024 review found the game's graphics 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. The graphics were more interesting than beautiful to Polygon reviewer, who also 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 (2010), Rock, Paper, Shotgun felt that Rain World had more in common with (1997): 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", according to GameSpot. Its imaginative and compelling landscapesurreal inhabitants in a bleak, alien atmosphererecalled the spirit of games like BioShock (2007) and Abzû (2016), 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 (2012), which featured parallel themes of a savage ecosystem in a post-human environment. PCGamesN was also pleased with the game's narrative, describing how the game's "gruelling survival story" turned into "a sci-fi epic that has you meditate on both the futility and beauty of life". In a review of Downpour, PC Gamer summarized Rain World as a "truly daunting game, but a mesmerizing one to inhabit".
Downpour was well received by Rock, Paper, Shotgun and PC Gamer. PC Gamer explained how the DLC's easier accessibility made the game "finally click". Its new content was a "monstrously huge package" and a "new beginning" for Rain World in prediction of future community mods . Rock, Paper, Shotgun said the gameplay experience was less confusing than the original game due to the build-up of guides, as well as enjoying the new game modes, which allowed new ways of approaching the game. Comparing the expansion to Stray (2022), they enjoyed the immersion of the new slugcats and their struggles to survive but still considered its difficulty unfair. The reviewer recognized that the unexplained gameplay was one of Rain World core elements and concluded that Downpour reintroduced Rain World as "one of gaming’s most fearsome and unpredictable beasts".
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