https://ko-fi.com/jimmcgee
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1933390/Rain_World_Downpour/
Rain World Downpour will be game of the year unless Shadow of the Erdtree has six new slugcats. This video is very critical, but I hope that my criticism helps shine a light on what Downpour (and the base game) excel at, which is pretty much everything.
Script and notes: https://c00lzone.neocities.org/index.html
Video sources and “”””vibes””””: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2AslNtHKpSidHX9ctKxEl0Lqfy0HuVc
Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:43 Gourmand and Artificer
00:47:10 Rivulet and Spearmaster
01:22:43 New Features
01:32:13 THE SAINT
02:02:49 THE END OF RAIN WORLD
source
VERY excited to know your thoughts on this! your first rain world video is one of my favorite vids on the platform
edit: i feel as though downpour comes together to be much more than the sum of its parts. i agree that moment to moment to slips and falters, but as a whole i came away glad that this was something i had experienced. finding pebbles as saint sticks out to me as one of very few moments a game has fully reduced me to tears.
off topic, but i had a friend i recommended rain world to come to me and say that it had affected him emotionally in a way that he had wholly unanticipated. games as a medium are woefully under appreciated, and im glad there are games like rain world pushing those bounds.
Downpour is the Dark Souls 2 of Rain World.
The overgrowth echo was not a hypocrite. Everybody he had ever known and loved through eternity decided to ascend. He truly loved life not for the sake of life itself, but for its beauty. He'd be okay if he lost his life if was able to ascend with the others who made it worth living. He'd lose the relationships he cared about so much if he didn't ascend, yet his zeal for life condemned him to an eternity as an echo. A tragic fate if there ever was one, he was doomed by his social nature.
hell yeah 🎉
None of your criticisms are baroque, just part of a vanishingly small minority of opinions in a fandom that cares more about shitposting robot people and donut steel slugcats
God I've wired so long for this and now its real, yeeeeesss!
Just curious, do you have any examples of what you consider good sci-fi or fantasy?
9:33 You can thank Bwarch for the collectable tracker. Apparently 4 years ago they suggested it to AndrewFM on the Rain World subreddit and it got in.
The Artificer's campaign highlights the shortcomings of the game's approach of "leaving the player alone", hear me out:
I may be stoopid, but i only found out about her enhanced explosion ability while doing challenges (there was one about parrying). The game left me to figure it out on my own, causing many wasted hours (the combat would be so much easier with that ability) and TONS of frustration filled attempts at the Scav King. That mega shockwave makes him a joke, i am not kidding.
And if we talk about the other ending, at first it's like the game's hinting at you that you CAN get all karma levels and get a good ending. But what is actually going on? Yeah i too felt the gut punch, but for many it will not be worth the time wasted in frustration.
Unintuitive, wastes your time and leaves you mad at yourself for doing apparently absolutely unnecessary activities thinking you were onto something, wondering if there was one microscopid detail that you just missed
The other campaigns are a blast though.
The Saint's one is nothing less than a masterpiece, mwah
Oh my god I was looking forward to this so much, I had no idea you were actually making it but holy fuck you did that's so awesome. Can't wait to watch all of this
I can rewatch your videos infinitely
you have the bug where your food isnt tracked for gourmand delete your userdata folder which contains your old pre downpour saves to fix it.
If you cut out all the unnecessary gameplay with no voice-over, the video would be two times shorter at least. You don't respect the viewer's time at all.
edit: Your game design/story ideas are sometimes so detached from reality that I don't even have a word for it.
i absolutely LOVE gourmand cuz
1. hekkin chonker
2. most spear damage
3. he knows hes fat
4. you can fall on lizor to possibly 1 shot
5. he craft
6. he has good slugtree ending
7. he has almost any item in his stomach
8. he slide so fast
9. infinite rolling time
10. cute
Yo! Sweet vid. Speaking of cycles, I was wondering if you were ever planning on talking about Dark Souls or any games with time loops like Majora's Mask or Outer Wilds? I'd be interested in what you'd have to say about about any of those if you've played them. If not this is also a recommendation.
Well made and written video as usual! You make some interesting observations that i do appreciate seeing and in general do find this to be an well put together critique. I do find myself disagreeing with a lot of things here though.
I saw rivulet quite a different way, it feels like they are the most overt stand in for the player. They have no shown knowledge of moon, of pebbles, of anything and kinda just fall into the middle of things as you said. This makes it to me feel like the opposite of what you mention with gourmand and artificer, the player drives the story forward because they know of information and care for things and characters the rivulet has very little of a defined reason to care for, because they really aren't defined at all as a character in the story besides doing a fetch quest for the iterators to help with stuff.
Spear's pearl quest didn't really strike me as interesting either, it felt more like a chore where the entire time one of your core abilities is taken away in favor of a fetch quest which i dont really like either. Both of these quests also struck me as a tad too gamey for my liking, constantly being asked to carry something around by the iterators. I generally found both riv and spear's campaigns a bit of a letdown because they completely abandon that animal headspace and instead feel specifically as means to show the player important lore bits. Gourmand and artificer may have some dissonance (good point is how both of them know things that you only get to learn much later) but it felt much more like the characters had their own motivations which could be inferred by the player based on their mechanics and helped me bring a lot closer to them than running errands for iterators as characters whose only purpose seems to be to help the iterators Do Stuff.
Imo in the challenges there's generally much more specific goals with which the rng can sometimes screw you over in. Resetting isn't as big of a deal, but on some of them it felt much more boring since it's less dynamic, more repetetive and sometimes can really feel like you clear something barely trying or are completely unable to do one because of rng. Some are nice but some don't do well on this, quite a mixed bag. In the base game your goals are general and your area of play large and non linear. In challenges all of it is limited and rng becomes a much bigger factor.
I pretty hardly disagree with saint's ecosystem working better if i understood the implication there correctly, some areas are still overrun by huge predators which arent present at surv's point in the timeline and i think there's a bit of a disconnect with creatures like red lizards and centipedes etc disappearing and then reappearing in what should be much worse conditions for them. Also rubicon felt like it completely missed the mark for me, the guardian locked rooms struck me as an incredibly gamey mechanic and completely took me out of the experience. I didn't feel like i was on the saint's pilgrimage, i felt like i was suddenly playing an arena shooter where entering a new screen suddenly locked me in and i have to kill everything to progress (technically only the guardians but still). The ascension mechanic stopped feeling like i'm freeing the creatures from their cycles, it feels like i'm just calling in an orbital strike on them so they stop being in my way and i can progress. It really frustrated me on my playthrough, not because it was incredibly difficult but because it felt like it undermined everything i found interesting about the campaign and rain world in general up to that point and just really killed my immersion at that moment.
i don't know how i feel about the saint! when someone does something wrong, after they've paid the appropriate price — if the situation even calls for punishment — if they're willing to try in good faith, shouldn't they get another chance?
what i'm saying is, why meddle in the affairs of passing gods when you can let five pebbles reincarnate as a yeek. the little frog fellas in outer expanse
I honestly believe that Arti's is probably the most disruptive in relation to the main concept of the Rain World.
I will not state the obvious about her abilities (which also applies to other characters), but her story is absolutely antagonistic to the structure i would expect from this game. Right out of the gate, you're instantly assigned to a specific role in the world with a set villain, and you can't do anything about it, as reputation is permanently negative. While it makes sense considering the backstory, however, it's nowhere as immersive as original campaigns, because i, personally, did not decide to seek the revenge, and i am forced to deal with aftermath. This relationship isn't believable, since vanilla lays very heavy emphasis on you being a "yet another cog in a giant, abandoned clockwork". You are a simple animal tied to your struggles, and all acts you take are believable for such animal in that situation. Arti takes a literal superhero trope, with scavengers acting like an annoying obstacle rather a part of an ecosystem, seeking personal goals with use of her power. I just fail to believe that situation could've happened in timeline of the game.
From the moral standpoint, it's really also lacking. If original gave you complex thought food about the meaning of life itself which reflected off your personal motivations, understanding and beliefs. You wasn't even forced to finish the game at the first place, during my first playthrough i liked the world so much and got stuck in my own animal struggles, choosing not to ascend. I wasn't driven by the curiosity of what would happen next like with usual pieces of media, and i liked the experience so much, that i just didn't deem finishing it necessary, which strongly interweaves with the main themes of cycles that the game proposes. Artificer, however, quite literally has an echo telling player that: "You are going to do a bad-bad thing! Go find another way!", in a very obvious setting, ans the main message revolves around moral acceptance of murder, which is an extremely bland and unoriginal theme which has been discussed and used for centuries.
However, if only instead of actually finishing the game and showing all those cutscenes after the bossfight (which doesn't belong in a game like this either way), game would've just continued further, but without ability to ascend or raise your karma again, this campaign would've been so much better from a spiritual point of view, and you killing chieftain scavenger would've been a point of no return. Arty got exactly what she came for, now she would be forced to reap the fruits of her anger for eternity (and making the player question, was that really the right way?), instead of ancient echoes being extremely specific about what paths you should take.
It's worth mentioning that it has been confirmed by Downpour developers that the DLC is not canon to the main game, and instead takes place in an "alternative universe", which i honestly believe is a right decision.
It’s interesting to see the contrasting opinions of Downpour. It’s seems as if the things you dislike, are the things someone else loves, and visa versa.
1. Why can Gourmand magically combine items?
I am not sure myself, most people theorize that Gourmand already has these items in its stomache but this dosen't really make sense. Honestly this is just a video gamey thing and Gourmand is the worst written slugcat by far to the point where he does even have a unique acension ending.
2. Why do Artficer's pups die forever?
Most people in the community theorize that the way cycles work is that when a creature dies the time line splits into parrallel universes. The creature experiencing the death will wake up again but to other creatures they will not. The only way to prove this theory is the lineage system that makes it so after killing creatures they can respawn as something else which implies a different creature took over that creatures shelter and the dead creature is still dead.
…
I really enjoyed this video and a lot of the points made I both agreed and disgreed with. I agree that they made a the game a little more hand holdy then I prefer. I think the tutorials remix setting being default is only to the games detriment. Even as an accesibilty feature I believe it should not even be in the game to begin with.
I must disagree with some of the lore related things you disliked. I personally really enjoyed how Spearmasters ending was protrayed and I do not think I would have liked it in a any other way. If you remove the dialogue at the end of the campaign it becomes harder to understand the relationship that Pebbles and Moon share. There are some aspects of the story I disliked. I personally really dislike Survivor and Monk's new ending as I feel it takes away power from the games original ending which I believe is a very masterful ending. I also dislike that all of the new slugcats (excluding Artificer and Saint) do not have unique acension endings. Gourmand when ascended has Survivors face which really breaks my immersion hard.
You called void fluid yellow sauce you missed the opportunity to call it magic mustard
Oh my freaking god….. How lucky can I be after buying my favorite food, going on youtube and seeing a new video from Jimmy!
I’m so exited 😆 I wanted 2 months for this. Thank you
Completing gourmand’s quest is only a way to get a alternate ending when making to the tree in outer expanse. I beat gourmand without doing the quest at first. Most people do gourmand without doing it. It’s a side quest.
your gourmand foodquest is bugged you have to delete the userdata folder in local to fix it. yours isnt tracking what food youve eaten the bug is caused from having pre-update saves. Also you really shouldnt record your first playthroughs this came across as rushed and is missing a lot of details. So the analysis feels weak. I think your points are in the right direction just not properly fleshed out.
I had a bit of a different interpretation for saint, which is not really mutually exclusive with yours but theres a few details I would have mentioned.
Im not really sure where this definition comes from but in my head the definition of a saint is one who performs a miracle after their own death, in rain world of course death is only part of the cycle so saint would instead be one who performs a miracle after their ascension. Pebbles and Moon pretty explicitly lay out that the reason a solution could never be found is because ascension is a one way street and no information about what being ascended even means can be collected. The role of saint is to return from this point of no return to deliver the solution. The void worms seem to act as both judges and ferrymen, those who are truly karmically enlightened are carried to the purest depths of the void where they recieve a true ascention. In the case of artificer who fools the guardians to enter the void without max karma the void worm turns away from you and you presumably recieve an "incomplete" ascention of some sort or become an echo (during artificers ascention you can see the same whispy particles come off of them that saint has as they become an echo). Saint climbs up from the depths of the void sea instead, at this point saint still has max karma but when met with a void worm all your karma is wiped away after ascending it. I think the reason saint ascends the void worm is that it was going to drag saint back down to fully ascend, by ascending it instead saint is showing desire to stay in the physical world and loses their karma. But by recieving this curse saint is able to return to the physical world in some form, as an echo or through the time loop. Saint is doomed to never ascend but is the only one who can deliver knowledge from the other side. As for the elephant in the room you clearly avoided mentioning, challenge 70 is confirmed by devs to be very very very not cannon, but I think it does point in the direction that saint could have been a triple affirmative if there were any functional iterators left to care.
This was such a pleasant surprise to see in my recommendations.
1:25:46 if you bring pups and go there as monk after survivor. It would be a riunion and is a very happy ending.
While this video is very good and I agree with a lot of what is said in it… it also feels limited by its refusal to approach the game from any perspective other than the one you wanted to impose on it, rather than meeting it on its own terms for what it really is.
It's weirdly… elitist? To complain about the presence of basic gameplay tutorials when there's a degree to which they're necessary to, like, start playing the game. I think downpour in particular is limited in its ability to naturally convey mechanics by the very minimal control scheme the game has employed from the very start, where awkward and unnatural button combinations have to be used to avoid adding new buttons the control scheme, and while, yes, it sucks for immersion to include tutorial text at all… the game's borderline unplayable without those very slight nudges. I absolutely agree with you about the tip text ideally being off in a default state and opt-in as an accessibility feature, though. Coming back to the game in a post-downpour world, I buttoned past most of it without reading anyways, but… it is a bit heavy-handed.
But if the argument boils down to immersion… well, i think to some extent that was always fully going to be impossible, because I feel like the player's and the slugcat's goals always differ on a very fundamental level. Slugcat's goal is to survive. Your goal is to reach the next shelter, to save your progress. And it feels to me like the "cycle" concept and even the karma system were superimposed onto the game to try and integration this very video-game-y separation of interests into the game itself – I wouldn't be shocked to learn there's a very, very old prototype of this game where every death was permanent, the karma system and thus the concept of a "cycle" being added later because of how otherwise ridiculous that would've been, but then again, from what I'm told the game launched with /no respawning food/ and subsequent softlock potential, so… it feels to me like Rain World's entire history is a long list of concessions to turn the idea of a "fully immersive survival experience" into something actually, like, playable. So arguments against this degree of accessibility feels a bit… futile?
I get where you're coming from, because you had your own experience with the game, and you want to see others have their own experiences, but I think it's kind of beautiful that other people are allowed to have their own, different experiences with the game that may not necessarily line up with your own. My first playthrough of rain world, I hated it and just ended up wiki-guiding and save-scumming my way to the end. I kind of regret that, but downpour gave me the opportunity to have the kinds of experiences I wish I could've had with the game the first time – stuff like discovering the artificer's karma system, saint's ascension, seeing the world itself unravel over the course of eight different playthroughs without knowing what's coming next. And none of the additions necessarily tarnish what the game had to offer in the first place – a first playthrough now is not going to be fundamentally different from a first playthrough 3-4 years ago would've been, you're ascending that slugcat and you've got no way around that – and I appreciate that, instead of trying to do That again five more times, each slugcat gets its own, somewhat unique experience that coexists with all the others. And again… i think that's why I like it so much?
Like I said, great video, loved both this and your original guided tour, but i wish the perspective was a bit less… tunnel-visioned? Than it was. It definitely rubbed me the wrong way from time to time. Idk why I'm rambling in someone else's comments when I should be working on my /own/ videos but I feel like that this video inspired such a verbose response out of me is a sign that you're doing something right, lol.
Well, good work as always!
Even though I liked this and first review (which i guess has it's part of making idea of RW DLC to live (i'm serious, i feel like your review shows the game in the right way to the large count of people)), i have some comments:
– About Gourmand – i agree, that in theory the part of "game magic" is gone, but nothing kills the experience of survival in Rain World more than having a second playthrough (and you'll play it – as a Monk f.e.) – but here is this Game's paradox.
My real love to the game got developed when i got into the Outskirts room where "Unseen Lands" theme is played and then i realized, that my movement skills makes me able to do ANYTHING!
TLDR of this part – if you play the playthrough the time other than first – the immersion is ruined for sure. The solution may be to make completely new map for new characters, but it would be pretty tough task bc this approach breaks this "world evolution" thing which is in Downpour now – the world must be one for player to connect these stories.
And one more thing, the Gourmand illogical stuff ruins immersion much less than THIS GODDAMN ROOM IN SKY ISLANDS (yeah, the one in which YOU CANNOT SEE SHIT BC OF CAMERA) – especially for Hunter, because you must go from farm arrays to chimney canopy this way (and the fact the devs fixed it is marvelous (although the should do it 5-6 years ago, but – fine)). You got mention the fact of these problems in this reviews, but the measure of it must be put right. That's why it looks like a bit of a stretch for me.
Complete tldr for Gourmand – i did not feel much immersion fall for Gourmand, cuz i got my playthrough as Monk and Survivor for the second time. I liked to find new rooms and challenges while trying to navigate in locations which are, y'know not as intended for Gourmand as for other characters (like going up through the Gutter and the Pipeyard)
For the other parts i will talk less cuz i did not complete them and got my expertise only by watching some playtroughs in YT^
Artificer is fun but too violent for me – but it's fine. I do not agree with your improvement of her dreams, bc you get "this fight in Sekiro which you lose no matter what" situation.
About the problems with "how death work with children". This problem truly exists, but it was originated far before Artificer – in the Survivor arc, cuz they WAS a kid in the world of the CYCLES.
The only obvious problem of immersion in Artificer's campaign that using Chimney Canopy's intro theme in genocide end cutscene is kind of a tone failure, cuz the authors unwillingly did the evaluation (link) "Doing a genocide of scavengers is just like got passed from Industrial Complex to Chimney Canopy".
The critique of Expedition Mode here is a bit of irrelevant for me cuz this style of gaming (restart all game after loosing all karma) is literally Hunter mode – yeah, technically you may continue playing further with your own risk – but with chaotic world of RW you just go to menu and hold R to restart the game. Especially you did that when you effed up in THIS GODDAMN ROOM IN SKY ISLANDS.
About additional endings for Monk and Survivor, i find them really good for two reasons: First, the void ending is good enough art-wise, but the more you start to think about it and the especially the cycles, the less it works. Logically the fact that robot guy tells you KYS properly. The second one is more deep for me: these tragic tropes of 2010th gameplay must go away. Don't wanna be a snowflake, but i feel how this kind of stories turn me into emotional masochist, and… that's bad. I don't deny these endings for sure ofc, buuuut we need a discussion about that.
– Saint for me has some problems – this 10 ability has been looking like BS since i first saw it before DOWNPOUR was a thing and "More Slugcats" was just a regular mod. And it also has this ominous vibes of – excuse me – "Rise of a Schoolshooter" arc for me, and the last mission of Challenge mode… ahem, doesn't help it at all. When you start thinking about it, it become really bad.
About accessibility options and tips i have a pretty cruel explanation. If the player chooses the accesibility over immersion – it's a problem of immersion, not the player. That means that person's game perception is different from yours. Ofc you may bully them [friendly] with "Git good" signs
Although, if you think about it as intended, you got to the conclusion that Iterators solves the problem as Ancestors did before – created a looser who'd do it for them.
To conclude my unsystematic ramblings. I see these problems as devs got into Pareto's set of directions for the game (when you to meet one criteria you have to surrender another one). They just make another direction than you would do (i suspect it involves devs wanting to show more explicitly their enormous gameplay mechanism). It also looks like it for me bc of existence of Enot/Sofanthiel. I know, that this handsome boyo is not canon (an a secret) buuuuuuuuuuut – what does this guy do with immersion is… interesting
And one more thing about this video in specific (finally a relevant critique of a video!). May we agree that putting 1-frame text messages in a 2 hour video is a bad idea? Man, this video is not a 10 min RYTP and you are not a Multiprogramm, okay? Especially in your immersive videos, when the viewer needs to stop watching and start trying (and failing) to catch the message, completely destroying the pace of a video. And it was much more than two times, c'mon!
I kinda disagree on few points you make. I will make it clear that I didn't finished Rain Wolrd when it first launched, but to me, when saw Survivor and Monk fall far away from his family, my quest was to reunite with my family. Years passed by and Downpour is launched, I'm finnaly playing it again and my goal is to reach my family. Now I know the Outer Expanse is a DLC adition, and the Survivor wasn't meant to reach his family on the first place. (although you can see in the Monk's ending he did so), as there is no canonic ending. So my disagreement is regarding ascencion as something the slugcat shoud strive for. You put too much focus on this spiritual journey and yes, it's the first game ending goal. But, why does it need a escape? In the beggning when it's was clumsy vulnerable animal, for sure. But he gains experience, he learns how to survive and trive in this world, why the ancient's escape is so important to him? To that, I support that hypocritical Echo in his point of view, you can diminish it calling it "just plants", but the struggle for survival should not be something to be fleed upon, it's a continuous journey.
Rivulet helps Moon for the same reason Hunter does. They start with a mark of communication and a pearl in their stomach that contains schematics of 5P's internals. Clear signs of being sent by someone to help.
Since both Rivulet and Spearmaster are modified by iterators for their specific quest, their mutations are not under question, I assume. On the other hand, Artificer's explosiveness and Gourmand's ability to make a singularity bomb from rocks and plants don't make much sense. But there are creatures with arguably crazy mutations, like Miros Vultures that have a rocket launcher, Strawberry Lizards that can use their tongue like a grappling hook, arguably Caramel Lizards that can jump like they don't weight as much as a train car.
Also, some things you say make it sound like you haven't read the pearl lore from the base game (whoops, should've watched the next minute of the video). A lot of elements that Downpour merely expanded on were already introduced there, as well as in echo dialogue. Granted, Downpour really shifted focus, but that's bound to happen when you more than double the character amount. There's only so much you can do with the concept of "you are lost in a hostile world, go escape the struggle". Monk was already a copy of Survivor with slight stat and spawn changes.
i've only ever seen Saint compared to Buddah, so what you talk about in the end of the video gives an interesting perspective on the story.
but i doubt that he is the true savior in the context of Rain World's overarching theme of an Endless Cycle of Suffering, Death and Rebirth.
sure, he is presented as such, but when we speak with the Iterators in the Rubicon there is no clear indication that Saint actually freed them.
if anything it gives me the feeling that we only see a moment in the never ending loop of their Cycle.
restarting the game with an object in the stomach only emphasizes it, as, instead of moving to the next destination, we just doing the same thing over and over again.
imo, Saint is only here to tie up the ends and give us some sort of a closure.
also, reading the comments i can't help but wonder – what IS your idea of a good Rain World 2?
Super good video, Jimmy. Super awesome that you came back after years just to go about reviewing this fantastic expansion to Rain World.
I first wanted to say that, in my personal experience, I enjoyed Downpour a TON, and it blew my expectations out of the water, as my expectations were founded by similar worries that you had, which was the fact that interpreting something that started as a community idea into a completely realized and organic extension of the game seemed nearly impossible to do without warping anything passed its previous groundwork, but by god, did the team do it.
For me, I pulled insane amounts of enjoyment out of the game, mainly because I cared for exploring each area and all of the new ways the environments had changed, and I don’t think I found myself being genuinely frustrated or let down by any campaign apart from Gourmand’s (which, even then, I was definitely not let down by Outer Expanse, incredible stuff. Just wasn’t a fan of Gourmand’s style on a first playthrough.) I believe the game achieved this through playing a relatively safer path, that being focusing largely on what we already know and setting up the timeline based on that. Overall, really had fun, and I cannot say I thought of the experience in the same way you did while playing.
That being said, your points stand very true. Quite a few aspects of Downpour, mainly the way story beats are handled and tutorials of a character, can seperate you from the character. The beautiful thing about Rain World was that you lived as both yourself AND the creature. You could feel your own way about things, traverse the world however you wanted to, and interact with the world in the ways you wanted to. However, by creating a world that almost feels like it’s demanding your drive for survival, your views will end up aligning with the slugcat in a beautiful way, wanting to expirement with objects and moves yourself for the soul purpose of surviving since you don’t have the liberty of knowing those things.
Downpour can certainly take away the primal sort of aspect of it, since some campaigns can almost feel streamlined in how they play out, demanding something more out of the character rather than just simply surviving. Though, I do think that this still works out if you were a veteran to the original, since it would only be natural to experiment with more of the world after getting a large sense of it in survivor. In the shoes of a beginner, however, I can see this being a little bit of a problem when it comes to immersion. Generally, I do agree that your motivations in these campaigns could have been more organic. We could have FELT the trauma the Artificer went through, and also organically have seen the fatal progression of how the in-game events unfolded without the need for as much exposition surrounding them.
On a seperate note for the Saint, I pretty much agree with everything you said. Super strong campaign with jaw-dropping changes to the environment and how you must play, and with the new environment, a new sense of feeling completely fresh to the world and foreign to it in a way, just like the survivor. However, the ending didn’t really quite stick for me either, for the same reasons you said more or less. It gives the journey a little less of an impact, and honestly makes the world feel even smaller, since you’re forced to go back at the same place you started with the world in the exact same state, making it feel like you didn’t do as much as you really did.
Really great video that I enjoyed watching all the way through. I totally love your criticisms and respect the perception you have on what actually strengthens the game, and also totally agree that community ambition can sometimes leave more say than what needs to be said. However, I also agree that this was one of the best outcomes we could’ve possibly gotten for a project constructed like this. Thank you for sharing, it’s always cool to see someone who is passionate about Rain World :).
some stream of consciousness thoughts:
because it was initially made by the community, i think downpour was very intertwined with things the community wanted to see. rain world had become slightly different when seen and shared by many, and over time the fan content produced also changed it in different ways.
like you said, people formed pronouns and ships and made theories and adjusted little details.
so while downpour itself may not be perfect, or 5x more Rain World, it scratches many itches at once, introduces new mysteries to ponder, and a lot of the new content felt very natural to me.
plus, it made a lot of speculated information canon, which opened up possibilities/continuity for and among fan works. in other words someone made a fanfic including most of the new characters and lore and it is the most satisfying rw work ive read so far….
so maybe it wasn't as objectively good, but there's an overwhelmingly greater amount of things i liked about it.
(pups pups pups pups pups pups)
(and expedition, once i got over the hurdle of unlocking things, was a fun challenge to complete)
(challenges! except for #27, what?)
(i do wish you had to opt into tips, and not right away. maybe after reaching a completion point. rain world definitely changed in tone with all of the easily accessible modifications nowadays… which could be good, but i get what you meant by leaving a bad taste in your mouth)
1:34:46 …But you DO have a greater degree of control.
I liked how blasting the void worm is out of your control. It reinforces the theme of fate, of a closed loop, of forcefully retracing your own steps. It's an action that you can't fully explain the motivations for, or the consequences of. It's like the one thing that has to happen to hold the cycle together, the fulcrum, the edge (thinking about The Legacy of Kain here). It heightens the mystery and you wonder "What was Saint trying to do here and why ?" Yes, you are wrenched out of the role of the Saint, but this moment made their mind feel completely inscrutable to me, and it evoked the same feeling of awed fearful wonder I felt when I first swam down the void sea. That behavior so utterly unlike what you'd expect from, say, a slugcat.
The void worm swims away, almost gracefully, which I took to mean it's probably entirely unaffected. What follows is hard to interpret. Are you being punished for seizing a power that you shouldn't have, etc ? Were you trying to help the worm, or harm it ? Something else entirely ? The Saint ending is brilliant. I spent many hours tying my brains into knots trying to make it all fit together, but no matter what, there's always a part of unknowable that makes a definite answer impossible. So it can be interpreted endlessly.
Also interesting that you draw comparisons to Christianity, because I feel there's a huge difference between being redeemed, and being ascended. Being redeemed (imo) essentially means being forgiven for an inherent fault (and I won't be going at lengths about my issues with the idea of original sin or the internal logic of Genesis), ie, you are morally responsible for your spiritual predicament, you are guilty, you are broken, etc.
Whereas, being enlightened means being helped in freeing yourself, and here, it is the world that is flawed. The blame lies nowhere because nothing can reasonably be blamed. You are a victim of circumstances who deserves to be saved no matter what you have done. If I remember, in some sects of Buddhism, your sentience entitles you to liberation from suffering even if you're scum (I've read Zen texts that certainly imply that). Whether being ascended is in itself desirable is another question entirely, to be sure, and there are some very interesting theories on what form this takes in Rain World, from total inexistence, to a hivemind existence within or as void worms, the final light you swim into like a spermatozoa is referred to in code as an egg, the void worms look almost exactly like the beasts kept in boxes in the crypts where qualias and memories are stored, etc etc etc etc.
To me Saint always had strong vibes of a Bodhisattva. Beyond the aesthetics of their meditating in their sleep screen, Saint is essentially a morally faultless, mysteriously enlightened, attuned being (even understands speech without a mark) overflowing with empathy for all living things. This is where it ties up into the themes of attachment that OG Rain World was very interested in, as you can theorize that Saint is trapped in their cycle by their attachment to the idea of liberating others, ie, trapped by compassion just like Artificer is trapped by violence. No matter how you slice it, it's still an emotional gut-punch of an ending.
Anyway, good vid.
Excellent video, and it's cool that there's more Rain World, so I can have two more hours of you talking about this wonderful game.
Taking a step back, and thinking about your critiques on Downpour, everyone's comments here, and the general direction or "vibe" of the Rain World community, I suppose it's fair to say that people have different takeaways from playing the original game, and the Downpour expansion is the ultimate result of that.
While it's clear that you take the core game's design and themes seriously, and I respect the heck out of your original video and its level of nuance, Downpour, its content, and (adjustable) changes to the base Rain World game exist because what the developers, modders, and community value in "more game" are just that slightly different from yours (or mine, or others).
It's nice that there's more video game to play at the end of the day I suppose
Ive never subbed to someone so fast. This video is brilliant and deserves so much more attention. Thank you for this!
Ok so there's actually a pretty huge thing I learned while playing the game that I think is worth bringing to your attention. If you bring a dark yellow pearl that can be found within the early stages of garbage wastes to Moon (though you can also bring the pearl to Pebbles) she basically states that huge digestion tanks (which are pretty much the rooms in Garbage Wastes that contain acid) were built as a means to get rid of outdated or broken machinery in a chemical fashion. These produced highly volatile elements within the microbes inside the digestion tanks, who were meant to speed up the process of deterioration, and efforts to get these microbes to form symbiotic bonds with the other tank managing creatures in order to dispel these highly explosive and volatile materials were made.
So basically, you know how slugcats were purposed organisms to clean pipes? Well, assuming that the Artificer was once, or was a descendant of, a purposed organism meant for managing digestion tanks, they could have reacted with the microbes, causing explosive reactions to build inside of itself, which would perfectly explain the ability to explosion boost and use its stomach to craft explosive materials. Hopefully, this is something that gives you an even greater liking to the Artificer than you already have, since there's good evidence that they don't have their abilities for no reason.
The Gourmand, also known as Brace Belden!
To comment on one thing you said, it should be noted that you can't ascend echos as the Saint. Whatever happened to echos of previous civilizations, if there were any, is still a mystery.
Haven't watched yet, but I just wanted to pop in to say that if the view count on this video is ever lower than you expect, I'd reckon it's because a lot of your subscribers are like me: I really loved your last RW video and would like to watch this one! But until Downpour is released on console, I don't want to see any spoilers. 🙁
Regarding the undergrowth echo, I don't feel like they were that hypocritical. I feel like you were a bit reductive when discussing their reasoning. Rain world is beautiful (duh) , It's part of the reason it kept me going back to play the game. Kept me going back to reenter the cycle yet again. I didn't want to ascend, I was enjoying this very moment playing the game. So atleast I can understand what they meant. If I, a mere slugcat was able to appreciate the world that much, surely the ancients could? I may be biased though since If I was offered immortality, I'd still take it knowing the consequences. Otherwise, this is a really good video.
6:06 Jerma reference?!?!
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The way you view and analyze various pieces of media is very interesting and got me wondering: what are your favorite films?
Out of pure intuition and speculation I’d say you strike me as a Tarkovsky fan. If you’re a movie guy, that is.
57:38 – Where and how are they teaching you kids to read so fast these days?
59:56 – It's ritalin or somethig isn't it? You're all red-lining it jamming hard on crusty whites
1:00:43 – Oh come on!
NO WAY your first video was the thing convincing me to finally buy the game, strating my spiralling obsession with it ! I can't watch the video yet since I didn't finish Saint yet but as soon as I'll finish it I'll come back here.