rain world has had an interesting journey in my mind, i first heard of it in one of my comment sections i think somewhere in 2022? i had just come off playing a bunch of precision platformers the year prior and was looking for more, so when i saw rain world generally labelled as a "platt'e fourmerre", i decided to give it a go.

i did not like the game.

i was expecting something completely different, my head was not really in the mindset for the type of game that rain world ACTUALLY is, a game that doesn't tell you where to go at all - doesn't tell you anything, now that i think about it - and most harrowingly... DOESN'T HAVE TRADITIONAL PLATFORMER CONTROLS AND HEAVILY PENALIZES YOU FOR DYING :O !!!

fast forward to 2023, a friend of mine becomes a real huge fan of the game. REAL huge fan, streams it occasionally to us, gets some other friends of mine to try it. i, of course, still resist at this point, remembering that i did not like the game, but come december - i'm curious.

so i try it again, friend watching me just in case i really had no idea what to do;

and i fucking loved it.

it's truly a game like no other. hard to describe it for me, but it's like you're really part of an ecosystem, a lone slugcat in a world as hostile as our world can be to us, middling in the food chain, wandering the vague ruins of a people no longer. mystique fills the air in every crevice of every room of every area, but very passively - what's archeology to a slugcat anyway? does it help it eat?

it's no perfect game by any means, there's actually a lot i dislike about it; for instance: shaded citadel sucks, a lot of the challenges are bogus and not fun, interior sucks even more god i hate unfortunate development i NEVER go there, gourmand's food quest is boring, etc.

and yet no other game, short of truly goalless games like gmod, has allowed me to find this much of my own fun in it.
i remember i once heritaged a red lizard into existence as monk, proceeded to tame it and try to bring it to outer expanse with me (keyword: try)

this whole ordeal definitely had an impact on me, maybe games i don't like right away... aren't necessarily bad (audience gasps loudly and an old woman dies of a heart attack). i mean, this is an obvious fact, right? but just because you know something doesn't mean you believe it, ya know? i just think that, if not for rain world, i wouldn't be trying at all to get out of my comfort zone with games; most of the stuff i initially thought i hated about rain world is part of why i think it's so good now.

as i am writing this, the watcher DLC had just come out, and it's hard to say for sure (only just got to the new areas), but it might finally push me past 200 hours.