Sony's Rain is Beautiful and Melancholy

Take shelter. 

Often the best thing about the announcement of a new generation of consoles is the late flourish of curious games that appears on the current ones. Announced last year at a Sony Gamescom conference rich with cool and unusual new titles, Rain is an interesting, quietly atmospheric PSN exclusive from Sony’s Japan Studio; there are glimpses of ICO and The Unfinished Swan in its creative, puzzley platforming and melancholy ambience. It’s about a boy who follows a spectral girl into an alternate dimension where he’s invisible unless he’s in the rain – a dimension filled with phantom monsters that chase and stalk you through the night.
As a Scottish person I naturally have a profound and lifelong relationship with rain, so as a thematic motif it’s familiar and resonant. Walking through this gloomy, rain-soaked city evokes an atmosphere of isolation and quiet sadness. What I didn’t expect to be so familiar was Rain’s urban setting; it’s modelled on European rather than Japanese town streets, with austere, grand, grey buildings that evoke Paris or Edinburgh more than Tokyo. But it still has an ethereal quality that means it isn’t fully grounded in the real world.

“We took references from many different places around Europe, and also because we are a Japanese studio you will probably find Japanese elements to it as well,” explains Noriko Umamara, Rain’s producer. “We try to make the world a mixture of everywhere so that anyone can feel some sort of connection, a similarity to their neighbourhood where they grew up – but it’s also a totally different world.”

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There are glimpses of ICO and The Unfinished Swan in its creative, puzzley platforming and melancholy ambience.

For the first five minutes of Rain, you are entirely alone, searching for the girl you’re following as you walk the streets, but soon skeletal, spectral creatures like abstract dogs made of bone appear to stalk you. Overhangs and canopies shelter the boy from the constant downpour; because he’s only visible in silhouette as the water bounces off his slight frame, these dry places shield him from his ghoulish pursuers. But he’s also hidden from the player – you can tell where he is by his damp footprints, or the way that discarded bottles and furniture and sheaves of paper scatter or topple over as he walks into them.
In these moments it feels like you’re controlling a ghost or a shadow, an immaterial presence. It reminds me of A Shadow’s Tale, a tragically little-played Wii exclusive that cast you as the shadow of a boy who’d lost his body. It’s also got a touch of The Unfinished Swan’s storybook mystery. The narrative appears as lines of text that appear on the sides of buildings and melt away, gently guiding you through the first puzzles. Unless something dramatic is happening, the sound is minimal – there’s no narrator, just mood-music and the insistent patter of the rain.

Before long you’re taking advantage of the boy’s invisibility to lure the monsters into traps as well as sneak past them. There’s a powerful sense of vulnerability; you can’t fight back, and unless you use the environment to trap or destroy the creatures you have no choice but to hide. Later in the game, after the boy follows the girl to a looming, ominous factory, other creatures start to appear: a hunter with a club for one hand and a long, pointed finger on the other that searches you out from hiding places, and giant four-legged horse-things that provide shelter under their bellies.
Rain is surreal, and just a touch nightmarish. The cutscenes have a more watercolour style, with abstract stills that wash into one another and diluted paint-spatter on the screen, but in-game it’s bleak and spectral. It’s not survival horror, but there’s tension and fear – it seeps from the surroundings. It’s fear like ICO’s, where shadowy creatures could emerge and steal you or Yorda away at any second. Rain is clearly not shying away from that particular conceptual reference point – screenshots show Rain’s girl pausing to weep on a bench, and the boy standing in shafts of light in a tall church-like structure.

I didn’t see the boy catch up with the girl until the middle of the third chapter, set in the factory, where they work together to escape it whilst the sinister hunter-skeleton-thing seeks them out. Afterwards, she runs away again, followed by the monster, but it’s easy to see how things might play out with two characters in its second half if they ever unite. Rain won’t be over in a few hours; Noriko says we should expect a “full-size game”, so the hour that I saw was just a sliver.
Even in that short time, Rain showed ample creativity, and several ideas that play with invisibility and detection: mud that stubbornly sticks to the boy’s legs and betrays his presence, puddles of water that splash noisily when he runs through them, scaffolding that topples when monsters are lured near. It’s like a stealth platformer, an Unfinished Swan with added peril. I'm look forward immensely to getting to know it better.

Rain

Published by: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developed by: SCE Studios Japan, Acquire

Genre: Adventure

Release Date:

United States: TBA

UK: TBA

Australia: TBA

Japan: TBA

RP for Rating Pending

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