The other PS3 game and tied for my personal favorite is Rain; a heartwarming story of survival against the unknown, figuratively and literally. You play as a young boy trying to rescue a young girl from the unknown and a series of mysterious monsters. The world is engulfed in rain and darkness but the characters and monsters alike vanish if they are not in the rain. A 3D puzzle and platformer game that while small has a lot of heart. The best kind of game that instills a sense of panic in the player is the one where you don’t know or even see what is coming. This game does that exceptionally, multiple times I found myself wondering when the unknown would track me down again. The water color paintings at the beginning and end contrast to the grey and colorless landscape of the game really brings an artistic style rarely seen. The sound of the rain against the beautiful and varied background music is also very exciting. The setting, while not as interesting, is slightly original in its view of classic French architect. Much like a previous indie game called Contrast took place in a similar setting and under similar style of light and dark, although Contrast used shadows primarily. The game reminds me a lot of Never Alone, another indie game that focused on the cooperation of two characters trying to escape from some form of evil. Never Alone was more like a 2D style art piece while there is more to Rain since it is 3D but of course it gets kind of repetitive after a while. To be fair they try to mix up locations and completely shake up the world near the end to bring life back into it.
My main problem with this game is that it does get repetitive very quickly and the unknown isn’t a big enough threat to distract from that. After the first few minutes and figuring out the mechanics I literally breezed through this game and got all the trophies in a little over an hour or so. Unless you are thick the puzzles become almost stupidly easy the second you see them. When they add the girl as a tool to make puzzles more expansive they do get bigger but they are still embarrassingly easy to complete. Near the end the puzzles are removed for the most part anyways and are replaced with effortless platforming that doesn’t punish you even if you fail. I also have an issue with the couple of portions where you are supposed to run away from the unknown in that you have no idea where to go. One portion especially irritated me early on because I could not even tell which way to go and the unknown was always on top of me again before I could look around. After a couple of tries it gave me the hint to ‘crawl through the hole’ to which I thought ‘no shit but where is the hole?’ These are rather minor problems though. Much like Wall-E the entire story is done without speaking and relies on actions and music and it does that splendidly.
