Rain World takes place within untamed ruins where many creatures are out to eat you. Of course there'd be scary moments in it.
Unmarked spoilers ahead!
General
- The core concept of the game. Every creature is stuck in a cycle of life and death where when you die, you just revive in the last shelter you slept in... with your memory completely intact, including your moments of death. And all the while, there's deadly weather that batters you to death unless you're under a roof, and can still drown or freeze you if you don't find a proper shelter.
- On the note of the rain, it can be a huge heart-stopper if you haven't kept your eye on the cycle timer. You're in an all-out brawl with a couple lizards and a vulture, when suddenly the threat music fades away and every creature scatters in panic. Cue a race for the nearest shelter as fast as your slugcat legs can take you, or risk bullet-like rain smashing you to death. Even if you can escape the rain by hiding under a roof, you will drown or freeze if you don't reach a shelter.
- Even worse if you wake up early due to a shelter failure: it can happen at complete random with the Downpour DLC - you'll never know how or why, just that you've woken up in a pool of water and the storm outside is still raging throughout the entire region you've settled into. You're hungry, your old shelter is now completely unusable for this cycle, and you're stuck between the deadly weather and all of the predators who are just as desperate as you to eat their fill and escape.
Creatures
- There are carnivorous plants that disguise themselves as climbable poles. First time you come across most of them, they'll drag you to their roots once you mistakenly grab them.
- Special mention to the Rot Cysts: amorphous blue-lighted tentacle things near Five Pebbles which prey on nearly anything around them with their gangly appendages. Even lizards and centipedes have every reason to flee from them. Their cores have tons of HP, so they can only be killed by a direct explosive spear hit or a singularity bomb, with the former not being an option for Downpour's Mother Long Legs.
- They're not something that can evolve organically, either; they're just cancer-like globs formed from the deterioration of the Iterators.
- Five Pebbles' Unfortunate Development is a writhing obstacle course with the walls lined with these. It gets worse and worse if you play as the Monk, and it's spread so much by the Rivulet's time that Five Pebbles is renamed The Rot.note
- Relatedly, the horrible fate of The Hunter should they run out of cycles and perish without ascending. The painful seizures preceding their demise is bad enough, but their remains linger in the Rain World. Instead of falling prey to scavengers or simply decomposing, the disease that killed them takes over their body...and they become a warped mass of Rot Cysts, shambling about in the place they died, as though trying to remember. This is made worse by their withered corpse visibly hanging from the familiar X-marked core. Oh, and unlike the Daddy Long Legs, it can see you. Sleep tight, because Hunter Long Legs is after you...
- The Shaded Citadel is almost entirely shrouded in pitch darkness due to the iterator can built directly over it, and is host to a wide variety of equally terrifying creatures:
- The small spiders that live in the deepest parts of the Shaded Citadel can be extremely unnerving to come across, since they're deceptively quick and can overwhelm you in a flurry of long, thin, hairy legs.
- The larger wolf spiders are just as terrifying, able to silently hunt you in the dark before pouncing at you from any angle. They like to lurk near pipe entrances, or sometimes even in the shelters that you use to hibernate.
- The miros birds, deep within the Memory Crypts. You can't see them over the long stretch of land, and can only hear the intermittent clanging of feet and beaks before they lunge across the screen to snap you up.
- The Leviathans that live in lakes are extremely scary: they're gigantic balls of something that thrash around in the water, causing vibrations on the screen whenever they move. They're way too big to kill, and their robotic maws can technically clamp onto and eat anything else.
- Firebugs only appear in the endgame region of the Saint's campaign. Since you don't have conventional means of attacking them there, you might beat the run thinking they're as harmless as their smaller Eggbug cousins... but if you knock their fire eggs off, they rush at you in retaliation with blinding agility. While they kill you by pummeling you with their needles upon grabbing you, it can easily look like they're chewing up your guts before spitting you out.
- Even if they help the player reach the bottom of the Void Sea so that the player can Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, the Void Worms are highly unsettling to meet, with massive worm-like bodies and relatively tiny heads, and the effect is enhanced by the trippy visual effects of the Void Sea. They're also so fast that it's a big surprise when one of them arrives with a loud rumbling sound, and said speed gets extreme when pulling the player so fast downwards that the latter looks distorted.
