Video Game / Megaton Rainfall

"Is anybody out there?"

Megaton Rainfall is a game where players take on the role of an immensely powerful Energy Being defending the Earth from an Alien Invasion. It was developed by the Spanish developer Pentadimensional Games and released on October 17th, 2017 for PS4 and PSVR, on November 17th, 2017 for PC through Steam and Oculus Rift, and then on August 8th, 2018 for Xbox One, and on August 9th, 2018 for Nintendo Switch. A trailer can be viewed here.

The main story of the game follows a mysterious hypercube named the Signer creating the "Offspring", a Physical God entity that it has tasked with defending Earth from destruction at the hands of the Intruders, a mechanical race of aliens hellbent on obliterating humanity. What sets the game apart is its ludicrous scale- entire cities can be leveled in one attack, spaceships and buildings will crumble under the might of your blows, and one of the earliest upgrades is turning your maximum speed from Mach 8 to 1 trillion times the speed of light.

This game provides examples of:

• Aliens Are Bastards: Played with as the Intruders are fully prepared to kill all of humanity, but only because they figured out that if they don't they will be killed instead by the Signer who has decided he only needs one species for his plans.
• Alien Geometries: The final boss, a Sierpinski tetrahedron.
• Anti Poop-Socking: If you play the game in VR for a while, the game will remind you to take breaks or play in non-VR mode every so often. Justified, given the amount of movement in the game can quite easily make a motion sickness-prone player ill.
• Bittersweet Ending: Humanity is saved, but the Signer determines that this means all other life is unnecessary given how helpful they were to you and the intruders' incompetence, terraforming all planets into clones of Earth.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: You know what kind of game you're in for when this is one of the earliest upgrades.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Played with. Opposite to most of the genre, humanity is the most important existence in the universe, though this doesn't make their situation any better. Humanity is deemed by the Signer as the Chosen Species which will flourish and fill the universe, while the other intelligent species are doomed to be erased. The human race, of course, has no idea what's going on: suddenly there's an Alien Invasion and there's a flying naked purple man who's killing the aliens but also killing a bunch of humans, no idea if it's by accident or on purpose, and one day all celestial bodies in the universe disappear and are replaced by a bunch of Earths. A potential bright side is that the Signer promises to let humanity know their purpose after the Alien Invasion is over and done with, but that means telling them that the universe was made up in the mind of an inhabitant of a higher universe which was made up in the mind of an inhabitant of a higher universe that-you get the idea. Also, the only purpose of humanity was to fill up the universe, which the Signer himself decided humanity was incapable of doing on their own, hence the Earth cloning. You can only guess how humanity would react when all religion, morality and nearly all philosophy is effectively out the window, and all the scientific progress they've been working on for ages is rendered ultimately pointless. Many would probably even Go Mad from the Revelation.
• Deconstruction: Of superhero games in general, where the main appeal is in the sheer destruction you can cause. Here, not only is this discouraged, but actively punished, and killing people with stray attacks is made startlingly easy. The game goes out of it's way to remind you how horrific the destruction you're both causing and stopping is, with audible screams every time casualties are lost. While the power you have is exhilarating, the game makes it very clear this comes at the cost of being a walking disaster. In a way, this game works as a companion piece to both All-Star Superman and Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, showing just what it's really like being Superman: it's really, really hard. General superhero fiction also often portrays their heroes as these incredible larger-than-life beings, while this game makes it a point to show you how small you really are in the face of everything even with your immense power.
• Deity of Human Origin: The protagonist is a Physical God who was originally human.
• Destructive Savior: The game. A single missed shot from a charged beam can level an entire city in a second flat, obliterating hundreds of lives in the process. The average fight will have the bodycount be in the hundreds.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • You yourself can very, very easily destroy the entire planet by charging your gigaton blast for about thirty seconds. Make sure to aim it for the sky when fighting aliens.
  • The final boss can split the entire planet in half if you aren't able to win.
• Everything Breaks: Entire city blocks can be leveled in seconds.
• Shipless Faster-Than-Light Travel: You can fly at a trillion times the speed of light.
• Flying Brick: The player.
• Gainax Ending: You saved the Earth, hurray! Now God erases the rest of the universe (which he created inside his mind) and fills it with infinite Earths, so he can use humanity as living computers to count atoms, which will enable God to reach the (even) higher plane.
• God's Hands Are Tied: The Signer is able to make large-scale changes to the universe but can't make meticulous modifications (i.e. the extermination of a species), which is what you're here for.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality:
  • The intruders show no hesitation about totally destroying humanity, however the only reason they're doing this is because they discovered that God will erase their species from existence if the human race, the "chosen people", are left alive. They're basically fighting for their entire race's right to exist in competition with an alien species they have no affiliation with or knowledge of.
  • The Signer operates on Blue-and-Orange Morality due to his status as an existentially higher being who created the universe in his mind, for no other reason than to discover if an even higher being created his universe. To him, humanity's being the Master Race and the intruders' being useless filth that need to be cleaned up are simple facts of the matter.
  • You're just doing as you're instructed by the Signer as you don't have much of a choice, and humanity has no idea what the hell's going on.
• Hand Blast: Your basic attack.
• Humans Are Special: Deconstructed. It turns out that the Signer, the literal god of the universe, decided that humans are the species that should flourish and spread across the universe. The problem is that the Intruders, who are literally the only other sentient species in the entire universe, have to die for that to happen which is why they are invading Earth.
• Humans Need Aliens: Humanity seems to be defenceless against aliens, so they depend on the protagonist to defend them.
• Invincible Hero: Black holes are the only things that can hurt you.
• Invisible Wall: One stops you leaving Earth's orbit before you get SuperLuminal Flight.
• Opening the Sandbox: As mentioned above, the universe is yours dyer you learn SuperLuminal Flight.
• Our Gods Are Different: The game's cosmology is an endless tree of intelligent beings creating universes in their minds filled with intelligent beings creating universes in their minds, all as a test performed by each being to confirm that someone did indeed create their universe. The Signer, our universe's almighty god, is at the same time a mere mortal in a universe created by an even higher being, and if you perform the test then you will be the almighty god to a countless number of existentially lower beings. It's impossible to know where this pattern started, and it's never going to end.
• Person of Mass Destruction: You. A major point is doing your best to avert this, but boy is it difficult. Completing missions without accidentally blowing up a section of the city is way harder than killing the aliens.
• Physical God: You are one, and the offspring of a non-corporeal god as well.
• Procedural Generation: The game uses this for cities, except for a few pre-determined landmarks.
• Puny Earthlings: Humanity appears to be completely defenseless against intruders, and completely dependent on the hero to save them.
• Purple Is Powerful: The world-shattering protagonist is an all-purple Energy Being.
• Reentry Scare: Invoked in that you burst into flames when entering a planet's atmosphere but being indestructible, it's not a problem.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted. The universe is both said and shown in-game to be incomprehensibly large, and celestial bodies are all reasonable distances from each other. The protagonist is able to travel across the universe with extreme ease, but that's because their top speed is one-trillion (1,000,000,000,000) times the speed of light, and even with that speed it still takes a good double-digit number of seconds to travel between stars or galaxies.
• Small Universe After All: Subverted as while you can fly to other galaxies with Superluminal Flight, that's making you fly faster than the speed of light. The universe is truly endless and finding the Signs requires the player to travel across several galaxies, and the only reason it can take only a few minutes is because you're moving faster than any living thing in the universe.
• Shipless Faster-Than-Light Travel: You can fly at a trillion times the speed of light.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Averted. Travel into deep space and you'll eventually find a rather faithfully created black hole at the center of a trinary star system. This is also literally the only thing in the game that can outright kill you.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Though greatly discouraged by the mechanics, the biggest draw of the game is easily the amount of wanton destruction the player can unleash upon fully destructible environments. Even the most basic attack is a Hand Blast that rips chunks from skyscrapers, and from there it only escalates. Tellingly, one of the most popular Game Mods simply removes the "health bar" and story elements, creating a sandbox where the player can devastate cities to their heart's content.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: As seen here, if the player were to keep draining the casualties bar by killing humans for fun outside of a mission, then the hints will start to warn the player that what they're doing is wrong. And if they don't listen, the game punishes the player by draining most of their casualties bar, making the game much harder. And reloading the game without saving does not fix this.

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