Aluminum Christmas Trees: Black lizards being blind might seem like a fantastic element of the game's Speculative Biology. However, there are real animals (namely certain cave salamanders) whose eyes stopped functioning or even appearing, because of a lack of evolutionary pressure to see well.
Awesome Art: The game's visual style manages to capture the mood of an abandoned industrial environment, along with the impressive looking animations and colorful creatures. The game was heavily lauded for this before release, and is agreed upon as the best aspect of the game.
Many players criticize the game's semi-random enemy placements and punishing death mechanics coming across as Fake Difficulty; the rest appreciate its extreme difficulty, feeling it's appropriate for the creature you play as. All agree that the game's design feels very old school, which makes it both what its fans like the most about it, and what its detractors hate the most.
The DownpourDLC's campaigns and lore additions have split the base, with dissenters disliking its more "straight-forward" storytelling and less focus on the mystery and Crapsack World angle of the base game, and fans who prefer the more optimistic and (slightly more) digestible narratives laid out.
Its status as officially-sanctioned Alternate Continuity by the devs is also a point of contention, with those that feel it should be canonized and expanded upon, and those who prefer leaving Downpour's story additions as glorified Fan Fiction.
The new slugcats added in Downpour are also this, gameplay-wise. Are they fresh and fun additions to the game that fit right in, or too "videogamey" and powerful/complex when compared to the base game's more grounded slugcats? There's also a third camp that enjoy their gameplay but find them unfitting for the type of game they're in.
Difficulty Spike: Drainage System is an absurdly sadistic noob trap. Its gate from the Outskirts is often the first one players find - but it’s actually an alternative early- and endgame route. The unwary new player will find themself in a brutally hard water level built around advanced swimming mechanics. The best path forward is through a water-filled tunnel with air pockets to Garbage Wastes, but go too far west and farming five karma to go through Subterranean (the standard final region) and up to Shoreline is the next best path. Or, more practically, restart.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: A vocal amount of self-described Rain World fans are those who haven't actually touched the game, purely being drawn by the characters/creatures and/or the lore. Considering the type of game this is, this is far from surprising.
Each of the five most prominent Iterators are widely associated with one of the specially-powered Slugcats. While it's canon that No Significant Harassment has Hunter, Seven Red Suns has Spearmaster, and Looks to the Moon adopts Rivulet; fans often sort Artificer to Five Pebbles due to their shared choleric attitude towards the Scavengers and other creatures that disturb them, and Saint with Sliver of Straw due to the latter terminating herself successfully, with Saint's attuned state being akin to the fabled "Triple Affirmative" that would free all creatures from the great cycle.
Since Downpour, the full ensemble of Slugcats are often compared to and reimagined as mercenary classes from Team Fortress 2. These vary, but the most agreed-on are Scout & Rivulet for being the speedsters of the bunch; Soldier & Hunter for being relatively basic, yet adept head-on fighters; Demoman & Artificer for being explosive users with an impaired eye; and Heavy & Gourmand for being slow, surprisingly articulate powerhouses.
Five Pebbles' increasing frustration with every slugcat that visits him.
Gourmand has a lot of hilarity in their campaign:
Their starting area is the Shaded Citadel, with Gourmand waking up surrounded by Slime Mold, giving the impression that we're seeing their winding down from a bender, with no concern from being lost in a decrepit, dark and dangerous structure.
One of your optional objectives, the food quest, tasks you with eating 22 different foods/creatures along your journey. You get the idea that they're more concerned with how the local fauna tastes then actually setting off to the Outer Expanse to lead their tribe.
One of their main methods of attack is to throw their own weight against the enemy, either by stomping, rolling, or sliding into the poor sods. This leads to the hilarious sight of slaying formidable creatures like Red Lizards and King Vultures by simply dropping from a high enough point. It isn't unheard of to also do that on accident.
When waking up in a shelter, the Slugcat will wake up after slugpups. They are often jumping on top of the player, giving the impression of rowdy children trying to wake up their exhausted parent.
Friendly Fandoms: There's a noticeable fandom overlap with Warrior Cats, due to both sharing the same premise of "complex and dark setting with cute critters as the main characters", with many popular Warrior Cats content creators also delving into Rain World content.
Game-Breaker: The Artificer is the single most effective slugcat in non-configured PVP combat. Her Double Jump blast is a reliable mobility tool that makes her more agile than most other slugcats. She can liberally convert food and rocks into deadly grenades as well, and she can't be directly killed by the explosions (making point-blank throws survivable). If she winds up without such resources, oh well, her concussive blast stuns other creatures long enough for her to lethally maul them in a heartbeat.
All variations of Leeches are this, being absolute pests in the water that try to drown you if you pass by near them. Without a strong traversal tool, innate or otherwise, you can either use Snails to disrupt them or bait them with another unfortunate victim. If you have none of the like? Better hope you can outswim those Leeches.
Jungle Leeches, added in Downpour, have the annoying side-effect of draining your food pips, potentially robbing you of sleeping in a shelter until you can find more food to replace it.
Garbage Worms, exclusive to the Garbage Wastes, are one of the few completely invincible creatures and a total nuisance, doing absolutely nothing in its passive state but yoinking your spear and making off with it, making it a hassle to pass by them if you have something like an explosive spear. And if you think about attacking them? Not only does it do nothing to them, but now all the Worms across the region will turn aggressive for one cycle, swatting you out of the air and attempting to drown you, usually successfully.
Wolf Spiders are comparatively weak creatures, being skittish and frail with only a fairly-telegraphed lunge attack and a slow-killing grab that you can easily get out of with any thrown item. What makes them annoying, however, is their sheer numbers, with places that host them being absolutely lousy with them. Couple that with their tendency to stick to the ceiling and it makes them a chore to fend off.
Mother Spiders are largely the same, only being slightly bigger, much slower and packing an evasive dodge. Killing them, however, causes their abdomens to erupt with Coalescipedes, quickly overwhelming you if you're not prepared. Due to their heightened aversion to combat, it's often better to just leave them alone.
Scavengers turn into this in Artificer's campaign, due to kill squads being a common occurrence, turning them into a constant threat that can ambush you with explosives and surprising spear accuracy that can impale you from damn near across the room. While you have the tools as Artificer to deal with them (and indeed, you need them around if only to assist with opening karma gates), they're still a constant thorn on your side.
It Was His Sled: The mere existence of the secret final character, Inv, as well as their Joke Ending, has been all but spoiled to high hell, to the point that some are surprised to see they're supposed to be an elaborate secret.
PORLExplanationA recurring reaction to Scavengers' obsession with the pearls lying around and how widely they gaze at such.
hi i'm alex from yeek ExplanationDownpour's frog-like Yeeks, given their name and orange-white coloring, have been loosely compared to Alex Eggleston from YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG.
Memetic Molester: Again, Inv/Enot/??? seems to have been made for this, being shown in-game to attempt (and fail...miserably) to get together with all of the other main slugcats, with the fandom blowing them up as a desperate, lonely and skeezy lounge lizard who's determined to find anyone who'll reciprocate their advances, often shown to harass the other slugcats excessively.
Artificer's campaign is one of tragedy, loss, grief, and pointless revenge. That being said, the community often simplifies Artificer into an absolute blood-thirsty maniac obsessed with nothing but ruining/ending the scavengers' lives to a comical degree and whom shamelessly revels in the violence.
Periphery Demographic: The game is brutal and unforgiving, and the world it sets up is rich and deep in world-building... which makes it an unexpected hit with pre-teens, who engage in the more light-hearted side of the game's setting without ever stepping into the intricacies of its mechanics and ecosystem.
Popular with Furries: The game's creature designs have attracted a small but strong following within the fandom, with the eponymous slugcats taking the brunt of the attention for their simple but adorable designs and idiosyncrasies, with quite a few even making their very own scug-sona. Judging by the devs' April Fools 2023 video, they're very well aware of this.
The game's karma system is generally considered to be the most annoying mechanic. To be specific, the player earns a karma point every day they survive and loses one every time they die, and gates have minimum karma requirements to progress. This is annoying on its own in such a hard game (and at launch could make the game Unwinnable by Mistake since food didn’t respawn), but there’s typically no save point on the other side of a gate, so if you die in a region you’ve just unlocked you’ll be booted back to where you came from and forced to farm karma in an area you’ve already completed. This can result in the game becoming a chore depending on how your run goes. Worse, you also lose karma for quitting out of the game outside of sleep cycles (although PC players can circumvent this by copying their save files). The game does give some Mercy Invincibility by allowing you to quit out thirty seconds into a cycle, which can also save the day if you get blindsided the second you open the shelter.
Swimming, especially at launch. You couldn’t see Slugcat underwater for some reason, his lung capacity was about ten seconds, and on top of his buoyancy pushing him up he would automatically start to swim upwards as his oxygen ran out; there’s a boost function but it drains your oxygen almost instantly, making it something of Shmuck Bait. The grand total of this was that you’d have about three seconds to blindly try and steer Slugcat until he would stick himself to the ceiling and drown. Most levels had some way of getting around the controls, but Drainage System did not and was virtually impossible (fortunately it is also optional). A patch made Slugcat visible underwater and increased his lung capacity, but the controls are still infamously awkward to the point that everybody still avoids Drainage System like the plague.
The controls are needlessly convoluted despite being deceivingly simple, often jamming multiple functions into one button. The "Pickup" button is the biggest offender as, depending on the character, it has upwards of six functions, not even counting functions that require two simultaneous button presses, such as Artificer's Bomb Jump/Concussive Blast. The fact that there are multiple buttons, one of which is a face button, that are left unbound makes this design decision even more baffling.
The fast travel system... or lack thereof, really. Instead of traditional infinite fast travel, you have tokens, which you earn from completely vague milestones and are very limited in quantity. For reference, the average person will most likely only earn one in their first playthrough. This makes the mere act of going place to place an absolute slog, especially if backtracking to familiar territory.
Downpour introduces shelter failures, which are a randomized event where your shelter floods, rendering it uninhabitable for the current cycle as you're also prematurely forced out into dangerous torrential rain. This makes farming karma an annoying hindrance at best, or a huge setback at worst, depending on how many times you die and how close the next shelter is. The one saving grace of shelter failures is that they "extend" the length of the cycle, giving you ample time to find shelter even during the initial bout of rain.
For Spearmaster, exclusively, they lack a mouth and thus can't "store" an item like other slugcats. This becomes a large annoyance halfway through Spearmaster's campaign, as you will be forced to carry a pearl that Five Pebbles extracted from inside you, necessitating bringing it to the end goal, limiting you to a grand total of one free hand from there on out. For someone whos gimmick revolves around their spears and being the only one to innately dual-wield them (without exploits) this comes off as Artificial Difficulty.
Safari Mode uses a special Overseer to pinpoint your view of the region. The controls do not work when this Overseer is hidden. You can get stuck with a certain room or creature if the Overseer is crowded away, or even killed.
Surprise Difficulty: For one, it's an E-10 rated game by "Adult Swim Games"; but also despite that it's a brutally challenging, fairly opaque game for seasoned and perceptive gamers. Not the type you'd expect from a game with a cute cat-like critter for a mascot.
That One Achievement: Downpour introduces "The Champion", which requires you to finish all 70 Challenges, DLC-exclusive Arenas tasking you with a variety of parameters and win conditions, from "kill all enemies with x items" to simply "survive under a time limit", with wildly varying enemy lineups and arenas. They all run the gamut of difficulty from "easier than the base game" to brutally difficult, with later challenges often requiring complete mastery of each slugcats' advanced movement tech, enemy behavior and pure dedication to trumping the already-difficult game's souped-up final challenges.
That One Level: The entire game is pretty hard, but there are some regions that really take the cake in terms of difficulty.
Shaded Citadel is a complex and very dark castle of some kind, with portions of the map being shrouded in darkness. Darkness can be dispelled by getting a light source, and the two most powerful sources of light are Scavenger lanterns and neuron flies. The problem? The only ways to get neuron flies before heading up the Exterior is to harm Looks To The Moon, which grants Videogame Cruelty Punishment in the form of the gold Overseer abandoning you. The other way is to buy a lantern from a Scavenger Merchant, who is conveniently located on the far east side of the map. Even if you manage to get a light source, the place is still dark, confusing, and houses some seriously dangerous threats like spider swarms, which can kill Slugcat fast. Also, since the Scavenger is on the east side of the area, anyone coming in from the west (i.e the much easier Garbage Wastes) is in for a rude awakening, and possibly cannot even finish the level due to lacking any form of easily accessible light. The bottom of the area also houses the Memory Crypts, which are themselves difficult and exhausting to navigate thanks to the constant patrol of Miros Birds.
Five Pebbles and its Exterior comprise the midgame portion of the intended path, and are by far the two toughest levels in the entire game next to the completely optional Sky Islands. And they are played back to back. The player will likely enter the facility from the Memory Crypts, which will feed into The Leg. The Leg itself is a fairly tough vertical climb where the player has to deal with white lizards hounding them constantly, and the upper portions of the area are filled with Daddy Long Legs (and sometimes both enemies at the same time). Upon making it through The Leg, players now need to deal with The Underhang, which revolves around using Grappling Worms to swing around above bottomless pits. One wrong move spells death, which is easy to make when the place is filled with yellow lizards, more Daddy Long Legs, and some tricky jumps. Even worse, in order to get into Five Pebbles, you either have to have 5 Karma to get into the gate from The Underhang, or climb up the entirety of The Wall, yet another vertical climb filled with lizards, bottomless pits, and vultures. And if you finally make it into the facility, you still have to deal with Five Pebbles itself, which is a complex and dangerous environment. Woe help you if you choose to run through the Unfortunate Development subsection, which has walls made out of Daddy Long Legs. The only consolation is that the entrance to Five Pebbles from the Wall requires a measly 1 Karma, meaning if you can brave the trip up you can get into the facility through that entrance no matter what, though that entrance does require a spear to access.
During Rivulet's campaign, these areas become even worse. The Leg and Underhang feature a greater abundance of Daddy Long Legs, and once you get inside the facility it becomes clear just how badly the Rot has messed up Five Pebbles. The zero-gravity isn't working correctly as it flickers on and off, the rooms are rearranged as a result of the damage, there are Long Legs all over the place, and many walls are covered with stationary yet no less dangerous cysts. It can take only one wrong move for you to get caught by a tentacle and swiftly consumed by the Rot.
There's a specific stretch of the Underhang that's particularly difficult once you've extracted the Rarefaction Cell from Five Pebbles' facility and have to return to Looks to the Moon. Due to the Cell occupying both hands, you're forced to traverse the area without the Grappling Worm while coming to grips with the Cell's temporary low gravity as a substitute. Clearing the area requires pin-point platforming and delaying the cell's activation to clear jumps without going too high or low. It's to the point that going around via Chimney Canopy is seen as the easier route.
Farm Arrays is widely considered one of the ungodliest regions to traverse. Many of its flats have large Worm Grass that require riding Rain Deer to cross. These Rain Deer typically require being fed a Spore Puff to hitch onto their antlers. However, it's not immediately obvious that Spore Puffs have this purpose, or how to change their movement prior to the Downpour DLC. Said Rain Deer have also had bouts of Artificial Stupidity in the forms of sitting down or moving in unusual ways. There is a snaking path between all gates that doesn't require the Rain Deer mechanic, but it's riddled with weaker Worm Grass, getting through the gate to Subterranean requires you to either ride Rain Deer through some patches or swim through a flooded pipeway longer than most Slugcats can hold their breath, and taking said path between the gate to Outskirts and either of the other gates requires you to pass a Scavenger Toll.
For purist lore enthusiasts, collecting all the optional and very out-of-the-way Colored Pearls is an exercise in frustration and patience, requiring you to traverse across difficult and perilous terrain to even reach them, grab/store them in your 1-3 spaces of very valuable carrying limit, then having to trek all the way back to Looks to the Moonnote or Five Pebbles, if playing as Artificer just to get a few random tidbits of worldbuilding, ranging from completely mundane to incredibly important and necessary backstory. Considering the massive scale of the game world, the brutality of traversing it as-is, the lack of infinite fast travel and the multitudes of colored pearls, most people opt to just look up a video essay or read the wiki.
Gourmand's campaign has the optional "food quest", which is a collection of 22 foods/creatures you must consume at least once for an additional ending. Most of the foods are very ubiquitous and easy to find. Some are more difficult and require slaying certain creatures. The game will never tell you precisely which creatures or where to find them. The most it gives you is a faint icon over your food pips to indicate only *one* on the next of the quest. Thankfully, you can finish the quest in any order, and their food quest was tailored specifically to a logical route so you get most by virtue of playing the game normally, but there will be outliers that require intimate map knowledge or simply looking it up.
One specific creature on the quest is the Aquapede, which is one you can find early on your game, if you know where to look, but also the hardest to eat, by far. For starters, Aquapedes thrive underwater, whereas Gourmand flounders in it, due to their exhaustion mechanic where simply throwing one spear immediately tires them, slowing them down and running their oxygen up faster than normal. Aquapedes will also almost immediately head to their den if speared once, requiring you to burst it down ASAP or waste another cycle to either find another one or try again. Lastly, the very areas they inhabit are tailored to the Aquapede and against Gourmand, often being deep underwater, where Gourmand cannot put their weight and Regurtitate to use, as well as limiting you to only one weapon as you'll most likely need Bubble Weed to keep yourself under. The only feasible way to win is either having an explosive spear or singularity bomb handy, or to bait an Aquapede to the surface, where you can then attempt to pelt it with your toolsnote Spore Puffs are recommended of choice and pray it either doesn't kill you first or that it dies before it crawls back into its den. It's so needlessly difficult to fight the Aquapede as Gourmand that the alternative, that being the dreaded Red Centipede, is actually recommended over the former.note Surprisingly, it isn't as hard as it sounds, due to Gourmand's innate ability to create/craft Spore Puffs which absolutely devastate Centipedes. As a bonus, a guaranteed Red Centipede spawn shows up in Subterranean, where you'll be headed to anyways as it leads to the Outer Expanse.
Unpopular Popular Character: In game, Inv is an absolute joke of a character, of whom all the slugcats they try to swoon in the Dating Sim unanimously reject their advances. The fandom, however, treat them much better, often finding them pitiable or not as repulsive as they are in-game, and being one of the more well-known characters despite being hidden behind an elaborate ARG secret and essentially being a niche in-joke.
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