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Watership Down
by Richard Adams
Ever since playing Rain World, I've been yearning for a book that is even somewhat comparable. I truly believe that it is a triumph of the science fictional imagination. Watership Down is probably the closest I'm going to get. Add in a helping of Blame!'s anti-human mega-architecture, and Land of the Lustrous' transcendental scifi-Buddhist lore, all refracted through a graffiti-in-a-junkyard stylization, and you're most of the way there.
Many video essay pixels have already been spilled on Rain World's unique qualities, but relatively little about the difference in story between the original game and the semi-official expansion Downpour. Initially developed as a free mod, the team behind Downpour eventually negotiated to get access to the original mapping tools, and to release the mod as a paid semi-official expansion. 99% of the work was done by fans, with little input from the original developers. Downpour contained significant new story content (in total probably more than the original game had), which was supposedly vetted by the original writers.
One of the most striking things about Rain World is that the world does not seem to be made for you. Unlike most games where the world is a precisely calibrated theme park for the player, Rain World aims for the impression of a world which is not only independent of the slugcat, but uncaring and somewhat hostile. Some paths are traversable only after the player learns the game's many unexplained advanced movement techniques. The use of spears to create your own climbing paths is necessary in several places. The world's other denizens operate with an independent set of priorities, roving about semi-randomly according to their simple needs and directives. Crucially, the slugcat is not special here. To a predatory lizard, the slugcat is like any other prey animal (at least before the reputation system kicks in). If it sees you and is hungry, it will attack. If it is pre-occupied with fighting other lizards, or fleeing a vulture, or has already gotten other prey, it will ignore you. It's this feeling of being in a world that exists for its own sake, that has the appearance of a living breathing ecosystem, that makes Rain World endlessly fascinating to play.
This nobody-ness extends to the story. The slugcat is simply a lost animal. More intelligent than some others, but less than the scavengers. There is nothing special or unique about you. When the slugcat crosses the world to meet Looks to the Moon, it is not because there is some destiny at work, but because it was amenable to Moon's guidance. When Five Pebbles sends the slugcat to dissolve itself in the void sea, it's already full of wandering souls seeking their ultimate dissolution. Though you may alleviate Moon's pain, nothing you do affects or answers the ultimate question that is their reason for being.
And yet, this meaningless encounter is unspeakably awesome. The discovery of the only functional machinery in a world that has been entirely mechanized, the realization that you have been crawling through the veins of a god, whose body is a mountain, and whose breath is the rain. While the ending to Rain World is visually spectacular, I find that it is the view atop Five Pebbles' can that is most arresting. A vista completely covered in clouds, with the occasional other can or antenna complex far away just poking above. A world that has been completely remade in eons past, for machine gods that are now dead or dying, yet is full of life.
The player can go on the arduous sidequest of tracking down each region's coloured pearl in order to get a little bit more story, but it's mostly interesting for its incomprehensibility. Snippets from a world that has few to no references points in common with either us or the slugcat, yet whose nature is exactly the same as ours. The glimpses into the tragedy of Pebbles and Moon and how they got in their sorry states is poignant, but incomplete. Slugcat meets them at a specific point in their decline, and though it can comfort Moon, it can only really help itself, leaving the "story" fundamentally incomplete. The ending sequence snuffs out one particular being, but not one that is particularly important.
That all changes with Downpour. Now, I don't want to make it sound like the original devs are completely innocent here. They themselves added the Hunter, who was special, did have a purpose in life, and is massively important to the story. But there's a difference between one optional post-game hard mode character, and an entire god damn Sonic and Friends rainbow of slugcats.
Some of the new ideas added are just too expansive for their own good. The Gourmand's new region, Outer Expanse, recontextualizes the subway cars seen in the Subterranean region as in fact the terminal point of a sky rail system, with a forested swamp far below. Thus the entire playable area of the base game is now understood as in fact taking place on top of a massive mesa. While the image has merit, it also undermines the logic of the original. The whole point of ascending to the top of the Wall or diving to the bottom of Subterranean was that you actually were making significant distance up and down, not crawling up and down a relatively small vertical segment of the world. The new non-lethal rain and natural landscape in Outer Expanse also decreases the import of the Wall vista: no longer is it a world entirely consumed by artifice.
Rivulet's campaign goes even farther. Not only is Rivulet some kind of super-strong and fast mutant, it actually has a significant effect on the lives of Pebbles and Moon. Through Rivulet, Pebbles sacrifices the last of his strength in order to save Moon, making small restitution for his crime. While a moving redemption, god damn, this just shits all over the original. It turns out you could have had a significant effect on Pebbles and Moon, you just didn't.
For the final campaign, the Saint, the story actually gets so weird I wrap back around to loving it. The Saint's deal is that after encountering each of the Echoes, it gains the ability to magically fly around and annihilate souls a la Land of the Lustrous (seriously, was this some documented ability of the ancient Buddhas? How does a motif this specific come up twice?). Flying around righteously killing the fuck out of everything is fun as hell, but like, you can see how it's a million miles removed from where we started. If you pursue the optional path of killing Moon and Pebble as Saint, you get a bonus conversation in the void where they thank you for freeing them, allowing them to grasp the true shape of their impossible task. After attempting to kill one of the void worms and swim out of the void, the Saint is stabbed by a series of chains(?) reminiscent of the tentacles of the echoes, and seems to reappear where it started at the beginning of his campaign. Saint seems to be trapped as an eternally recurring Boddhisatva, reframing the predicament of the echoes, not as the most karmically chained beings of all, but as the most selfless.
Downpour is full of stuff I love. So much of it is "what if Rain World was fun", lots of the new regions and creatures are fitting for the original world. Saint's frozen, dying, world, with a single egg of warmth in its depths, waiting to emerge anew, is an amazing reinterpretation of the world and the theme of repeating cycles from the original. I played through all of it, and I'll play the upcoming Watcher expansion, but so much of the story is unfitting embroidery on a story that was effective because of its starkness.