Game Reviews

Rainmaker - The Beautiful Flood - Not a damp mess

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Rainmaker - The Beautiful Flood - Not a damp mess

Rainmaker is an interesting one-touch puzzle game about guiding a bubble to an open door. It looks lovely, and it's got some pretty neat ideas wrapped around it as well.

There's very little hand-holding here, so when new elements are introduced you need to work out how best to use them to your advantage.

As polished, vaguely intriguing puzzle games go there's a lot here to like. It's not perfect, and the hands-off approach leads to some difficulty spikes, but it's worth persevering with all the same.

Bubble to a door, sounds pretty simple

In practise it's a little more difficult than that. There are shades of a variety of other puzzles here, from Cut the Rope to Where's My Water.

Your bubble has multiple different states that you can cycle through with a single tap. You have different abilities depending on the level.

Sometimes you're just poking a bubble and a cute block. Other times you're dealing with a basketball or a skittering spider as well.

Tapping anywhere on the screen switches what you are. The bubble floats upwards, the basketball bounces around, and the spider wanders around attached to ledges. There are other styles to unlock as well.

And below it all there fizzes a story about endless rain, flooded homes, and being trapped in a sewer. It's a story that exists apart from the action, but there's enough going on that you'll want to push on to find out more.

Okay, this all sounds pretty impressive

It is. And did I mention it looks pretty? Because it looks really pretty. There's a softness to all of the edges that pulls you into the game's machinations, and an easy restart system that means your failures are never too catastrophic.

That's not to say it doesn't have its problems. There's not much room for experimentation here, and often you'll stumble across the solution to a puzzle rather than reaching it with a satisfying "eureka" moment.

But there's still enough here that you'll get entangled in its multiple limbs. It has some new ideas, and some fresh takes on old ideas, and while it's unlikely to land on the top of any game of the year lists, it's still well worth a look.

Rainmaker - The Beautiful Flood - Not a damp mess

Rainmaker is a slick and entertaining puzzler. While it might not have the chops to hang around in your games folder too long, it's still worth a look
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.