Rainswept, from Frostwood Interactive and 2Awesome Studio, starts out with a trigger warning. From there, the game just jumps straight into an emotional roller coaster. If you’re bothered by portrayals of depression, suicide, intense grief and mental illness, this is definitely not the game for you. It’s a murder mystery, but it’s also almost a character study of interpersonal relationships and how they are affected by death, assault, naiveté, and more.
Rainswept is the story of a couple, Chris and Diane, who die. It’s also the story of the detective called in to investigate their case, Detective Michael Stone. The first thing you’ll notice about Rainswept is the visual style. It’s well-designed but noticeably minimalist and takes some getting used to, especially with the way people move in the game, almost like they are puppets and you’re watching a really dark puppet show. In fact, that’s kind of what Rainswept is, as this is essentially a slightly more interactive visual novel with only a handful of story paths.
Stone is out to solve the murder-suicide of Chris and Diane. The local podunk cops just want the case closed, but Stone has other ideas. There’s some fairly graphic (but still minimalist) analysis of the crime scene near the beginning. As Stone, it’s your job to analyze all the leads, get to know the locals and find out what happened. Over the course of the 5 or 6 hour game, you’ll end up exposed to a wide variety of circumstances, responses, and trauma, and chances are good that at least some of it will be intimately familiar to you.
That’s what makes Rainswept good. The writing is noticeably based on reality in such a way that it’s distinctly possible that the writer went through some of these circumstances in their life. People talk like they really would, react like they really would, and most importantly, behave like real people. They’re archetypes of real personalities across the board, saying weirdly inappropriate things, reacting oddly, and generally not dealing with their own baggage. Diane specifically (who you’ll learn lots about) is incredibly realistic and behaves much as someone with a mental illness and her history would. That’s not a commentary about mental illness in and of itself, simply an observation about the quality of the character writing. Stone is also surprisingly realistic. In fact, only one or two characters came off as anything less than completely believable and that’s certainly rare. There’s no posturing, just a sad story, a lot of people who are misunderstood or misunderstand each other, and pretty much a living snapshot of life in a small town.
However, that doesn’t mean everything is flawless in Rainswept. There are certainly some odd little quirks to the control system that were more than a bit irritating. Stone moves incredibly slow for one, and it’s easy to find yourself constantly holding the ZR trigger to run everywhere because it’s so irritatingly tedious to crawl slowly across the screen. The D-pad menu had a weird glitch too, which allows you to clear the menu by double tapping left or up, but not by double tapping right, so that every time you check your to do list, you had to bring up another menu to clear it. And then there’s the magnifying glasses. You can press X to display little magnifying glass marks on all the interact-able objects on screen. However, much of the time you can’t interact with everything you see. Officer Blunt always had an interaction mark on her, but it was impossible to highlight her to talk to her most of the time. This is a persistent issue in the game and while entirely ignorable, felt like it should have been fixed. There were also a few graphical hitches, but only one was particularly severe, interrupting a key scene with Chris and Diane with a weird rectangle. In short, while well-written, the mechanics of the game felt like they were a bit of an afterthought here and there.
Regardless of controls, Rainswept’s story drags you in until you can almost feel Detective Stone’s emotional state. And one of the key factors in that immersion is the sound design. Sound is subtle and fantastic in Rainswept, with weather effects taking a front seat and a quiet, introspective soundtrack that suits the heavy, almost oppressive content. This is a fantastic example of well-crafted sound design that dovetails well with the gameplay throughout, creating a much more powerful experience. By the end of the game, the quiet swells of music, windy days, and minimalist graphics have woven a tapestry that’s hard to ignore.
There’s not a lot to Rainswept aside from the story though. There are a few pathways the story can take depending on your choices, but most choices result in the same response no matter what, only creating the illusion of choice. This is a philosophically deep game but not one steeped in a variety of gameplay or significant replayability. You probably won’t expect where it goes, though it’s hard not to give spoilers and they would definitely ruin the game.
Rainswept is a purely indie presentation but its style, creativity, script depth, and sound design make it well more than the sum of its parts. For $10, you’re buying more of an experience than a game, one that is designed to address uncomfortable topics and address them quite bluntly in a way that quite frankly, we should all be doing more often. There’s a sense of humanity within the pixels of Rainswept and it carries you on a journey that feels like it accomplishes its goals and leaves you with a sense of the enduring perseverance of both the individual and the group in the end. This is a very personal-feeling project that successfully manages to tug at a player’s emotional heartstrings and ends up being a reflection of the darkness and uncertainty that everyone feels in their lives. Frostwood has done an absolutely excellent job on this short and unique title, and Rainswept is definitely worth taking an afternoon or two to play through!
This review is based on a digital copy of Rainswept provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was great in both. It should be noted that the map was particularly hard to read on the smaller screen of the undocked Switch. All screenshots are of actual gameplay. Rainswept is also available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on Steam and Itch.io.