Rain On Your Parade Review
Rain is absolutely, without a doubt the best weather there is. This is not a question or up for debate. Whether it’s a gray drizzle or a falling torrent, I love when it rains because the sound is so wonderfully soothing. Rain makes any day better simply by existing yet it never lasts long enough for my tastes. Almost as good, but not quite, it gives me a universally acceptable reason to stay home and not socialize with anyone. But I recognize that many people, incorrectly, disagree with me and that’s their choice. I simply sit back, comfortably relaxing knowing that if a foul-mannered cloud ever descended upon my hometown, they would be terrorized while I would only be made happier. A preposterous event, you might say, but Rain On Your Parade vehemently disagrees.
Rain On Your Parade is a story within a story. To help his grandchild get to sleep, a grandfather decides to teach them a dubious lesson: how much fun it is to mess with people. To that end, the grandfather tells the story of Cloudy, an ambitious and mischievous cloud on a quest to find the mythological city of Seattle, a place where a cloud can rain on people and ruin days to their heart’s content. On their way to this meteorological Shangri-La, Cloudy will have all sorts of adventures, everything from saving endangered animals to causing the end of the world.
Rain On Your Parade is of a kind with games like Untitled Goose Game because it’s a puzzle game in which solving the puzzle involves the player being genuinely horrible and annoying to people who haven’t done anything to deserve that sort of treatment but it’s obfuscated by a colorful and cartoony tone. The thing that impressed me most about puzzles in Rain On Your Parade was how varied and different they were while all still being enjoyable. The game starts with simple objectives like raining on the bride and groom at a wedding or putting out a spreading fire, but later on tasks players to cause a car to spin out of control and demolish a bus stop or interrupt wild west duels by stealing a herd of cows. Later puzzles are able to become more complex and challenging with the addition of powers to Cloudy’s arsenal, which gives players new tactics for solving problems. At first, Cloudy can only rain, but over the course of the game will learn new tricks such as lightning strikes and snow. I really liked these puzzles because they strike a good balance between challenging and entertaining. They’re just tricky enough to make me pause for a second to figure it out, but after a bit of thought are just plain fun to play.
Periodically, Rain On Your Parade gets a wild hair and departs from the typical puzzle level to try something unusual. These levels task the player with a strange task, such as raining bread onto a town square to unleash an army of pigeons or using different colors of rain to paint a massive portrait. Unlike the puzzle levels, these are a lot more hit or miss and are often built around, or at least heavily focus on, some reference to video game culture or movies. Overall, I thought these levels were fine, but they struck me as odd. Perhaps if Rain On Your Parade were a more challenging game, these would have been a welcome moment to unwind and relax. But as it is, the game isn’t much of a brain-buster so these breaks don’t feel necessary or earned. Additionally, I found some of the more cliche references to be annoying and played out. One point in their favor is that, regardless of how fun or challenging these outlier levels are, they still work well within the game’s mechanics, which shows an impressive level of creativity and skill on the part of the developers.
One thing I hadn’t expected from Rain On Your Parade was the game’s plethora of secrets. Each mission has one to five objectives for players to accomplish, with a couple being necessary and the others optional. But beyond that, missions have secret objectives players aren’t aware of until they have partially completed them. These objectives are things that aren’t directly related to the other objectives but reward players for being thorough or creative in their approaches, such as destroying all of one kind of item on the map. These were fun for me because it gave me a reason to mess around more or less aimlessly in an attempt to get that little extra bit out of the game. Other secrets can be found in the map Cloudy travels through on their way to Seattle, where players pick which level to play next. From the game’s collectible “fanboys” to characters hidden in secluded areas to two different full-blown levels, they serve as a fun reason to explore the map. Lastly, I won’t give away the context to save the surprise, but there are secret sharks Cloudy can use to defeat enemy robots.
Rain On Your Parade isn’t a masterpiece or something to revolutionize the gaming industry. Puzzle game aficionados won’t find much challenge in it and the hardcore crowd won’t get much out of the silly atmosphere, but Rain On Your Parade isn’t aiming for them. This game is about having immature, slightly dickish fun, not unlike the more antagonistic episodes of Looney Tunes. If you want a silly game to unwind and de-stress or have a young child you want to share a video game with, Rain On Your Parade is a great way to spend your time. And since it’s only $15, it’s a very low-stakes risk.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
