Rain On Your Parade Review

At a time when titles like Donut County and Untitled Goose Game taught me that games can revel in beautiful simplistic absurdity, I was very much on board with what Rain On Your Parade had to offer. Its delightfully simple levels ramp up their silliness across something like 50 individual challenges – it’s the perfect pick up and play package.

It begins with Grandpa telling a fantastic story about a mischievous cloud and its misadventures, providing the absolute lowest requirement for a narrative. This tale speaks of the creatively named Cloudy, who dreams of heading to the magical city of Seattle, where rain clouds get to rain on anyone at any time. However, the villainous Professor Dryspell is committed to stopping that road trip. This adventure was so wholesome, so enjoyable, that I felt compelled to rope my two and a half-year-old daughter into joining me, much to her delight.

What follows is a range of puzzle-based levels that ask you to flex your cloudy muscles and find new and creative ways to make things wet, or catch on fire – or corrode with acid, the list goes on. You are a very versatile nimbus, and the world is your oyster. The creativity that drives these situations is the game’s most treasured asset, as in one instant you will simply be saturating folks who have ventured outside, and in the next you will be trying to set off a bomb. Maybe you are soaking up a range of chemicals in a school to demonstrate chemistry, while also herding children into a distant classroom, before heading to the country to destroy farm vehicles AND grow crops. The sky’s the limit, and you are most at home there. Seriously, at one point I was playing Metal Gear Solid from the perspective of a cloud. The game is just full-on batty and entertaining to the core.

Come at me Sun, I am the raining champion

Cloudy as a character is also yours to enjoy, with a range of cosmetic options unlocked as you play through the title. There are top hats and sunglasses aplenty, but the real joy comes from the fact that you can actually draw your own face. I spent close to 45 minutes tweaking and playing with my obscene creation, trying to communicate the sheer majesty of what my cloud represented – long enough that my daughter was well past fidgeting out of boredom and had instead chosen to wander off and play with other expensive collectibles in my office.

What makes Rain On Your Parade a genuinely enjoyable adventure is how well the game approaches each of its situations. While the general concept remains consistent, the methods and motivations continuously change; you may be a precipitator, but you are a CREATIVE precipitator. It’s never as simple as merely rain on thing, there are a handy amount of twists that make your dynamic drizzle days feel rewarding, even if it is as simple as ‘DONT GET THE KIDS WET’.

Classy AND Gleeful

I also have to lavish praise on something the game has taken careful attention to avoid – mechanic bloat. So often a game of this nature will gradually introduce more and more mechanics to solve puzzles, and the game will eventually end up with these multi-phase puzzles that act like some kind of end-of-year exam that challenges you to make use of all of them. Instead, Rain On Your Parade will bring forth goofier elements for a series of puzzles, before retiring them. Sure, some powers will persist, but the overall experience is kept tight and focused on ensuring that you are only really juggling a small handful of tricks at a time.

This is appreciated when the true afterparty begins — when you start the New Game+ offering. Here, you are now able to flex your added Thunder/Snow/Tornado powers on previous levels. These have a range of additional objectives to complete, so you can revisit your humble beginnings with a newfound eye for added mayhem – and perhaps a renewed interest from your daughter if present.

Cloudy would have an easier time sneaking if he was in de-skies

Final Thoughts

Rain On Your Parade encourages you to take something cutesy and adorable, and find your inner evil. Drink deep of the chaos a simple rain cloud can impart on the world as you ruin weddings, start fires and bring about the extinction of the dinosaurs. At the core of it all, ruining someone’s day has never been more fun.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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