Rain on Your Parade (Xbox One)
With games like Untitled Goose Game and Donut County it does seem like a trend towards “mischief games” is taking hold, the point of the game less about unique gameplay goals and more about providing various scenarios to disrupt in amusing ways. A quick look at Rain on Your Parade makes it look like it’s part of this group as well, the player guiding a cloud to disrupt people’s lives with rain and other weather effects. Even after writing this I found that the game’s page on Steam specifically recommends the game if you liked Untitled Goose Game and Donut County. Rain on Your Parade does soon realize that simple mischief can grow stale though, fairly quickly starting to introduce level types with more creative concepts and wilder ideas to make a new level a more exciting prospect than just seeing who you’ll be picking on next.
Rain on Your Parade is presented as a story told by an old man to his grandson at night about a cloud who wanted to find a place on Earth where clouds are free to do as they please. It turns out the famously stormy city of Seattle is the cloud’s destination, so it flies off in search of it, raining down on the places along the way as it travels. Perhaps due to its nature as a story most of the game is presented with somewhat of an arts and crafts look, major characters like the cloud itself and people who speak to it drawn on cardboard and moved about with strings while more mobile human characters and animals are clearly made of felt or plastic when you get a closer look at them. This art direction doesn’t really impact the range of level designs though, instead the game happily pursuing whatever ideas it likes and then trying to adjust the look slightly so it fits into this visual format.
Rain on Your Parade’s silliness is embodied by the batch of recurring characters you encounter in your adventure. The most important is your nemesis Dr. Dryspell, a villain who speaks in rhymes and has a deliberately weak motivation for wanting to rid the world of rain. Allies on the other hand will often introduce a level’s new goals with their dialogue but will often do so with references, unexpected breaks from their expected character, and gentle jabs at video game conventions. Some characters can ramble on a bit and the jokes do work better when they are snappier since a lot of the writing’s appeal are the surprise comments, but they’re sparse enough and skippable that you can better focus on the action.
When Rain on Your Parade starts it presents the player with a pretty expected scenario for some mischief. You play as the smiling cloud above a wedding party and your goal is really just to rain down on everyone and watch the chaos that unfolds. The early levels have you moving your cloud around to douse characters and objects appropriate to the level’s theme, there sometimes being a few extra goals like avoiding an angry sun that will dry you up or using your rain to guide characters to a specific location but otherwise it is simple and would hardly be enough to build a whole game on. Rather quickly though you start finding levels with more creative concepts that break away from the idea of simply raining down on everyone in a frenzy. You’ll have sneaking levels where you need to rain on people without them spotting you, you’ll have a level where you inexplicably drop bread instead of raindrops and need to draw pigeons into causing their own brand of chaos, and concept levels become increasingly common. Your cloud can suck up different fluid types so you can start making oil trails to ignite or even utilize chemicals to start a zombie horde that you guide through the city and help grow. Levels begin to present themselves with special cinematic effects to mimic other media, and even if you don’t recognize a level is referencing The Office, Counter Strike, or Metal Gear Solid you’ll have a unique gameplay shift and a unique presentation style to separate it from the previously simple act of raining on people.
Levels begin to have more goals that require more thought to them even in stages where you go back to simple downpour antics with some objectives even remaining hidden until you pursue your curiosity and trigger their addition to the level checklist. Stages will have optional and required objectives and beating the game even unlocks new special conditions for previous stages to further draw more content from each stage layout, and poking around to find extra goals or simply figuring out how the new ideas at play in a stage work give Rain on Your Parade more interesting variety. Special stages begin to crop up as well where the game shifts away from goal completion and will focus on things like high scores instead. Your cloud has a set amount of rain it can use, and while in some stages it can be replenished quite easily, in others like battles against Dr. Dryspell it is both a life bar and a limited source of interaction as your way of fighting back. In score focused levels you’ll often be asked to make the most of your limited water by disrupting a crowd in economical but hasty ways since people do react to being soaked. Other objects like electronics will misbehave when wet too and this can factor into the goals with a great puzzle focus, but listing every application of the simple rain mechanic would be difficult since it can shift to new forms like dropping meteors, swords, or even human hands for the express purpose of petting a dog.
A wide range of imagination evolves the simple core premise and even new mechanics can briefly shift Rain on Your Parade into different genres, but your weather-based powers do also evolve over the course of the adventure and add new tricks. Thunder comes with a lightning bolt as well and you can more directly impact the world by blasting objects around or powering things up, a tornado gives you the means to move things around albeit in a somewhat loose manner that can make some simple tasks a bit more difficult for good and for ill, and snow gives you the power to influence the level space with slippery ice or just turning people into big balls of snow that will roll around with ease. Much like the rain mechanic these will find purchase in many different level concepts, most of the game’s stages not too difficult to complete even if you go for extra goals and the experience more about discovering what you can do in the level and then engaging with it. A greater focus is on ridiculous ideas and outcomes than being truly challenging, although there are also secrets to find even on the world map that can sometimes provide entirely new levels or just add new ways to customize the playable cloud as your reward for finding them. Appropriately many of the hats and accessories for your cloud are silly or strange, Rain on Your Parade all about delighting in what new ridiculous idea crops up next.
THE VERDICT: Creative spaces for weather-based chaos keep Rain on Your Parade interesting despite the sometimes breezy designs of the goals given to the player. Seeing what new twist to play emerges, reading a silly bit of dialogue, recognizing a parody, or just embracing the option to go wild with your rain, snow, and wind helps keep the game’s energy high, the game experimenting beyond the scope of the initial design of each new skill your cloud gets to make the game’s batch of 50 levels feel unique and diverse. Some puzzle solving and action moments do require a bit of involvement compared to the game’s usual format of low pressure play, but seeing which wacky new idea is on show in the next level makes the newness of what’s ahead more than make up for any simplicity.
And so, I give Rain on Your Parade for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. More than just mindless mischief, Rain on Your Parade keeps the player excited to see what’s next by constantly experimenting with how it can tinker with its premise. Figuring out what factors are at play and then utilizing them makes up much of the play’s flow and oftentimes these aren’t too difficult to work out and execute, but every now and then stages like the score-based levels or battles with Dryspell you’ll find yourself pushed to be a bit more careful or strategic. Some levels are more about an interesting premise carrying the day while others focus more on how you play or executing objectives that aren’t so straightforward, so while you’re likely to better remember wild ideas like going to the moon or helping wipe out the dinosaurs, the variety in the individual levels ensure the game has a solid balance of breezy concepts and levels with more substantial interactive elements. Branching out from the idea of just inflicting weather effects on unsuspecting citizens really does help the game maintain a sense of novelty important to avoiding the burnout of the seemingly basic premise its early levels put forward. It isn’t quite as ambitious as a game like What the Golf?! that pushes how you play into wild directions while maintaining a degree of difficulty, but seeing what lies ahead and having a general amusing tone keeps Rain on Your Parade fun and fanciful throughout.
Rain on Your Parade’s play can range from being the storm cloud over one poor specific man’s head for the length of the stage or stealing a parody of the Mona Lisa from a museum and both feel a wonderful fit for the tone and the capabilities of your cloud. Light-hearted, brisk for the most part, and providing enough levels with deeper play to offset the ones that are simple in concept or execution, Rain on Your Parade can have its moments of mischief while also breaking its own mold to head in unexpected but delightful new directions. Perhaps appropriately for a silly comedy game you can’t quite predict what’s coming next, interacting with the new idea at play satisfying enough that this cloudy day doesn’t outstay its welcome.