RAIN OF REFLECTIONS is a Fantastic Story Bogged Down by Tedious Gameplay

Rain of Reflections recently came out on PC and Lionbite was kind enough to send me a copy to review. It is an interesting game. The number one priority of the game is its story. It feels like the team created the story and then after it was completed, asked the question, “How can we incorporate some kind of gameplay into it.” This is both a strength and a weakness.

As I mentioned, the story is clearly the top priority for Rain of Reflections. The problem here is that the gameplay itself felt lacking. In the game you play as Wilona and there are essentially three parts to the gameplay. First, part of it feels like a point-and-click game. You walk by clicking on spots and you then click on things to investigate them. The second gameplay is “hacking.” Wilona is a whiz at computers and can remote hack into them and the hacking takes the form of three mini games that start out as fun and quickly become tedious. Finally, there are encounters. Encounters are turn-based strategy moments. You can try sneaking around to reach the goal or after a certain point, you can also fight with a gun. This part was pretty fun. I liked the fact that you could choose to be sneaky, but then it wasn’t game over if you failed at being stealthy.

Another weakness of the game is the graphics. The graphics aren’t terrible, but they’re not great either. The animation feels really stiff an unnatural for humans though which really hampers the experience, especially when the lip syncing is pretty bad.

So, what were the strengths? Well, the story is really well done. The story is engaging if you get past the repetitive gameplay and mediocre graphics. There were moments where I thought I knew how things were going to turn out and then it went the other way, but it didn’t feel too forced. There were times where a little bit more story would’ve helped to explain things a little, but this is also only the first chapter. The world created for Rain of Reflections is also pretty cool from the sample we got.

Another strength was the audio. For the most part, the voice work was good, the music was phenomenal, and the other audio work like background sounds helped immerse me into the world that I thought was pretty cool.

Overall, the story in Rain of Reflections is amazing, but the gameplay gets very tedious very quick. On the bright side, Chapter 1 only took me about 3 hours to finish, so it’s not long at all. If you can deal with a game that feels like the game part was an afterthought, you’ll be in for one great story. I’m really interested to see where the story goes from here.

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