Sony's Rain is Beautiful and Melancholy

Often the best thing about the announcement of a new generation of consoles is the late flourish of curious games that appears on the current ones. Announced last year at a Sony Gamescom conference rich with cool and unusual new titles, Rain is an interesting, quietly atmospheric PSN exclusive from Sony’s Japan Studio; there are glimpses of ICO and The Unfinished Swan in its creative, puzzley platforming and melancholy ambience. It’s about a boy who follows a spectral girl into an alternate dimension where he’s invisible unless he’s in the rain – a dimension filled with phantom monsters that chase and stalk you through the night.

As a Scottish person I naturally have a profound and lifelong relationship with rain, so as a thematic motif it’s familiar and resonant. Walking through this gloomy, rain-soaked city evokes an atmosphere of isolation and quiet sadness. What I didn’t expect to be so familiar was Rain’s urban setting; it’s modelled on European rather than Japanese town streets, with austere, grand, grey buildings that evoke Paris or Edinburgh more than Tokyo. But it still has an ethereal quality that means it isn’t fully grounded in the real world

Rain is an adventure video game in development by SCE Japan Studio for the PlayStation 3. The game was first revealed at gamescom 2012 and is currently scheduled for release on the Playstation Network in 2013.

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