Rain On Your Parade - Story, Gameplay, Visuals & Audio Review

Rain On Your Parade is a fun and comedic indie game that takes the gameplay formula of Untitled Goose Game but applies it to a storm cloud. Imagine being a cloud that just rains on the worse people, well that's this game. It's cheesy, corny but boy did it put a smile on my face. Rain on Your Parade is available on Xbox One, Switch, and PC this week.

Rain On Your Parade story

If you come into Rain On Your Parade looking for the next narrative masterpiece then you'll be setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, Rain On Your Parade is a self-aware joke that throws out any sense of reality out of the window. The story opens up with a parent telling their kid about a cloud that would go about ruining people's days. That very cloud is us, a cute cardboard cut-out cloud appropriately named cloudy.

Our job is to go about the Earth, ruining bad people's days. It's simple, the story is a little dumb but boy is it charming. Along the way, I came across a giant cloud that has been around since the honey badger memes and a Frog who you might remember from the retro video game era. There's a handful of references here that I'll let you find for yourself but they range from video games to tv shows and despite how simple they were, they made me laugh and smile the moment I realized them.

Rain On Your Parade Gameplay

Rain On Your Parade ranges across 50 levels that'll have you raining on farms, weddings, offices, military bases, and so on. At its heart, it's a puzzle game that gives you objectives to rain on. Missions have a star ranking on them that score you on completing the main objectives that are required to move on in the campaign. However, there are also side objectives that improve your score and unlock new accessories for your cloud. This is where some of the replay values come in. You can customize your cloudy with accessories from a hat to a guitar they hold. I went with this froggy on my head which was just one of the many cute options you can unlock.

You can even draw your own unique face on Cloudy but I was a bit disappointed with how that controlled on Switch. You'd think being on a Nintendo Switch, the game would let you draw a face with the touch screen. Instead, I had to use the right analog stick to draw a face, it just felt weird. Obviously, there are better control options, at least on Switch and PC so why not utilize them? Now throughout the 50 levels, there were plenty of great levels, some easy and some challenging but there wasn't a pattern or any consistency. I'd find myself coming across a handful of levels that could be finished in under a minute with little to no challenge and then suddenly I'd be presented with a mission that left me with a challenging objective that required a few tries.

While I would have liked more challenging levels in general, I would have loved for there to be some gradual increase in difficulty because this just falls all over the place. The difficulty varies from rain on everyone on the map to a multistep one that requires exploding chemistry set at a school while trying to wrangle up students into a classroom. The multistep objectives ones were always a treat but also left me wanting more. Later levels do at least introduce new abilities and types of liquids. Being a cloud, you can absorb evaporation from other liquids from acid, coffee, and more. The new liquids occasionally introduce new attributes like using oil to spread fires instead of putting them out. It's a clever way to introduce some variety to objectives. Alongside that, are the new abilities you unlock over time like the ability to shoot lightning, destroying the impenetrable rain shields that are umbrellas.

Rain On Your Parade Visuals

I played my review copy on Nintendo Switch and for the most part, it played well on the Nintendo handheld. Performance in handheld mode runs at 720p 30fps while it hits 900p 30fps in dock mode. Those targets are locked though, at least when it comes to resolution. Some levels like this concert one, drop the resolution a bit to keep the performance consistent but it does come at the cost of sharpness. Nevertheless, the cute and charming art style holds its appeal regardless. Running on the Unity engine, it has the simplistic art style to it but I've never been one to mind it. It's adorable in my eyes and along with the dorky writing, it often got a chuckle out of me. It does seem like some more optimization could have been done though. Load times are short but are frequent between levels and there's the occasional pop in the corners of the screen the kept distracting me.

Rain On Your Parade Audio

Rain On Your Parade features an upbeat soundtrack that has a retro-themed to it. To me, it sounds like something I'd hear in a 2d pixel platformer for iPhone back in 2011. Shoutout to those of you that played Pizza Boy on iPhone 4S. It's not necessarily great but not terrible, it's alright and fitting to the upbeat nature of the game.

Conclusion

Rain On Your Parade is a fun and charming puzzle game that left me wanting more. Sadly, it's not because it was so amazing that I just wanted more of it but rather because it felt like there was a great idea here but not entirely executed well. There's a lot of ideas here with the potential to be fleshed out and the less challenging levels I think could have been better laid out with a lot less of them. Nevertheless, I did enjoy playing and if you can grab it on sale, I think it'll be worth playing on a lazy weekend.