PlayStation 3’s Newest Art Game: Rain

We’ve known about Rain for quite some time. After all, it was announced last summer. But since then, we’ve had precious little to work with, other than a series of unique screenshots that emerged out of Japan last week.

But now, we know so much more about Rain. I was lucky enough to sit with the game’s developers from Studio Japan, where they showed me the beginning of the quest and answered a bunch of my questions, too. In short, Rain evokes other unique art games found on PlayStation 3 – think The Unfinished Swan, Datura or even Journey – and while it’s certainly not gearing up to be an experience for consumption by the masses, it most certainly has a special something that makes me want to see more.

Rain is a PlayStation Network game, and it’s set for release in 2013. Sony’s fully-owned Studio Japan has collaborated with PlayStation CAMP – an independent dev initiative that gave us the likes of Trash Panic and Tokyo Jungle – and Acquire, the developer best-known for Tenchu, Way of the Samurai and Shinobido.

For a full look at the game, watch our video preview below.

At its core, Rain is about the juxtaposition of conflicting feelings, best compared to being lost as a child. On the one hand, you’re afraid of being all alone in a mysterious environment you don’t understand or know. But at the same time, you’re excited, curious and anxious to explore. And in the game’s opening chapter, entitled The Children and the Night, you quickly find out how the game’s mechanics unfold, bringing to the fore all of these feelings that don’t quite make sense in the presence of one another.

Your character, a nameless young boy, is only visible when rain cascades over him. As he runs around the abandoned streets of his city, he’s clearly visible when standing in torrential downpours, but if you take cover under an awning, for instance, he disappears. You can still track him by the water-logged footprints he leaves behind, but he’s otherwise invisible to both you and the strange enemies that are tracking him.

As an action-adventure game, Rain forces gamers to solve puzzles within the confines of this wet/dry mechanic, all the while text narration drives the ambiguous, yet strangely emotional story forward. White text appears over the environments as you move around, providing perspective into the plight of the young boy’s plight.

Will Rain be any good? That, of course, remains to be seen. But it certainly has “promising” written all over it.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.

Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com