What makes a game “Immersive”? You may point to the atmosphere of a virtual environment being able to drag you in through its cohesive design, whether through sound design, visuals, or movement feeling intuitive. One is fully immersed when they don’t even have to think about the buttons they press to commit an action, they just do it, and can feel like they’re really in the place of the playable character.

The actual environment of a virtual world itself is strangely brushed under the rug. It has become common understanding that the animals in any game do not actually eat each other through a food chain and have the ability to create scarcity of resources throughout time. The focus of many games is to make you feel like a big fish in a large ocean, full of opportunity you can seize and make your whims reality.

Rain World decided to go all in on the actual environment, creating an in-depth ecosystem full of strange creatures that each have complex AI and interact with one another in emergent activities.

In order to make you appreciate the way other life forms behave, you are not the top of the food chain but smack dab in the middle of it, with just as many overwhelming predators above you as there are prey beneath you.