Rain on Your Parade is one of those games that catch your eye as soon as you encounter it. I don’t think there are many, if any, games that feature a cloud as a protagonist. It manages to be more than just a unique visual experience though. The game takes some relatively simple upfront mechanics and expands upon them in creative ways to make a fun, but fairly short, light puzzle experience. 

Abbreviated Review: https://youtu.be/98K16ChGv1A

The entire story of Rain on Your Parade is initiated as a bedtime story from a grandfather to his grandson. It’s very “Princess Bride-like” and has a few silly moments, but is mostly just a way to set up the experience. The isometric view and tilt-shifted camera focus create a perspective that everything is just the toys from that kid’s room. The people are all made of yarn and the cloud you control is a cardboard cutout suspended from strings. It makes things seem much more “cute,” which is probably a good thing since you’re destroying the environments with natural disasters at every turn.

The visual aspects of the game are family-friendly, but it doesn’t keep the violence of cloud-related shenanigans looking pretty decent in most cases. Nothing that will blow anyone away – especially in some of the forest areas – but with plenty of fun physics aspects, it ends up being an entertaining style. They even manage to change up the typically bright styling from time to time with things like a black and white level and even a totally unexpected first-person shooter level.

Early on, Rain on Your Parade seems like it might be a little limited in design. There’s a good bit of “get everyone soaked” that is reused in a few different ways. However, it expands significantly beyond the first third of the game. As you start to unlock more powers like lightning, snow, and a physics-flinging tornado, the gameplay shifts to more problem solving with some basic puzzles. Then, out of nowhere, it will throw entirely different mechanics at you.

For instance, there might be a one-off level where you’ll be using the tornado skill to fling balls down a lane for a somewhat nuanced bowling game. Another has you defending an area for as long as you can from invaders using all of your skills to knock down their umbrellas and put out the torches they use to melt your slippery snow patches. I was especially entertained by a time where I used my tornado to drag around a ‘black hole’ that grew as it sucked in bigger objects. This essentially made what felt like Katamari Damacy – one of my favorite games.

While I wouldn’t call Rain on Your Parade “hard” by any means, it was great to see the variety of challenges that it presented across the 50 levels. Even though some of those experiments ended up kind of disappointing. In particular, the stealth levels. I’ve always had a vendetta against non-stealth games trying to implement stealth mechanics because they always feel subpar. Stealth requires precision and lots of information being passed to the player and the handful of levels here don’t have that at all.

Overall, Rain on Your Parade does a lot of things right. It’s very functional and easy to pick up while offering a fairly broad selection of things to do across its relatively short run time. It helps that the game has a “new game+” mode that allows you to do old levels again with additional challenges unique to each one. Aside from those stealth portions, they’re all quite fun as well.

The one area that feels occasionally worse than it could be is the sound department. Some of the voices are a bit awkward and, given how limited they are, could have benefited from any decent voice actor. Also, the music that exists in the game is fine, but it gets a little repetitive. Outside of these minor issues though, Rain on Your Parade is a great indie game that shines with its originality even through the clouds that you’ve brought to the party.

If you'd like to see more of my reviews, check out my curator page here: Endyo’s Indies, Abbreviated Reviews, and online at BagoGames

Rain on Your Parade is one of those games that catch your eye as soon as you encounter it. I don’t think there are many, if any, games that feature a cloud as a protagonist. It manages to be more than just a unique visual experience though. The game takes some relatively simple upfront mechanics and expands upon them in creative ways to make a fun, but fairly short, light puzzle experience.  Abbreviated Review: https://youtu.be/98K16ChGv1A [h1]An Old Man’s Story[/h1] The entire story of Rain on Your Parade is initiated as a bedtime story from a grandfather to his grandson. It’s very “Princess Bride-like” and has a few silly moments, but is mostly just a way to set up the experience. The isometric view and tilt-shifted camera focus create a perspective that everything is just the toys from that kid’s room. The people are all made of yarn and the cloud you control is a cardboard cutout suspended from strings. It makes things seem much more “cute,” which is probably a good thing since you’re destroying the environments with natural disasters at every turn. The visual aspects of the game are family-friendly, but it doesn’t keep the violence of cloud-related shenanigans looking pretty decent in most cases. Nothing that will blow anyone away – especially in some of the forest areas – but with plenty of fun physics aspects, it ends up being an entertaining style. They even manage to change up the typically bright styling from time to time with things like a black and white level and even a totally unexpected first-person shooter level. [h1]The Full-Spectrum of Gameplay[/h1] Early on, Rain on Your Parade seems like it might be a little limited in design. There’s a good bit of “get everyone soaked” that is reused in a few different ways. However, it expands significantly beyond the first third of the game. As you start to unlock more powers like lightning, snow, and a physics-flinging tornado, the gameplay shifts to more problem solving with some basic puzzles. Then, out of nowhere, it will throw entirely different mechanics at you. For instance, there might be a one-off level where you’ll be using the tornado skill to fling balls down a lane for a somewhat nuanced bowling game. Another has you defending an area for as long as you can from invaders using all of your skills to knock down their umbrellas and put out the torches they use to melt your slippery snow patches. I was especially entertained by a time where I used my tornado to drag around a ‘black hole’ that grew as it sucked in bigger objects. This essentially made what felt like Katamari Damacy – one of my favorite games. While I wouldn’t call Rain on Your Parade “hard” by any means, it was great to see the variety of challenges that it presented across the 50 levels. Even though some of those experiments ended up kind of disappointing. In particular, the stealth levels. I’ve always had a vendetta against non-stealth games trying to implement stealth mechanics because they always feel subpar. Stealth requires precision and lots of information being passed to the player and the handful of levels here don’t have that at all. [h1]Cloudy Skies Mean Good Times[/h1] Overall, Rain on Your Parade does a lot of things right. It’s very functional and easy to pick up while offering a fairly broad selection of things to do across its relatively short run time. It helps that the game has a “new game+” mode that allows you to do old levels again with additional challenges unique to each one. Aside from those stealth portions, they’re all quite fun as well. The one area that feels occasionally worse than it could be is the sound department. Some of the voices are a bit awkward and, given how limited they are, could have benefited from any decent voice actor. Also, the music that exists in the game is fine, but it gets a little repetitive. Outside of these minor issues though, Rain on Your Parade is a great indie game that shines with its originality even through the clouds that you’ve brought to the party. [quote] If you'd like to see more of my reviews, check out my curator page here: [url= http://store.steampowered.com/curator/28346672-Endyo-Gaming/]Endyo’s Indies[/url], [url= https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38271367/]Abbreviated Reviews[/url], and online at BagoGames[/quote]