Like tears in rain… of reflections – a review of Rain of Reflections: Set Free

You know the drill. There are the towering skyscrapers and neon-lit streets, perpetually drenched in rain. There are the fancy, antiseptic dwellings of the upper echelons of society high atop the city, and the seedy underbelly full of low-lifes at the bottom. Then you’ve got your flying cars and your hackers and AIs and an oppressive police force and the aftermath of natural disasters and poverty and desperation. Rain of Reflections: Set Free, a mixture of point-and-click adventure and a turn-based strategy game developed and published in 2019 by Lionbite Games, is about as paint-by-numbers as cyberpunk gets. And I’m all for it. Well, for the most part.

Story-wise the game borrows freely from Children of Men as well as a myriad of earlier cyberpunk works. The first chapter – and, thus far, the only one released – in a longer story, it follows the exploits of Wilona, a hacker and a scientist, as she tries to rescue and bring to safety the only naturally born child alive in an infertile world. The idea is a good one for a video game, and the writing is generally good, although much of the game’s dialogue is at once over-written and half-baked in a way typical to most video games.

If the game falls a tad short in the writing department, it more than makes up for it in the joys of the gameplay. Most of the time, it’s a classic point-and-click adventure game: click here and your character moves here, look there and your character comments on the thing she looks at, click at this item and your character interacts with it. There are some light puzzles, and a nice mini-game whenever something needs to be hacked, but nothing that takes more than a few minutes to figure out. As a lover of point-and-click games I liked it all well enough. But here’s the zinger: the game also doubles as a turn-based strategy game. Every now and then, our hero runs into some adversaries, and has to fight or flee her way out. It gives the game a sense of variety and keeps things fresh. As a nice addition, Wilona has a self-made cloaking device that turns her invisible so that she can sneak past her enemies.

The game looks gorgeous. The graphics have such a level of detail as to make Rain of Reflections look essentially like a triple-A game. There is sometimes a kind of sheen, too, to the way everything looks in brighter areas, and lighting is used in a very visually effective way, which is key for a game that often takes place in relative darkness. In terms of art design, the game usually relies on very typical imagery of modern cyberpunk, all of which is lovely in that grimy, lived-in sort of way. But it’s actually in the less dystopic imagery where the game finds a fresher, more original footing; the richer parts of the city are futuristic, yes, but also mix into their architecture modernist and Art Deco influences which give the game some much needed variety, visually.

I must admit that, ultimately, all the different elements of classic cyberpunk that the developers drag out and cram into their game like it was the mid-80s begin to feel a bit forced, as if they were trying to tick off every box on the list. I like cyberpunk as much as the next person, probably way more, actually, but… I dunno. Enough is enough, I guess. There is a certain harmony that’s lost when a game tries to be about too many things at the same time. A little bit of subtlety goes a long way, less is more, all that jazz. Still, it’s a very enjoyable game, certainly recommended to anyone who likes cyberpunk, and it definitely left me wanting more. Now, if Lionbite Games would only make the next chapter…

 

Basic info:

Developer: Lionbite Games

Publisher: Lionbite Games

Release date: 4 October 2019

Platform: Microsoft Windows

Picture credit: screenshots from Rain of Reflections: Set Free (Lionbite Games 2019), taken by the author

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