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Rain is a game about sacrifice. It's about a boy who casts off his physical form to save a ghostly girl from the monsters pursuing her through the drizzly streets of a sleeping city. It's also about a potentially promising psuedo-stealth puzzle-platformer that has undermined its mechanics somewhat in the service of the cinematic ambitions of a fairy-tale narrative. That narrative, in turn, is bent out of shape so that the developers can recreate a single image over and over, throwing boy and girl together and then separating them again to frame that magical moment where he suddenly spies her in the distance and silently implores her to wait.There's a great game here, in other words, but all too often Rain can only brush up against it. Sony Japan Studio's latest is sweet, earnest and richly atmospheric, but it's also clumsy and insubstantial - a missed opportunity.
Still, that central conceit is wonderful: a game of sneaking and skulking in which you play as an invisible protagonist. Rain really sells your invisibility, too, allowing you to shepherd an unseen body around the screen for audaciously lengthy periods of time, navigating only by means of the clumps of grass you stir, the wet footprints you create, or the bottles and scraps of newspaper you scatter in your wake.
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