The Rainsdowne Players

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

The Rainsdowne Players, released on PC in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2019, is an odd game, but I’ll try my best to describe it. Probably the closest genre that fits this game seems to be Graphic Adventure, though it has elements of RPG (without the combat and character stats) and Music-Rhythm (without gameplay based on… well, music and rhythm). In this game, players take the roles of a pair of players in a theatre performance troupe looking to find inspiration to create new plays to draw in an audience, all while avoiding projectiles tossed at them while they’re on-stage.

The presentation here is very old-school, with some really low-quality pixel art visuals paired with what seems like stock synthesized orchestral-style music. While some might find the presentation here comforting in a quaint sort of way, I think most will find the presentation here boring, if not outright ugly.

Then, when it comes to the gameplay, this game can’t seem to decide what it wants to be about, and it certainly doesn’t do a good job of conveying that to the player. While on-stage, you’re timing button presses to dodge items thrown at the actors, in a very simple and not especially engaging mini-game that might be a Music-Rhythm styled game except it is not at all in time with the music. Then, between performances, players explore their little town chatting with people and doing other small tasks to gain inspiration “cards” that can then be used to create new plays to draw in a bigger audience.

Okay, numerous problems here. Firstly, there’s no indication how to improve your audience – which cards are working, and which aren’t. There’s no indication if a combination of cards is particularly good. You just have to kind of guess and hope you picked well… and even after a performance, it’s anyone’s guess just how good a combination the cards you picked actually were. If a game mechanic doesn’t make any indication how it affects that gameplay, is it even a game mechanic?

Also, the plays those performances create don’t really reflect the sort of creativity you’d hope would go into your unique mix of concepts. Rather, it feels like a slide show of wordless vignettes, each one coming from one of the “cars” you selected, but none of them really tying together in any meaningful way.

Collecting these cards seems just as much of a crapshoot. Players can talk to characters with exclamation marks over their heads as well as characters without exclamation marks over their heads, but there’s no rhyme or reason as to which ones offer new inspiration cards. Sometimes you’ll need to perform a task, like completing another simple, brain-dead minigame. But there doesn’t seem to be any consistency as to whether or not you get anything for doing those tasks.

And then there’s the slow, slow, slow, slow, slow walking speed of your character, which takes any amusement this game might provide with its cute characters and setting and drains it of any fun it may have had. Just exploring the town (which isn’t even that big) and searching for hidden secrets becomes a tedious chore.

I can see the hint of something special in The Rainsdowne Players. The idea of talking to people to gain puzzle pieces to inspire creative new plays is an outstanding idea, and if it were executed well, it could form the basis of a really original game. Unfortunately, these good ideas are wasted here with terrible execution. And while the characters and world here had potential to be amusing, the tedious, slow, aimless gameplay saps any joy that could have been gleaned from this experience. Do not bother with this one.

tl;dr – The Rainsdowne Players is an odd experience that at least nominally has players exploring a town to find ideas to create a unique play, and then performing that play while dodging projectiles the audience tosses. While there are some interesting ideas here, none of them are executed well, and the tedious, slow-paced gameplay saps all the joy from the experience. This play should have been workshopped some more before it was rushed to Broadway.

Grade: D+

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