Pity the slugcat, a creature that has never before managed to step from the shadow of the grander, more celebrated mythical chimeras: the griffins, the centaurs, the Tricos. In part, that's because its arrangement of animal parts is peculiarly grotesque: the twitching feline nose and inquisitive ears mashed incongruously with the fat slimy torso of a common slug. But there's also a question of temperament. The griffin is part-lion, part-eagle, an apex predator squared, and as such can afford to be known. The slugcat, by contrast, sits just couple of links from the bottom of the food chain, able to catch bats and bluebottles, but otherwise hunted by just about every other carnivore on the block. No wonder the slugcat is absent from Greek myth: his survival depends upon anonymity.
In Rain World, a post-apocalyptic, tumbledown city of steel rafters, rusty poles and weed-clogged drainpipes, you soon learn the value of maintaining a low profile as a slugcat. The city is overrun with luminous crocodiles, vultures, ravenous plants and a growing menagerie of other predatory horrors, with their slick, whipping tails and flapping jaws. You quickly learn to slurp through pipes and quiver beneath ferns, only emerging to grab and munch on a passing bat when you're certain that you're otherwise safe and alone. With your brilliant white fur, you stand out a mile in this grey city. Slugcat has been separated from his family to boot. As such, you are not only noticeable, but isolated.
As soon as a predator eyes you, it charges, jack-knifing over curbs in an effort to grab you in its jaws. If you fail to escape, it's an immediate game over. Rain World's unkind designers then send you way back to the last safe space - usually a prison-cell-sized nook, somewhere deep below ground, or inside a forsaken building. There are no Dark Souls-esque drops to reclaim from the site of your death. You have nothing to show for your lost progress, save for the mental map you may have accrued of the area, the usefulness of which is then undercut by the fact that the placement of enemies dynamically shifts on each reload.
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