Dryspell, Cloudy’s arch-nemesis, are quickly followed by levels like the bathroom-cleaning one, which requires no thought or strategy whatsoever. Wonderfully involved boss encounters with Dr. Clones of Breakout and bowling felt like filler, and the difficulty curve is quite inconsistent. In other areas, however, it felt more like having an impressive number of levels was more important than the design of the levels themselves. Playful homages to other games add a good deal of variety, such as the Katamari Damacy-like black hole level where all items need to be sucked up, or the Zelda-inspired RPG level that takes Cloudy on a traditional RPG journey. I really enjoyed the maps that required the player to pay attention to the order of events, such as a restaurant scene where the objectives include trapping someone in a dark bathroom, tripping over the waiter when he’s carrying food, and linking up power supplies to make a mess in the kitchen. Others involve more timing, like placing snow over a road so a tobogganer slides into a lake. Hidden-object games definitely share some DNA with Rain on Your Parade, with searching for that one last crow to startle or tree to water playing a part in the bigger maps. Each skill is easy to use, and most maps provide a water source for Cloudy to charge his abilities, putting the focus on solving the puzzle rather than conserving resources. Over the course of the adventure, Cloudy learns a variety of abilities - using thunderclaps to hit switches or startle civilians, snow to create slippery surfaces, and whirlwinds to pull objects around. Each level has both a main objective needed to progress and optional extras - trickier requirements that award a cosmetic prize when completed. A carefully placed line of flammable tar from a candle to the birthday presents will set them alight, ensuring the bully from school will never want to celebrate his birthday again. Cloudy cannot burn things directly, but hovering over certain liquids lets him absorb their power. Others are trickier, like ruining a birthday party by setting all the presents on fire. Some tasks are easy: rain on every human is a common one, and watching the people scatter never fails to amuse. The levels in Rain on Your Parade each form a little puzzle box, a scene where Cloudy needs to complete several objectives to progress. Determined to find this miraculous place, Cloudy travels across the world, showering down rain on everything along the way. Whispers of other clouds tell of a mystical land named Seattle, where the rain never stops. While Cloudy has found some satisfaction in ruining local weddings and soaking school children waiting for the bus, he longs to live in a place where he can rain on whatever he wants. He recounts the adventures of Cloudy, a raincloud who delights in causing mayhem. Rain on Your Parade is framed as a grandfather telling a bedtime story to his grandson, the characters and environments all cobbled together from bits and pieces in the child’s room. While some levels are stronger than others, the intensely cheerful nature of the game makes it a joy to play, brightening even the darkest of days. After over two years of development, that little prototype has blossomed into a grand adventure, providing 50 levels of playful destruction. Back in August last year I checked out the free demo of Rain on Your Parade, a tight physics puzzler that used a cloud’s various abilities to cause mayhem.
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