Rain98 is a blue-hued, pre-Y2K, Serial Experiments Lain inspired visual novel about time travelling to the past to end the world

Image this. You’re me, and you boot up the demonstration for Rain98, an exceptionally blue-looking, rainy visual unique set in Tokyo, 1998, about a female who describes herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending referral to the forecasts of great ole Nostradamus. At one point you need to light this female’s cigarette in a gently elegant series. You get to a bit where you’re asked to put your name in, and you put it in since like its predecessors, this is certainly a self-insert type of scenario. Just you get a Steam accomplishment for getting a video game over for putting your name in. Rude! Curious, so you, and of course I indicate I, pushed on.

In Rain98, you play as an anonymous Generic Man who is deeply bothered, if not straight-out self-destructive (of which this video game has strong styles of) by the state of the world as it remains in our present day. It’s a reasonable position to take! I would not precisely state things are great today. They weren’t fantastic in 1998 Japan, the year that Generic Man is in some way transferred back to, discovering this young female, Reina Amehara, the Angolmois, in what he believes is his apartment or condo. She too is depressed about whatever, and while the 2 do not strike it off in the beginning, they strike up an offer: to end the world.

This Heisei-era apathy and nihilism is reasonably properly put too. It was a time of the lost years, a duration where Japan’s economy enormously stagnated, in turn affecting a large range of odd, typically anxiety-inducing and threatening works like Serial Experiments Lain, Neon Genesis Evangelion and All About Lily Chou-Chou. The very first of the 3 is obviously an impact on Rain98, a touch you can definitely feel a minimum of a bit of in its ambiance.

Rather rapidly while playing the demonstration, I understood that this entire time travel scenario is a quite wise one. The world draws now, and the world drew then. How will these 2 characters from various parts of history react to one another’s failure to accept their product conditions, which aren’t so various? That isn’t a response I discovered in the demonstration, I just handled about an hour of it and it runs an overall of 3 hours, so I’m anticipating to need to put a lot more than that into the complete video game.

Mentioning the complete video game, I didn’t handle to experience all of what it needs to provide either. There are relatively a couple of various minigames spread throughout, like one including lawfully unique DDR, lawfully unique Tamagotchi, lawfully unique Tekken, and more. Unsure if any of that can be discovered in the demonstration, however all of it looks lovely enough. I’m definitely won over by the demonstration up until now, and if the Steam page stay with its guarantees, Rain98 will be out by the end of the year.