There’s an ever growing genre in the industry that I like to call “douchebag simulators”. They aren’t meant to be deep experiences or anything created to test your skills as a player. It wants you to troll others and make their lives miserable, whether by giving you objectives or not. Games like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game are great examples, even though I don’t actually think either of them are particularly great games in any sense of the word. The same cannot be said by this soon-to-be-underrated gem I’ve just played, Rain on Your Parade.

In Rain on Your Parade, you control an unnamed little cloud who has a dream. You’re tasked with helping that little cloud reach a place considered sacred for these rain-inducing beings: a mythical land called Seattle. On the way to this promised land for clouds, you’re supposed to basically wreak havoc whenever possible, making the lives of the people underneath you as miserable as they can get. I immediately started to love this game’s premise the second I watched its little The Princess Bride-esque introductory video, complete with a grandpa telling his grandson a fourth wall breaking bedtime story.

As soon as the first level begins, you’ll realize that despite the fact you need to complete a certain amount of objectives per stage, you’re basically given carte blanche to ruin everyone’s day as you see fit. Do you want to ruin a wedding by raining on top of the bride? Go for it. Do you want to help a little bomb explode by raining on all soldiers trying to defuse it? I don’t know why anyone would want to do this, but sure, it’s your call. Want to rain on beachgoers? Have fun doing so.

Raining isn’t the only ability available, by the way. The more you play, the more abilities you’ll unlock. These range from shooting bolts of lightning on objects and living beings, to dropping hail instead of raindrops. Furthermore, you can hover by some special chemical containers and change the properties of your droplets. You can rain oil, letting you create paths of total destruction whenever you rain on top of a fire source. Later, you can transform your cloud into an acidic rain cloud, destroying crops and vehicles alike. You can even suck up chemical components inside a classroom in order to destroy a student’s science project.

This is as idiotic as you can imagine, but it is a lot of fun. What surprised me the most about Rain on Your Parade was its sheer variety of levels and objectives. This isn’t a short game, believe it or not, as it’s full of levels with totally different premises. There are high score time trials, “plot-centric” sections where you have to deal with a scientist who hates rain, and even a level inspired by Metal Gear Solid, complete with codec calls and someone yelling “CLOOOOOOUDY!” if you happen to fail the mission.

Not only can you unlock new abilities for your cloud, but you can also unlock new accessories to customize it. You can dress it with hats and other props, which are funny, but not nearly the best thing about the game’s customization mode. The developers also included a drawing mode, letting you draw a brand new (and most certainly dumb) face on your cloud. Sadly, touchscreen controls aren’t available on this mode yet, but the developers have promised a patch including this feature in the near future. For now, we’re left with a clunky control scheme where you move the paintbrush with the right analog stick and draw with ZL. Although, you can get used to it after a while.

Rain on Your Parade‘s gameplay loop surprised me in a positive way, but that isn’t the only thing I liked about its game. I was caught off guard by its visuals, which are indeed better than most indies on the Switch. Not only is its Paper Mario-esque art style a complete joy to see, but it runs surprisingly well on the system. It often achieves 60fps in both docked and portable modes. It even features some impressive post processing effects which most developers don’t even bother adding to their Switch ports. Granted, that does result in some slightly lengthy loading times every now and then, but I certainly wasn’t expecting for a game like this to look and run so well on such dated hardware.

More than just a funny game, Rain on Your Parade is a fun game. Its absolutely idiotic premise works, not only because of how cathartic it is, but also because the developers took their time to cram it with as many settings, objectives, and destructible objects you can imagine. It offers a staggering amount of bang for your buck and will give you a big dumb smile from beginning to end. It might have a few small issues here and there, but none of them are dealbreakers. This is one of 2021’s most interesting little gems so far and one I’d easily recommend to anyone.

 

Graphics: 8.5 Rain on Your Parade runs surprisingly well on the Switch and features some post-processing effects that are rarely seen on the system. Its art style is also pretty cute.	Gameplay: 8.0 The control scheme is very simple to learn and allows for a lot of experimentation. There are lots of ways to make every single person’s life utterly miserable with your “cloud powers”. The menu controls and the face drawing mechanics available in the editing screen aren’t the best, but you can get used to them.
Sound: 7.5 This game’s soundtrack is alright. It’s not very memorable, but gets the job done with its varied tunes. Its sound effects, on the other hand, are very funny. Finally, there’s a bit of voice acting here and there, but the less we talk about it, the better.	Fun Factor: 8.5 Between drawing the dumbest faces you can imagine on your own cloud, destroying tons of property, wreaking unnecessary havoc, and having a huge amount of levels at your disposal, it’s hard not to have fun with Rain on Your Parade, even if it suffers from a few technical issues.
Final Verdict: 8.5

Rain on Your Parade is available now on Xbox One, PC, and Switch.

Reviewed on Switch.

A copy of Rain on Your Parade was provided by the publisher.