Rain on Your Parade Reviews

My 3 year old son loves to watch me play this game.

Every bit of fun Rain on Your Parade has to offer is spent within the first five levels. After that, it’s all filler. I really wanted to like this game. I had high hopes after watching gameplay, and it fit the prompt "Play a game where the purpose is to cause havoc." But honestly, watching a YouTube playthrough is enough to see everything it has to offer. Those first few levels were genuinely a lot of fun. This isn’t really a puzzle game so much as a “complete the checklist” type of game. Each level gives you a handful of objectives, some mandatory to progress, some optional, and checking them off is initially satisfying. Your “reward” for finishing levels is hats, which is cute, but far from a reason to keep playing. The problem is that the novelty runs dry almost immediately. Most levels blur together because they feel like variations of the same thing. New powers are introduced, but they’re underused and fail to shake up the formula. The game’s pacing suffers for it; when all the creativity is frontloaded into the opening, the rest starts to feel like a slog. There are flashes of fun here and there. The humour lands in spots, and the final level has some fun moments. The fourth-wall breaks and the surprise Zelda-inspired stage are clever ideas, but just placed far too late, when I was already burned out. It’s frustrating, because the concept is amazing: you’re a rain cloud whose job is to ruin everyone’s day. That alone should be endless fun. But the execution feels constricted by its linear level design. If Rain on Your Parade had used an open-ended sandbox structure, letting you experiment freely instead of marching through a repetitive checklist, it could have been something special. Instead, it’s a game that delivers all of its best moments before you’ve even settled in. Sadly, this cloud really did rain on my parade.