~ Estimated Reading Time: 4 min ~
You ever pick up something unseeming, and spend the next ten hours underestimating its power?
This was a big impulse grab for me - got it during a sale, had heard nothing about it other than a stray Derek Yu tweet. An 80s-namco styled package with a cutesie elevator pitch: you're a cat, it's raining, dodge the rain, collect stuff in between the rain, and run. I played with an open mind as a skeptical friend watched over my shoulder; cute and simple is nice, but can also be underwhelming in the wrong context. The pace seemed off - first twenty seconds seemed to be too simple compared to its scale of difficulty immediately after - and it all looked a bit too simple.
After like thirty minutes of play, we just kept saying
NEVER doubt Raindrop Sprinters again
Our first mistake was to assume Raindrop Sprinters was simple; we hadn't even figured out what these mysterious things we had been earning were. Known as badges - each one is subtly obtained by a playstyle, and alters the game itself going forwards. I'm going to use this as an example, as it's the one listed on the website: If you move nonstop towards the goal several times, you get the non-stop Badge - letting you spend meter to double your speed. The initially slow feeling early-game now makes sense as a time to grind - no second wasted. What's important though are that Badges aren't just upgrades, they are mysteries in of themselves - you aren't given a hint on how to obtain each, or what they do. And so you must intentionally push yourself to play weird, and in those self-imposed challenges will the game unwind. For a game comprised of one room, it is oddly explorative. I was making choices without knowing it as I blind-tapdanced around - and those subconscious efforts seemed to flow into each other. As I waited to slowly clear the conditions of one badge, another fell into my palms. I was reaping the rewards of those I had already gotten, without knowing exactly what I was doing that was synergizing. It's an exemplary example of the steady workings going on beneath the surface of a tinny machine.
And as I eased into the game, slowly learning what it was asking of me - that was when it really became meditative. After all, awareness is the first step to familiarity. All those playstyles became deeply intentional - now I was using one badge to grab another, lining a perfect sequence. Y'know how I said the non-stop badge recontextualized how I thought about the first 30 seconds of a match? Now I'm trying to stretch that logic over the course of an entire match, trying to get every badge while moving. Your playstyle comes a long way in just a few hours; you could say that when the game is at its hardest, its at its most harmonious. As the rain becomes more intense towards the end of a match, the jingle of chiptune raindrops begins to compliment each other - almost relaxing you.
It's surprisingly dense for how form-compact it all is. Its side content is genuinely neat: I remember when I unlocked a mode in which your goal is inversed - you must touch as much rain as possible. It had ended my session so refreshingly, after my hours poured into sweating over score.
Thought a bit about the runaway success of UFO 50 while playing this. Something that had stuck with me was a quote on one of the reasons why that game was made - being they saw most of the individual arcade games within the pack as unsellable on their own. There's a lot of lessons to learn from its density, but the least we could take away from it is the worth of the individual small games that form it as well. I don't believe that everyone walked away from it loving it did solely so for the sum of its parts; some of you are 80s arcade freaks, and you haven't even noticed!! And Raindrop Sprinters is a great example of something worth engaging with for exactly the sum of its parts - it's a great little thing we should all be playing. It's like 5 dollars during sales!! You at least owe yourself that!!