Review: Rainswept on the Nintendo Switch

Rainswept is a beautifully crafted story about loss, relationships, and facing your own demons. As a veteran detective, you’ll travel to the small and peaceful town of Pineview. You will investigate an apparent murder-suicide of a couple no one in town seems to know very well.

Welcome to Pineview

It does not take long before you realize most townsfolk don’t even care what happened. Besides the shock of there being a murder in their little town, perhaps. But experience has taught you to never take a case at face value and investigate until everything is perfectly clear.

Rainswept plays like a point and click adventure game but with more streamlined mechanics, dropping an inventory, and too many choices to interact with the world to just two in most cases. You also carry a map and field diary to help you keep track of the case characters. However, the gameplay suffers a little from the lack of things to play around in the environment which could help make the game more immersive.

In your journey, you’ll reconstruct the lives of the victims. From the moment they met to their fatal last moments in Pineview. You will find out how things are not as clear as they seemed at the beginning. All while getting to know the people who inhabit this small but maybe not so peaceful town. Find out how most people have things they want to hide from others.

Loss is part of the journey

There’s something about experiences like this that keep me wanting more and more. Rainswept has such a great story I had to play it to the end no matter what. I even felt like I had to restart at some points because I regretted the decisions I made. This game has well-developed characters and relationships with which I felt close to through the game.

While you could make the argument that a murder mystery is a very safe, even cliché topic to take on, it does not take anything away from the story and the overall experience. A game can not be reduced to just a genre and leave it at that, it’s how the story is told that really matters.

Too many technical issues

While Rainswept was released in 2019, more than a year ago, I’m not spoiling anything else from this game. It is worth fully experiencing on your own terms. Still, it is questionable if you should play the game on Switch or rather on another system. The switch port seems to have quite a bit to improve, as this version seems riddles with small graphical glitches and other technical problems that can ruin some very beautiful segments of the game for some people.

Low-resolution assets are few, but very noticeable, like the one from the autosave notification, which doesn’t even seem to work every time, setting you back quite a bit at some points in the story. Menus are weird as you can only navigate them with the analog stick but not the d-pad. Sometimes they are unresponsive. But the worst example is when the graphics just go bonkers, arms twisting or detaching from characters, weird texture boxes covering parts of the screen and sometimes a mouse pointer that’s not even present in the rest of the game pops up unexpectedly when transitioning screens.

Problems are not frequent (besides the autosave graphic), but can harm the experience quite a bit. There’s work to be done by the team that ported the game to the Switch.

Should you play Rainswept?

All things considered, it is a great game, made with care. Still, I recommend picking it up on steam until the problems on the Switch are addressed. You can order Rainswept for Nintendo Switch for $9.99 USD/EUR.

For this review, I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect my opinion.