Integrating two or more video game genres to achieve rich gameplay is one of the ideas that some of the developers take advantage of it in their titles. They believe that loyalty to a single genre could result in repetitive and dull gameplay, so instead, they try to mix several genres of video games to come up with something new. Rain of Reflections uses this idea by combining adventure and turn-based strategy genres. The game has been developed by the Lionbite Games independent studio and it is the first experience of its developers.

The game’s story is happing in the future when humans have been becoming infertile and no infant is born naturally. A young scientist named Wilona is working on a project to find the reasons for this infertility and the possible solutions. The experiences are concentrating on the last human born naturally. Soon, Wilona realizes that politicians have evil goals behind all these experiments. Thus, she decided to free the last human with the help of her friends and put an end to all evils plans. The journey of Wilona from her home to the laboratory where the last human is kept froms the events of the first game’s chapter.

Rain of Reflections suffers from serious weaknesses in the story. At the beginning of the game, the story’s background and the reason for the human infertility are explained in a few paragraphs, and then we suddenly face Wilona who now wants to free the last human. In fact, there is not a clear justification in the story for the protagonist’s actions. What are the evil plans of the politicians? Why does Wilona jeopardize her life for reaching the laboratory? unfortunately, the game cannot answer these questions. In addition, the characters who accompany Wilona in her journey are not interesting and do not have good characterization. All in all, the story is the worse part of the game.

Despite the bad story, the game enjoys fun gameplay. The combination of adventure and turn-based strategy has turned out to a be unique formula. In fact, adventure parts and the strategy parts of the game do not have something special and they could have become boring after a while if the developers had used them solely. However, the integration of them has added diversity to the gameplay and prevented the monotony. We can divide the gameplay into three main parts: exploring the game’s environment and interacting with other characters, solving puzzles, and turn-based strategy. I review these parts in detail.

The first part, i.e. exploring the game’s world, is more or less like a standard point and click title. You can roam around the game’s envirement, interactact with different objects and talk to other charchters. Thank to the high graphic quality, exploration is always a fun action. You can easily enjoy the dark and rainy atmosphere of the game for a long time.

On the other hand, the interactions between characters and their dialogues are poor. The game always gives you some choices in dialogues but they usually do not have any effect on the game continuation. Furthermore, the voice actings are bad and do not convey the feeling of characters at the moment.

In the majority of point and click games, collecting items and using them for solving puzzles play an important role in gameplay. However, the Rain of Reflections’ developers have completely removed this part and added a series of mini-games instead. These mini-games are independent of the game’s environed and solving them requires high concentration and fast decision-making. I wish the developers increase the diversity of these mini-games in the second chapter.

One of the main parts of the gameplay is the turn-based strategy. It can be itself categorized into two modes. In the first mode, you should hide from the enemies and find your way into the exit. In the second mode, you have been provided with guns to fight enemies and defeat them. If Rain of Reflections had been a pure turn-based strategy game, we could have criticized it for simple mechanisms. However, the task of the strategy part is now breaking the monotony of the gameplay, and it has done it successfully.

Verdict:

Rain of Reflections: Set Free combines the adventure and turn-based strategy genres to break the monotony of the gameplay. The result is a fun game keeping you entertained for some hours. However, the vague story and poor characterization prevent it from being a quite memorable experience.