Matthew BaileyThe first rule of “A Gentle Rain”, not flavour text but an actual rule, states: Get comfortable. Change into some loose clothing if you can. Perhaps turn on some soft music or make yourself some tea or hot cocoa. Take a moment to stand up, stretch, and roll the stress out of your shoulders. Inhale through your nose, hold that breath for a moment, and exhale through your mouth.
Needless to say, if being told to relax actually does quite the opposite, then this definitely set me up for a time with “A Gentle Rain” which I can only describe as leaving me stressed and angry, the polar opposite of what it is trying to achieve.
“A Gentle Rain” is a simple puzzle game that markets itself as being a cosy, relaxing game designed to make you relax. Firstly, even though it says it’s for multiple players, all it really is is a single-player puzzle game where you can kind of work together by taking turns but discussing it anyway. So, it doesn’t really make any difference whether you take turns or not.
The best way I can describe this is to imagine Carcasonne where you have tiles with coloured flowers on the edges, and you have to join them together to lay petals down (of a matching colour that we got wrong on our first game but corrected for our second) by getting four in a two-by-two grid. Now, this obviously sounds fairly easy, but as there are quite a few different colours of flowers, it’s actually quite tricky to get these lined up. As I started playing this game, it became quite stressful to try and work out where to place the tiles so that you have any chance of actually being able to put your flower tokens down.
A few turns in, I looked at Jack and asked him if he felt relaxed. The stress on his face as we were trying to work out that if we placed the tile there, there was no way we were ever going to fill that gap because that orientation of those particular coloured petals was already on another tile. We had already kind of worked out that each orientation of tiles only appears once across the tiles.
Even explaining it now is stressing me out.
The multiplayer side of the game says: Bring your friend. More than one player can visit the lake at the same time. Simply take turns drawing and placing tiles. As you play, admire the view of the lake and be glad for the company of your friends.
In the end, you place all the tiles and hopefully place them in a way that you manage to lay all of the flower tokens in the gaps between sets of four tiles. We played this twice and managed it once, but only just. Needless to say, this was about as relaxing as waiting to have a colonoscopy done.
Now, obviously, I might be being a little bit harsh on this. It’s a very simple solo puzzle game, but the pure fact that the game is covered in this ridiculous calming language and pushes this calming narrative as a rule in the game really irritated me on a number of different levels and instantly put my guard up before we even started playing.
Being completely neutral about the theme, the puzzle is not massively compelling, and due to the fact that you don’t have that many tiles, you can pretty much play the game in about five minutes.
It also states in the rule book: Don’t worry if you don’t achieve the task in “A Gentle Rain”. It is the journey that matters, not the destination. But I think they are fundamentally missing any kind of audience if they expect to produce a puzzle game with a win condition and then say it doesn’t actually matter if you achieve it or not.
The quality of the components is fine. The tiles are card, and the flower tokens are wooden. It all comes in a nice small little box that you could definitely take away. But to be honest, if you are trying to sell me a game as relaxing, I would expect a certain level of component quality that just isn’t high enough.
I’m going to compare this game to “Lacuna”, a beautiful game that I played several months ago and will link in the comments below. Lacuna” doesn’t market itself quite as obnoxiously as a calming game, but due to the presentation of the packaging, the quality of the components that you play with, and the way less stressful nature of the gameplay, “Lacuna” actually succeeds in being the game that “A Gentle Rain” should be.
If you want a calming, relaxing, cosy game, I don’t think I can recommend this. If you want a good single-player or co-op puzzle game, I don’t really think there’s enough here to recommend it either.
It’s a shame. I was really looking forward to this as I love tiles and I love puzzles, but the over-the-top pretentious nature of it, coupled with the stressful but not overly compelling gameplay, left me thoroughly disappointed.
Game 6# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” was “A Gentle Rain”. Played with Jack(9) and Toby(6).
Disclaimer: A copy of “A Gentle Rain” was kindly provided by Incredible Dream for the purposes of review. Our thoughts and opinions, as always, are completely our own.
