Imagine this. You’re me and you’re starting the demo of Rain98, an incredibly blue and rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who introduces herself as Angolmois, an end-of-the-world reference to the predictions of good old Nostradamus. At one point, you have to light this woman’s cigarette in a slightly stylized sequence. You arrive at a moment when you are asked to write your name, and you write it because, as with the predecessors, it is surely a situation of personal integration. Only you get a Steam achievement by completing a game with your name. Rude! But curious, so you, and of course I mean me, continued.
In Rain98, you play as a generic, nameless man who is deeply troubled, if not downright suicidal (of which this game has strong themes) by the state of the world as it is today. This is a fair position to take! I wouldn’t exactly say things are good right now. But they weren’t great in 1998 Japan, the year Generic Man is somehow transported, finding this young woman, Reina Amehara, the Angolmois, in what he thinks is her apartment. She too is depressed about everything, and although the two don’t get along at first, they make a deal: to end the world.
This boredom and nihilism of the Heisei era is also relatively appropriately placed. It was the era of the Lost Decades, a period when the Japanese economy was massively stagnating, in turn influencing a wide range of strange, often anxiety-provoking and disturbing works like Serial Experiments Lain, Neon Genesis Evangelion and All About Lily Chou-Chou. The first of the three is apparently an influence on Rain98, a touch that can definitely be felt at least a little in its vibe.
Pretty quickly, while playing the demo, I realized that this time travel situation was pretty clever. The world sucks today, and the world sucked then. How will these two characters from different stories respond to the other’s inability to accept their material conditions, which are not so different? This isn’t an answer I found in the demo, I only managed about an hour of it and it’s a total of three hours long, so I expect to have to put a lot more than that into the full game.
Speaking of the full game, I also failed to enjoy everything it has to offer. There are apparently a few different mini-games scattered throughout, such as one involving a legally separate DDR, a legally separate Tamagotchi, a legally separate Tekken and much more. I don’t know if all of this can be found in the demo, but it all looks quite charming. I’m certainly won over by the demo so far, and if the Steam page keeps its promises, Rain98 will be released by the end of the year.
