Rain Forest

About the game

You have booked five days at a cabin in the forest. You arrive exhausted, looking forward to falling asleep to the sound of rain, and you can see the lights of the cabin through the trees. That is where Rain Forest begins, and it is not a game about fighting: it is about keeping your spirits up in a landscape that is wet, dark and slowly flooding.

The one number that matters is your motivation, shown at the bottom of the screen. It drains with the passage of time, with the rain falling on you, with the flood water around your feet and with the dark. It comes back when you do pleasant things: sitting in a cosy chair, drinking a cup of tea, looking at a lake, leaving a flower on an old altar, sleeping a night in a bed. A line of text under the status tells you exactly which things are adding to or subtracting from it at the moment, so you always know why it is changing.

The forest is a procedurally generated place of grass, trees, rocks, ponds and ruins. Scattered around it are tools that change how you cope: a shovel to dig ditches and drain the water, an umbrella and gumboots to soften the rain and the flood, a lantern for the dark, a crowbar to push rocks, a topographic map and a weather report to plan ahead. If you last the five days, you go home rested; if you give up on the trudge, the game says so.

Playing it here

Click Play. The forest is drawn with a custom pixel font on a large grid that scales to the frame, so it looks best in a large window or in fullscreen. It is played with the keyboard, saves your run in this browser only and makes no requests outside this site.

Controls

Tips

Read the line under the status. It lists every reason your motivation is going up or down at this moment.

Find the cabin. It is a warm, dry place with the most comfortable things in the game.

Drain the water. With the shovel you can dig ditches that carry the flood water away from where you walk.

FAQ

Can I lose? Yes, if your motivation runs out you give up and go home; otherwise you stay for the five days.

Is there combat? Nothing we found asks you to fight; it is about the weather and how you cope with it. The game has no sound.

Does it save? The game keeps its save data in this browser only; we did not find a Continue option on the title screen after reloading, so treat each visit as a fresh run.

Credits and licence

Rain Forest was made by Stephen Sherratt (gridbugs) for the 7DRL Challenge 2022 and is released under the MIT licence. It is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly by us from the author's source at a fixed commit, with his libraries and the other open source crates listed in the licence file. The pixel font is PxPlus IBM CGA (and its thin variant) by VileR, from the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack at int10h.org, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). The files are the ones in the game's repository; their names say they are customised, which the game's author did to VileR's font under the same licence (they carry the forest tiles as extra characters). The author's web version at that commit no longer matched the game (it was written for an older version of his library), so we pointed it at the current one, and we fixed a crash when pressing G while standing on a bed, chair, teapot or altar, which are not items. We also replaced the author's web page with our own (it blocks connections outside this site, keeps the saved game under its own key and scales the display to the frame). The licence texts, the source, the patch and the build script are linked from this page.