// KOTAKU — GAMING
Brutal Cult-Favorite Indie Survival Game Is Almost Free After Years Of Legal Limbo With Adult Swim’s Defunct Publishing Label
In 2017’s Rain World, the slow and clumsy slug cat struggles out of its burrow and into the world. It cannot climb; it can barely jump. Food is scarce. Almost everything its size and bigger is a predator that is faster and stronger than it, and will consume it without a thought. If it does not fill its belly and find shelter in time, deadly rains will kill it.
And yet, the slug cat persists. So too has Rain World.
I first fell in love with Rain World about five or six hours into trying to review it early in my career. What did it for me was watching an enemy pick up a stick I’d been muddling around with prior to spotting it, and yoink the stick across the map at me like a spear, pinning me to a wall. The enemy caught me, and I died. But on my next run, I found another stick, and was able to do the exact same thing myself, using the stick as a platform to climb to areas I hadn’t been able to reach before. The game never showed me how; my enemies did, silently and by accidents of their AI.
Rain World is such a wonderful, weirdo game, it’s not surprising to me that it took a long time to really find its audience. Years, even. Developer Videocult first launched it nine years ago, in 2017, with the now-essentially-defunct Adult Swim Games publishing it on PS4 and PC, and eventually porting it to Nintendo Switch. For quite a while, the state of Rain World was a messy one. Different platforms in different regions received inconsistent updates. At one point, the game was at version 1.5 on PC, 1.7 on consoles, and, inexplicably, 1.8 on PC in Korea. A promised Xbox edition had yet to manifest. There were bugs not getting patched effectively, and a lot of reasonably grouchy yet persistent fans.
In the midst of all this, Akupara Games CEO David Logan and head of publishing Buddy Sola were a newly-formed work-for-hire company looking for clients. They saw the state of Rain World, and, like a slug cat, pounced.
“From my perspective with Adult Swim, things were just sort of stagnant,” Logan says. “You know, they weren’t moving up. They weren’t moving down. They were sort of just, you know, the community was really maintaining the live ops for the game and maintaining, but it was like a small, low-burning flame. And we threw fuel on the fire and ignited the fire and made it really take off.”
Thus Akupara Games took over publishing for Rain World in 2022, after a lot of behind-the-scenes legal back-and-forth.Their first goal was to get all the versions of the game consistent with one another. But once that was done, they wanted to do more. When Akupara took the helm, Logan and Sola tell me, the all-time peak concurrent player count in Rain World was around 600. It was not a widely popular game, but it did have an extraordinarily devoted community that had stuck around through some rough times, which suggested to them that Rain World could be pushed farther. They leveraged that community for the game’s first DLC in 2023, Downpour, which was adapted from a popular mod. Their team began holding community events: art contests, live streams, ARGs. They sold physical merchandise. They released the game on Xbox at last. And the community responded to these things, far more strongly (say Logan and Sola) than communities for other games they had published.
Downpour brought the peak concurrent player count to 8,500. The second DLC, The Watcher, in 2025 got them to 15,500. Logan and Sola tell me the first DLC release sold 186,000 units, and the second sold 128,000 at their respective launches. Recently, during a single Steam summer sale, Rain World itself sold 1.3 million units on deep discount, and its sales since Akupara took over have reached 3.5 million total.
To me, this is nuts. Rain World is a really weird game. It’s harsh. It doesn’t explain itself much, but rather unfolds bit by bit as you play and observe. You die a lot, and lose progress, and restart, and get lost, and sometimes are put in unwinnable situations. Various updates over th