Picture this. You’re me, and you boot up the demo for Rain98, an incredibly blue-looking, rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who refers to herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending reference to the predictions of good ole Nostradamus. At one point you have to light this woman’s cigarette in a lightly stylish sequence. You get to a bit where you’re asked to put your name in, and you put it in because like its predecessors, this is surely a self-insert kind of situation. Only you get a Steam achievement for getting a game over for putting your name in. Rude! But curious, so you, and of course I mean I, pressed on.
In Rain98, you play as a nameless Generic Man who is deeply troubled, if not outright suicidal (of which this game has strong themes of) by the state of the world as it is in our present day. It’s a fair stance to take! I would not exactly say things are good right now. But they weren’t great in 1998 Japan, the year that Generic Man is somehow transported back to, finding this young woman, Reina Amehara, the Angolmois, in what he thinks is his apartment. She too is depressed about everything, and while the two don’t hit it off at first, they strike up a deal: to end the world.
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This Heisei-era ennui and nihilism is relatively appropriately placed too. It was a time of the lost decades, a period where Japan’s economy massively stagnated, in turn influencing a wide range of strange, often anxiety-inducing and ominous 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 you can certainly feel at least a little bit of in its vibe.
Quite quickly while playing the demo, I realised that this whole time travel situation is a pretty smart one. The world sucks now, and the world sucked then. How will these two characters from different parts of history respond to one another’s inability to accept their material conditions, which aren’t so different? That isn’t an answer I found in the demo, I only managed about an hour of it and it runs a total of three hours, so I’m expecting to have to put a lot more than that into the full game.
Speaking of the full game, I didn’t manage to experience all of what it has to offer either. There are seemingly a few different minigames scattered throughout, like one involving legally distinct DDR, legally distinct Tamagotchi, legally distinct Tekken, and more besides. Not sure if any of that can be found in the demo, but it all looks charming enough. I’m certainly won over by the demo so far, and if the Steam page sticks to its promises, Rain98 will be out by the end of the year.