Strange Rain Review

There are times in the day that I question the goals of some developers in the App Store. Sometimes I get the feeling that developers don't always release titles into the store in hopes that they will sell, they just want to put something out there. Apps like Strange Rain are perfect examples of this, providing very little entertainment for an app in the 'Entertainment' category, instead acting as a bizarre zen experience that left me puzzled for quite some time.

I guess the app can be summed up as your view while looking up into the rain. It's just rain, but things start getting strange when you touch the screen, which causes a somewhat jarring sound and what I would call "rain magnetism." As you tap on the screen creating tunes and odd rainfall patterns, your reality zooms out a bit and things start becoming different shaded frames. The more you touch, the further and further from reality you get, until you start frantically tapping on the screen, which takes you to square one.

For people like me who need a bit more to justify the money spent, there is a bizarre story mode that definitely made me crazy. The story doesn't really have much to it, but from what I've gathered, you are a guy sitting outside in the rain pondering life and loss while a close member of the family is in the hospital after an accident. The game mechanics all work the same, although if you slide your finger around the screen you'll go into deeper thoughts which reveal more and more of the story as you go. Unfortunately, the deep thoughts tend to repeat themselves at times instead of offering you a continuous story flow, but I guess that's the way thoughts flow. Just know that the story really doesn't have a beginning or an end; it's just a collection of gloomy thoughts about loss and grief.

Placing a recommendation on an app like this is tough, but I think I can safely say that if I were to spend my own $2 on an app, Strange Rain would not be the one. App recommendations are mostly a matter of opinion (particularly for apps like this), and in my mind Strange Rain doesn't have enough to offer to make it worthwhile. At most, you'll pick up Strange Rain for 20 minutes like I did and then will probably never open it again.