Rain that darkens a scene is a filter. Rain that floods a road, ruins a shot, drowns a sound cue or changes what an enemy can see is a mechanic. This publication plays for the difference and writes it down.
Each review covers the whole game and then examines its sky in detail: what the weather is made of, how often it turns, what it takes away from you, and whether the game is honest about what it is doing.
Review
9.1
The best weather system we have logged. Rain accumulates in the ground rather than on the screen, wet clothing costs you warmth for hours, and a storm you failed to shelter from is still affecting you two in-game days later.
Review
7.4
Volumetric fog of genuine quality, applied only to the player camera. Guards detect you at the same distance in clear weather and in a whiteout, which turns the finest visual effect in the game into a handicap you carry alone.
Review
8.3
Tracks fill in at a rate set by wind speed, and that single decision produces most of the tension. We timed drift accumulation across nine storms and found it consistent enough to plan around, which is the whole point.
Review
8.0
A fifty-one minute cycle means you can read the sky and act on it, which no fifteen-minute system permits. The forecast is a skill rather than an interface element, and learning it took us about nine hours.
Review
6.8
Rainfall replaces manual watering, which removes a chore, and it also floods nothing, damages nothing and delays nothing. Weather with only an upside stops being weather about two hours in.
Note
Twenty-six of twenty-eight systems model precipitation. Four model temperature. One models humidity. A short note on why the sky gets the budget and the thermometer does not, and what a heatwave could be.
Weather is the hardest system to review honestly because it is designed to be experienced rather than examined. Any single storm can be impressive. What matters is what happens on the fortieth one, whether the same conditions produce the same consequences, and whether you can ever plan around it.
Weather is the most expensive decoration in games and the cheapest mechanic. Almost every studio pays for the first and very few collect on the second.
A route you have walked forty times becomes new in a storm, at no content cost. Games that use this get an enormous amount from very little; games that do not have built a lighting preset.
When fog blinds you and not the guards, the sky becomes a penalty applied at random. Several games in this file are meaningfully harder in bad weather without ever telling the player why.
If the weather turns every eight minutes, reading the sky is pointless and the system becomes ambience. The slowest weather we have logged is also the only weather anybody learns to forecast.
The score covers the whole game. The weather assessment is a separate judgement printed beside it, and a game can be excellent while its sky is purely decorative — two in the current file are.
There is no correspondence page here, but readers repeat these tests and publish what they find, and three of those findings have altered the procedure.
I ran the same fog detection test with a modded camera and confirmed it: the guard cones do not change at all. Your reading was right and it is worse than you wrote.
The drift accumulation figures held on my save within a few per cent. First time I have seen anybody treat snow as something measurable rather than pretty.
Asking whether weather applies to the enemies as well is now the first thing I check in anything I play. It is a very short question with a very long answer.
