Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan Review

The world can be an intimidating and scary place, but having friends and family can give you the strength to make your way through it. Bonding with people is not always easy and is filled with ups and downs that you’ll have to get used to with time. Still, it’s worth the risk to meet people who’ll have a supportive and positive impact on your life. This comes across with ManaVoid Entertainment’s Rainbow Billy: The Curse Of The Leviathan. As the eponymous hero, you’ll have to befriend everyone in order to save the world from fading into darkness. It looks friendly yet the characters have a lot of serious stuff to say.

Billy And The Leviathan

When it comes to cute characters, they’re frequently found in some sort of idealistic paradise world where everything is happy and fun. Billy is a young kid living in such a place with their friends in a colorful world fueled by bright hearts and imagination. During a celebration of their home, a dark creature known as the Leviathan is awoken and decides to rid the entire world of color. Believing that everyone should grow up, the Leviathan’s curse forces everything and everyone into harsh reality. Billy resists the curse due to their heart full of color and sets off on the friendship to save other creatures and hopefully the world. Save the world by making is a pretty pure goal to have.

On the way to achieve this goal are platforming segments and turn-based encounters. You'll sail from island to island in a ship as far as the Rainbow Fuel will safely carry you. Each island typically involves jumping from place to place, solving puzzles to unlock new routes, and using special abilities to progress further. When you find a friend in need, they'll attack which will trigger a confrontation. It's just Billy and the opponent's side on the field with Billy's side taking hits which causes their morale to go down. However, the friends that Billy has made take on the form of tokens which are drawn like cards. You'll need to play tokens that have symbols that correspond with the opponent's symbols in order to defeat them. Having as many diverse friends as possible is the key to victory.

Making Friends

No matter what kind of path you decide to take, it’s better to make friends and connections along the way. The people behind Rainbow Billy will definitely make some with this game. They’ll make folks happy with the stylized artwork. All the characters have a cartoon-like feeling with almost puppet-like animations. It’s almost like playing through a storybook and toy box in one. It’s just a sweet and cheerful atmosphere.

There’s also a lot of variety in the characters and designs. Every single character has two different forms and a distinct look to them. Even characters who are connected to each other have their own look. On top of that, each friend you make has differing personalities and problems that they’re struggling to overcome. They share their issues in tons of detail both during and after you befriend them. It adds richness to the colorful cast.

The battle system is also an interesting draw. Only Billy can take damage, but they can throw out a huge number of friends onto the field. Battles can have different setups, enemies who use tricky tactics and have specific vulnerabilities. Even with all your friends, the RNG of drawing the right tokens adds a sense of strategy to each fight.

Hurt Feelings

Even if you mean well, your words and actions can come off as mean and insensitive. Rainbow Billy does a few things that hurt the overall experience. The first being that it can’t decide on an audience. The main challenges of this game are platforming and battling corrupted friends. There’s no penalty for falling off platforms and you’ll more often than not have tons of tokens to deal with any conflict easily. However, some of the problems that the friends discuss are overly serious and mature creating a confusing tone.

Then, there’s just not a lot to do. Despite all the things you can find, they’re not very difficult to get. The hardest activity is fishing and that’s because of your limited inventory space. You can collect tons of money, but there’s only one shop that doesn’t sell anything interesting. Most friends are found along the story path and others are just out in the open. There’s also collecting thoughts for upgrades, but again, they’re easy to spot.

Finally, there’s how it handles perspective. For most of the game, the camera is locked so you can’t look around when exploring on foot. Sometimes when going around turns or into areas, it will freak out and glitch around the screen. Also, it makes it really unclear where you can and can’t go in terms of platforming.

Friendship Power!

Rainbow Billy: The Curse Of The Leviathan is a platform RPG about making friends and bringing color back to the world. It’s a friendly feel with creative character design and interesting battle mechanics. It has problems balancing tone and difficulty while not having much variety in content or camera angles. Beyond that, it’s a fun feel-good adventure about sailing the Friendship.

TechRaptor reviewed Rainbow Billy: The Curse Of The Leviathan on Steam with a copy provided by the publisher. The game is also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.