I want to open my review of Drought with something rather important to this mods narrative: Whether you like or dislike Downpour, this team has an innate misunderstanding of Five Pebbles as a character and it shows in the very moment you step foot in his chamber. Even if he were to be excited by a message about how to change his code, he was always a cynic, and that’s canon to vanilla. It would have been so impactful to have his bitter mood be just gentle enough the player can tell 5P has a soft spot for Wanderer, yet still *in* character for 5P. Why must we sacrifice one of these for the sake of the other? And on that note, something as simple of a change as showing a pearl to 5P leading to the dialogue trigger of, “Is this?… ah. No. Just some random shiny orb to you. I may as well tell you what is encoded into it, since I’ve already wasted time looking at it.” Showing a soft spot, yet also showing the eager undertone that Pebbles has thirsting for knowledge. And then! You can still have your moment of excitement when Wanderer does give Pebbles the *proper* pearl. Thus, impactful (but even then, the pearls that have been altered by the mod are not great?)

This ties into the endings for this mod. Which… are rather… dull. Given we already could easily predict them, I was hoping the team would do something to throw me off? The Moon ending tries to be creative - but it falls short of being easy to miss because of how it’s meant to be activated. This sort of mechanic is not intuitive enough for a casual player to really get, imho. Moon is also mischaracterized! We know that canonically, she is so nice post-Fall because of her lost memories and she’s still too nice in this mod, which is clearly pre-Fall. Not only that, but speaking of Moon, the ‘new regions’ are mostly related to her. And... well.

These all just feel like boring copies of Pebbles’ regions, with so few shelters it’s frustrating. The LTTM region particularly is lack luster - reusing what seems to be whole segments of Pebbles. Moon is canonically an older model, so why is her interior almost the same? The renames of her areas are also incredibly dull, the worst offenders being those leading up to her can - The West Leg? The *insert adjective* Exterior? Really? You couldn’t have given it a more fascinating name? It seems this whole writing team just spectacularly dropped the ball!

Credit where credit is due: the color palette choice for the sub regions of the climb to Moon were actually gorgeous (which is why I felt it was egregious that open entry to LTTM, there were few discernible differences between her and Pebbles. Recolor her! Change the city’s colors atop her can! Do something to further incentivize my want to explore a region that is honestly pretty boring to navigate, with antigrav which, most people loathe to begin with!). I also really enjoyed FS. This was an incredibly creative area, and it was such an opening it is the only reason I was excited to see the other regions which, as aforementioned, fell so flat; and the movement (once learned) is pretty fun, I don’t enjoy how it consumes food pips however, and the key binding for the mechanic itself is quite annoying.

Ultimately: Where Drought fails, you can tell these failings are seemingly because the devs don’t like Downpour and are actively trying to separate themselves from that narrative. That's fine, it can be done successfully, but this mod needs another story rework to be successful in that.

Curious to see other takes, and please note I am not trying to attack the mod or the work of the dev team - I fully commend them for putting in the work they did as creating a mod is no easy task, I simply wish to point out the misses and see if others feel the same. (Apologies thought if I did mix up any DP and Vanilla lore, I tried my best to keep in line with what we know from Vanilla all things considered!)