• Price: $19.99 USD (digital and physical)
• Developer: ManaVoid Entertainment
• Publisher: Skybound Games
• Release Date: October 5, 2021

Rainbow Billy lives in Star Harbor, an exceptionally colorful town. Star Harbor will be celebrating the “true colors” of Billy’s heart through this year’s Star Parade. Unfortunately, setting off the fireworks for the celebration ends up angering the Leviathan, who decides to remove color from the entire world. 😱 You’ll have to flee before the curse affects Billy as well!

You’ll need to hitch a ride with the aptly named “Friend-Ship,” sailing away from the cursed areas. As you sail around, you’ll discover how to save the world and restore its color.

Riding around on Friend-Ship, you’ll need to keep track of the amount of Rainbow fuel you are using. Traveling into safe zones will restore your fuel. If you run out of fuel, you’re sent right back to the safe zone you came out of.

Throughout the game, you will gather “Thoughts,” little creatures that were changed from positive to negative. Find them and turn them in to the “Think-Tank” on Friend-Ship to “cleanse” the negativity, and earn rewards like an extra turn in battle or the ability to add decor to the interior of Friend-Ship.

There are many different characters that you will meet as you travel around – all devoid of color. In order to restore their color – and therefore their ability to feel positive emotions – you’ll have to “battle” them by listening to them and talking things out.

I must say that some of the “battle” mechanics didn’t feel like they were explained as much as they could have been. I figured out that each friend that enters “battle” at your side has multiple “skills” represented in shape form. You need to say the right thing to your opponent in order to “open their heart” enough for your re-colored friends to use their shapes to fill in their heart. You don’t have HP, and instead have a Morale meter in “battle.”

Once you restore their color, you’ll befriend that character, who can then assist you in subsequent “battles.” Their colors return, and their appearance also softens a little. A lot of the conversations involve taking the high road and not giving in to the negative emotions expressed by your “opponent.”

Friend-Ship has some surprisingly spacious living quarters for housing your new friends. Apparently, giving them something they want increases their friendship levels, which doesn’t seem like the best message given the wholesome nature of the game. 😅 Feeding them will also increase your friendship levels; what I really appreciated was that whenever you are trying to give something to one of your new friends, it will show you how much that item will increase friendship levels. They will also tell you what it is that they want, whether it’s a friendship bracelet or a video game. You find these gifts by digging up dirt, cracking fortune cookies you find, or by fishing. (Fishing mainly gives you some fish gummies to feed your friends, with one or two gift items.)

There are quick access points to go below deck and talk to your new friends on Friend-Ship; that way you don’t have to go all the way down to the docks again at your current location. In addition, there are fast travel points on the map. There are several convenient features like that in the game, including different accessibility options such as difficulty options for the game overall, mini game difficulty options, dyslexic font options, and text size options.

Rainbow Billy is really a pleasant experience, with its accessibility as well as its clever and sweet dialogue and character designs. The game is absolutely adorable – they even made plushies of the main characters. I love the designs and wish there were plushies or even mini figures of the characters you befriend as well!

As much as I really like the character designs, I did think that “collecting” 60 friends was a bit much, especially since there were many similar issues (i.e. inferiority complexes) among them. I don’t know if it would have been better if there had been half as many?

I did have some other minor issues, such as a lack of manual save, the loading time as you start up the game (it’s fine the rest of the time), and I also thought that some of the puzzles could potentially be too difficult for kids especially.

That being said, there’s so much to like about the game. It’s very vibrant (appropriate, given that it’s titled “Rainbow” Billy), and the music is lovely. I really liked the songs with the vocals; I think my favorite songs had to be the one in the Sunken Harbor area and the “Disco Broccoli” song.

What’s really great is that there’s a decent amount of LGBTQ+ representation. I loved the gay stingray named Flapjack, who has a husband. There’s a jock who tried to hide his attraction to other boys by acting overly “masculine” and tough. It felt like a pretty fleshed out world, with multiple pairs of characters that know each other and that have conversations when you bring them back together.

Discussions of body positivity are also present. 🥰

While the game does well in promoting positivity overall, I did think there were some missteps. For example, a character named Dippy requires you to purposefully make mistakes during battle in order to do any damage. I felt like that was kind of counterproductive to the overall message of the game, which is to not change yourself just to make others happy.

Anyway, I may get some pushback on this, but in a way the game almost reminds me of a much more kid-friendly and mental health-focused Persona 4 with LGBTQ+ representation. You help a lot of characters face and accept their true selves here, after all. Before the characters do that, they are shown in grayscale and are kind of literally confronting fears raised by their “shadow-selves.”And there are elements of the social link system as well; once you reach another level of friendship with a character, you find out more about their background. That’s just a random connection my brain made between the two games. 🌈

Switch It ON or Switch It OFF? While it has some issues with repetitiveness, the occasional difficult puzzle, and other minor complaints, Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan is a very wholesome game that really focuses on the power of positive thinking and accepting the parts of yourself that you don’t like, or that others may not approve of. It’s rated “E for Everyone,” and I enjoyed it as an adult. I think that the message behind the game would be a great thing for kids to be exposed to. 8/10 🌈