Hypothermia, raging flood currents and loose electric cables are your main enemies in your struggle to survive.
The game plays much like a traditional adventure game, meaning a fair share of your time will be spent trying to find the correct way through a puzzle or scene. Finding the way is usually solved through extensive exploration of the setting, talking to your fellow survivors or trying your athletic skills on platforms and floating debris.
One danger that's ever present is hypothermia. Oh yeah, the worst flood ever happens during a raging storm in the winter so walking around trying to find hidden objects in dark corners can get dangerous real quickly. You have a body temperature gauge to keep track of your status and once it reaches 50%, you're no longer able to run. At 25% you can only crawl and 0% means death by hypothermia. Strangely enough, you're the only one to seem to suffer from the cold. Policemen walk left and right for hours in the very same weather that kills you in under 5 minutes.
You don't meet a lot of people in the game but that doesn't mean you play alone all the time. Though most of the people you meet in Raw Danger are simply bystanders with little or nothing useful to say, you'll also be entrusted a fellow citizen to escort to safety. The best moments are definitely when you meet a group of survivors trying to escape a given situation - i.e. a building about to collapse, trapped in a tunnel with the water level getting higher by the minute - and you have to decide if you're willing to risk your own skin to help them or if you're more interested in saving yourself and the cute lady by your side.
There are several choices you can make during your game and, different from most games with this feature, sometimes your choices do change the outcome of the game. More often than not, you'll be given a choice to save your own skin without much danger or to risk yourself and try to save one or more fellow citizens. I've decided to play the coward in my first go and found out that I had skipped a whole section of the game by deciding not to go back to town to help once I had reached safety. It felt nice actually being able to simply go home and let the police and firemen do their job. Apart from being a coward or a hero, you also get to choose if you're willing to take the opportunity to fulfill a vendetta, if you're going to save the food only for yourself and let others starve etc etc. Every character has at least two different endings depending on the choices you make in the game.
That's not to say every choice is important, sometimes they're there just to allow one to decide how a given character will act out. Will he be rude, kind, try to take advantage of the women around or respect them and other minor quirks.
Even though the above description might indicate a serious or gritty game, Raw Danger is as far from that path as a game can be. There are hundred of collectibles in every corner of the city. Dozens of clothing accessories, ranging from black power wigs and cat ears to military boots and construction helmets, not to mention a plethora of compasses. Yeah, compasses. Weird as it may seem, the interface compass will change at least 10 times with every character based on the compasses you find throughout the game. Seriously, it has no in game effect but you'll keep stumbling on them on every room.
Some clothes do change your resilience to cold and finding yourself an umbrella can really improve your survivability but almost every item is meant to make you laugh. What's worse, you can actually hand those items to your partner and walk in pairs like clowns trying to evade a flooding city. It's kind of a mood breaker, only fit for those who've beaten the game several times, but as it's entirely optional, it did not hinder my experience.
The graphics does not make this game shine. Even though major floods, collapsing buildings and explosions have a decent look, character models are not that hot on today's standards. One should be advised to expect an early PS2 game. The music is fitting, particularly on the moments where you're required to act and think quickly to save yourself from harm.
It's an interesting game with a different perspective. Even though it surely could have been a lot better, it does represent a bold step in a different direction than most games.