Kathy Rain: Director’s Cut

f you're a fan of point and click adventure games I highly recommend Kathy Rain. It's short but so so good, it has that feeling of the old 90s games with awesome pixel art and snappy one liners. Very heartfelt, and deals with some really heavy themes.

I'm fairly late to the party on this one, I'll admit. I've known about this game for a long time but never bothered to try it until now. Not sure why, but I don't regret my decision to finally take the plunge on this little paranormal mystery point-and-click adventure. [i]Kathy Rain[/i], in which you play as eponymous journalist student Kathy Rain (who seems like she might be annoying at the start of the game but I promise isn't), is a game that I'm close to saying I loved. Kathy's off to her grandfather's funeral in the small town she grew up in, and in the process ends up embroiled in a strange series of investigations that dip deep into the mysteries surrounding this town, the secrets surrouding the years that led up to her grandfather's death, and a mysterious suicide that occurred years ago. Plain and simple, this is my kind of thing. Apparently the non-Director's Cut version has a much more muddied and unclear story, but this is the Director's Cut and the original is an objectively worse version of the game with at this point even mechanically, so there's no reason to play it. For what it's worth, I didn't find any part of this particularly confusing even if it got weird, despite a couple of dropped or unaddressed plot points. It's also an adventure game, which is also my kind of thing. The graphics and sound design and basically everything about it just scream out to a genre that has been long forgotten until more recent years. The sprite work is largely great, the music is really nice and atmospheric, the area background art being much the same. This is an era of adventure games that few try to really capture, and I loved it here. Now, the other half of adventure games.. well, it becomes hard to talk about the puzzle design in these kind of games the more you play them, because playing enough traditional adventure games essentially rewires your brain into trying the dumbest things imaginable and succeeding. With that in mind though, I think the puzzles in this game are mostly well-done and there's little need for the average person to consult any sort of guide. A lot of it boils down to presenting evidence to and questioning people, though there are a couple scenarios that I can see being genuinely annoying, such as one instance where you have to perform the action to essentially examine the item, but in front of another character, while presenting the item to them doesn't trigger it. There were a few other instances where using the item on the required scenery element/other item didn't seem to work on the first try, but that might've been user error and I misclicked or something. Beyond that though, not bad. Very little true moon logic to be found here. In terms of other complaints, uh... Kathy moves pretty damn slow and it'd be nice to either have a way to make her move faster or skip some room transition animations where she arrives on her motorcycle, slowly dismounts, and walks into the controllable area. Gets irritating when you're doing the adventure game thing of swapping between areas mashing everything on every surface for an interactions. This game is pretty old though, so I doubt this king of thing we be addressed. Still not a dealbreaker, still pretty good. If you like the genre, if you like surreal paranormal investigation stuff, play this. I don't think you'll regret it. Muscle through any misgivings you have about the protagonist in the first five minutes, and there's a genuinely great game here. It's also occasionally annoying or obtuse, but what isn't in this genre space?

This is an engaging point and click, story-driven mystery. It has extra appeal today as a fun "Back to 1995" Nostalgia-trip over 30 years beyond the story-line, to play as an era-appropriate Nancy Drew heroine in a world of off-beat Twin-Peaks-adjacent characters, pre-occupations (occultic dream-invading 'aliens'), and some owls which *are* what they seem (or are they?). Today its a simple lightweight game that shows the kind of artistry you can squeeze out of 16 bit graphics, a good story and a decision tree, I love these kinds of games!