"Kathy Rain: Director's Cut"

Spoilers for Kathy Rain and Kathy Rain 2 below.

Playing Kathy Rain 2 got me to go back and replay the first game, and it was interesting retrospectively to compare the two. Like I mentioned in my Kathy Rain 2 review, the first game came out in 2016 and was re-released as a "Director's Cut" in 2021. There doesn't seem to be a comprehensive account of what was changed between the 2016 release and the Director's Cut, but from what I understand and have seen online the interface was streamlined and a character was cut from the game's ending sequence. Supposedly new locations were also added and additional dialogue recorded. Regardless, I know that Clifftop Games considers the Director's Cut to be the definitive experience, so that's the one I've played, although I may go back at some point and play the original release as it is still available.

If I were to narrow down one thing that I think Kathy Rain does better than its sequel, it's atmosphere. The locations, which I assume must have been either hand painted or altered photographs that were then downsized, ooze atmosphere via their lighting and impressionistic qualities. The music is also moody and in some cases quite haunting. Obviously there's a huge amount of Twin Peaks inspiration here, but that's not a bad thing per se. The world of Conwell Springs feels like the right blend of "real" when you're in places like the sheriff's station or the clinic, and ethereal, such as when you're at the cemetery or the lakeside cabin. The different kinds of weather that occur over the course of the story also add to this.

Speaking of the story, while not massively original, it works. Kathy, a journalism student, goes to the funeral of her grandfather from whom she has long been estranged; afterwards she discovers from her grandmother that her grandfather has spent the last fifteen years or so in a more or less vegetative state after some incident out in Conwell Woods. She decides to look into what happened and finds herself drawn into an increasingly strange conspiracy involving the local church, a drowned girl, and mysterious formations of lights that appear among the trees. Although this is, as I've said, not anything we haven't seen before, Kathy is likeable enough (in my opinion) that I want to see her story through, and the mystery itself is paced out in such a way that it sustains my interest over the game's five days. The pacing maybe only wobbles a little because Day Four is so long and involved compared to the previous three, or at least feels that way, especially since you're meant to be talking to Jimmy Cochrane in the mid afternoon in the city at the very beginning of that day's sequence.

The other big part of this is in the puzzles. The puzzles in Kathy Rain: Director's Cut aren't exactly difficult, at least in my opinion, apart from a few slightly more involved ones, but I think that this works well enough to keep the pace of the story going as well. Probably the only aspect of this in the gameplay is talking to other characters, as you usually end up asking them about everything in your notebook and everything in your inventory too. Kathy will tell you if there's no point in discussing something with someone, but you don't know for sure until you try. Further, the only time I think the game ever gets into "cryptic" territory to any extent is in the game's final day, which is intentionally surreal, and during which time you have limited inventory.

Returning to writing, arguably the game's biggest strength in addition to its visual and audio atmosphere is its characters. While Kathy has been criticised a bit for being a bit of a tomboyish "not like other girls" instance of "men writing women", a wise cracking chain smoking motorcyclist, I think the character is written as likeable. Despite initially being characterised as a bit abrasive, it doesn't take long for the game to show us her vulnerability. She seems to genuinely care about her grandparents and Eileen, while she struggles with the memory of her deadbeat dad and the pain of having had her mother committed to psychiatric care, as well as unresolved feelings about a terminated pregnancy. As would happen again in the sequel, a major factor in this in addition to the writing is the voice acting, with Arielle Siegel and Shelly Shenoy being the highlights as Kathy and Eileen, although the cast as a whole is generally fairly strong.

My only other critique would probably be the same one I had with the sequel in terms of visual shortcuts. As cool as it is to have the area select screen with Kathy on her bike, at times it's hard to get a grasp of the layout of Conwell Springs and its surrounds. For example, Kathy's grandmother's house is meant to be on a farm, but because you never see it from the outside it's hard to get a good sense of this. Similarly, you never see the town as a whole except distantly from the cemetery, and the only exterior you get on the streets is outside the clinic; you never see the sheriff's station or church from the outside. For this reason I think the cemetery, lakeside cabin, Conwell Woods and other such areas work better as locations because we get to see both exterior and interior environments in most cases. As with the sequel, I know art is time consuming and difficult to make, but I do slightly still run into the same problem here of having a little trouble imagining the landscape of Kathy's world. The same issue occurs with the university, of which we only ever see two screens, and one only in a cutscene.

Nonetheless these are pretty minor gripes and ones I can forgive in an indie adventure game which does so many other things right; I actually find it hard to find much in the way of negatives given what the game is. I do genuinely think that Kathy Rain: Director's Cut might be one of my favourite indie adventure games of the last ten years and I'd definitely recommend it to any fans of the genre. I think this and the sequel make a pretty good combo. It took me seven and a half hours, apparently, to do my first playthrough back in 2022, and about six to do my most recent one, so between this and Kathy Rain 2 you've got about 18 hours of Kathy Rain goodness if you want some point 'n' click fun. I guess now I need to go play Whispers of a Machine and see how that holds up, although I think I'll miss Kathy...

"Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer"

Warning: Full spoilers for Kathy Rain and Kathy Rain 2 below.

For people who played Kathy Rain when it first came out back in 2016, the last 9 years must have been a long time. I first played Kathy Rain in its 2021 Director's Cut form in 2022, and I really loved it. While a bit derivative of Twin Peaks and the oeuvre of David Lynch in general, like so many mystery stories with an element of the supernatural, I nonetheless enjoyed the writing and voice acting and I liked the character of Kathy. That game ended with the hint of a sequel being possible, so I kept an eye on the game over the last couple of years to see if anything was in the works, and here we are.

Overall, I like Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer a lot. I don't love it quite as much as the first game, but I did enjoy playing it and I think the team behind the game should be immensely proud of what they accomplished. It's fun and interesting with great art and music, good voice acting and a reasonably compelling story with puzzles to keep the player engaged. The story is probably where it falls slightly short of greatness, along with a few visual shortcuts which reduce the immersion a tad.

Kathy Rain 2 is set three years after the events of the first game. As that game suggested would happen, Kathy's become a private investigator. We find out that she worked for an old stereotypical gumshoe named Lucas Longhorn for a while before she and her friend Eileen went into business together, cracking some big cases. In the end the work dried up, however, the two of them had a falling out, and now Kathy's alone, broke and drinking to forget her woes. Her last hope to save her business is to try to solve the mystery of a serial killer dubbed "the Soothsayer" who is terrorising the city, and to claim the reward money.

The most obvious highlight of Kathy Rain 2 is the presentation. Like the first game, the sequel has lavish pixel art and animation. The environments have lots of texture and detail, and the character portraits that come up during dialogue are full of personality. The atmosphere, always crucial in these kinds of games, is great; a particular highlight is the hill outside of town, from which you get a hazy view of the city with the sights of distant construction and passing aircraft. Rather than a map screen, like the first game this has a fun animation of Kathy riding her motorbike from which you choose the location. The animation in general is fairly good, with the game only occasionally falling back on the fade-in fade-out approach that a lot of adventure games use to avoid having to deal with complex animation.

Things are strong on the sound front as well. Kathy Rain 2 has a great soundtrack which perfectly suits Kathy's character and the investigation. The voice acting is also pretty good, although a bit more variable. The main highlight is Kathy's voice actor, Arielle Siegel, who returns from voicing her in the first game here, and who coupled with the portraits makes Kathy feel very real, sympathetic and believable. Several of the other voice actors from the first game also return to reprise their roles, which provides a nice degree of consistency.

Story-wise things are okay if not especially groundbreaking. Kathy Rain 2 starts off as a "new mystery" that about halfway through pivots completely into being a close sequel to the events of the first game, so this one mercifully provides a recap of the first at the beginning. As much as I loved the original, I didn't remember too much about its story, so this was appreciated, especially since a lot of characters and elements end up returning. My biggest critique of the game is probably that the story ties a little too heavily to the mysteries from the first game, to the point that the ending in particular, in which Kathy ends up in the same strange dimension as she did in the first, feels repetitive. Maybe if it had been four to ten years since I'd played the first, rather than just three, things would feel different. I think it isn't helped by the fact that for the first half of the game your motivation is "catch the Soothsayer to make a bunch of cash" which, while realistic, isn't that compelling either. I would have liked something a bit more personal without as much of a do-over of the first game, so maybe I'm being picky. My other complaint on this front would be that I think the climax is a bit rushed and weightless, such that I didn't quite feel the impact of things that the game probably wanted me to.

I'll just go into spoilers and say that towards the end of the game you discover that Kathy's doppelganger from first game (another Twin Peaks type element) and a deranged park ranger are in cahoots to reawaken the powerful being, "the Old God", hinted at at the end of the first. Their plan to do this is through a series of ritual murders involving obsidian scrying mirrors and a drug manufactured from the hallucinatory plant of the first game. In the end Kathy, Eileen and a new ally who is the redeemed Crimson One from the first game track them down and Kathy has a series of surreal encounters with her doppelganger's victims. She shoots the Crimson One's replacement, "Mr. Burgundy", with a magic bullet she was given just before the finale, the Old God decides he isn't interested in humanity any more (or something) and leaves.

I'm being glib, but none of this quite landed for me and wasn't that interesting compared to the more personal confrontations Kathy had with her past at the end of the first game. Kathy does find herself confronted in this game with her own selfishness as she imagines Eileen and an old school friend, Josh, accusing her of using them, but this occurs about two thirds of the way through the game and doesn't bear out much in the ending. Further, Kathy's troubled mother makes an appearance and is kidnapped by the doppelganger, but all it takes is a few lines of dialogue to convince her that you're the real one. It's all just not given quite enough weight. There's also Lucas, her mentor as a PI, who gives her the "quest" at the beginning of the game and is predictably murdered by the Soothsayer part way through. Lucas is a fun character and his relationship with Kathy is interesting, but it's not exactly anything we haven't seen before. All in all I can't help but feel that the story just needed a bit more drafting to improve the structure, pacing and character development a little.

The other limitation I mentioned previously is some of the visual shortcuts. The game doesn't have many, if any, establishing shots of any of the locations in Kassidy you visit, from Kathy's own office building, to the local businesses, the areas in Bear Creek, or the mines where the final showdown takes place. You pick a location from the map and Kathy enters that room or area from a door or one side or another. You also get the reverse, in which you conveniently can't enter a witness's apartment because she's a germaphobe, or a crime scene because the police have already wiped the area and there's no point. I understand that art is expensive and time consuming to make, which is fair, but I feel like this slightly decreased my immersion and gave me a weaker sense of the landscape of Kathy's world.

In the grand scheme of things, however, these are relatively minor drawbacks. It took me, according to GOG Galaxy, eleven and a half hours to get through Kathy Rain 2, and I honestly wish it had been longer. The game's puzzles are not particularly difficult, although I was referring to the "task list" which is apparently the game's built-in hint system and which other people have complained should be turned off by default. Personally I thought that this was just a way to keep me on track and didn't think that I was somehow circumventing some degree of difficulty by using it, but who knows. Regardless, the game kept me coming back to it for a couple of hours a day for about a week, which I think is as good an indication as any of the game's success.

Ultimately, despite some criticisms, I'd still recommend Kathy Rain 2, and I think it's a worthy successor to the first game. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to make one of these games, especially with a small budget and a small team, and to have made something this elaborate and substantial is impressive. I'd definitely be keen to see a third, in the next decade or so.