Further thoughts before "Life is Strange: Reunion"

In the unlikely event that you're a regular visitor to this blog, I apologise that so much of what I've posted about over the last couple of years has just been about Life is Strange. I really care about the original game and its characters, so it seems to be one of the only things I feel passionate enough about to write about much regularly. 

So now that Life is Strange: Reunion has been properly announced, what do I think? I find myself sorting elements of the announcement into three categories.

Things I liked:

• I mostly like Chloe's design. While I think they played it a bit safe with her hairstyle, at least they gave her the green hair from the Life is Strange 2 photo rather than doing something incredibly safe like keeping it blue. I also think the structure of her face largely resembles that from the first game.
• I like that you play as both Max and Chloe. This makes sense to me; if you're going to bring both characters back, have them both be playable. This is new for the series and provides the opportunity for interactions you wouldn't get if you were restricted to just controlling Max.

Things I didn't like:

• Rewind being back. I feel like Rewind had a very specific purpose in the original game, namely to function as a metaphor for Max's struggle with indecision. It also functioned as an interrogation of the whole notion of "choice based gaming". As I've mentioned in an earlier post, there's an interpretation of the powers in these games as representing unhealthy coping mechanisms, and if Rewind just becomes something Max uses to solve mysteries or whatever it feels less like it means something about human experience and more just like a gimmick.
• Backtalk being back. Likewise, while I don't hate the Backtalk mechanic from Before the Storm, and I understand it was inspired by the dialogue tree puzzles in traditional adventure games (I think insult sword fighting from The Secret of Monkey Island was cited back then as a specific influence), I don't know that a mechanic born of Chloe being an argumentative teenager needs to be reprised now that she's in her early thirties. I've always liked the somewhat generous view of Backtalk in Before the Storm that it didn't really persuade anyone and that characters mostly just let Chloe have her way because they get sick of arguing with her, but again that makes more sense when she's a rebellious teenager. I'd honestly prefer if in this game neither of them had powers or special abilities.

Things I'm nonplussed about:

• I find that I just don't care about Caledon or the returning characters from Double Exposure except maybe Amanda. As a whole, however, none of them were that strong in my opinion and if the game asks me to choose between them or Chloe it's not going to be a very difficult choice. I'm kind of interested to see the university in a different season but that's about it. We spent way too much time in the Snapping Turtle bar in the previous game so seeing it in this footage again did the opposite to exciting me. Likewise, some of the "cute" references to other things from the series, like Chloe being the manager of Steph's old band from True Colors, I find kind of naff and make the Life is Strange world feel small.
• As expected, Rihanna DeVries is playing Chloe. I completely expected this and I'm fine with it. Nonetheless, there were rumours that Hannah Telle and Rihanna DeVries didn't have much onset "chemistry" with each other and it's hard not to wonder about that watching the somewhat stilted, autocue-driven presentation they had to give to promote the game. Like I said before, this can't really be a true reunion without the original writers and without Ashly Burch. I'm sure what the game does depict will be fine, but I think it'll just be fine. I don't think it's going to get that spark we might have had if, in some vastly different series of events, we'd gotten another game with both of the original actors. I also found a bit of unfortunate humour in the fact that, unlike the Double Exposure presentation, which heavily involved that game's development staff, so many people who actually worked on this game at Deck Nine have left or been let go at this point that the cast were the only ones who were available to deliver the big marketing spiel about the new game.

Like I said with my previous post, while I'm curious about this I just can't get too excited. It simply feels too much like fanfiction and not an authentic continuation of Max and Chloe's story. It might be fun and I'm interested to see how it plays out, but Deck Nine's games just feel too distant from Dontnod's. It's the presentation, the way the characters and story are written, everything. I feel like the thing I'm going to be comparing it to the most isn't Dontnod's games but rather the comics, which a few years ago felt like the thing you "had" to buy if you wanted more Max and Chloe, because the idea of them ever having another game together seemed absurd. Those also brought back the storm, separated Max and Chloe only to reunite them later, and had Max moving between parallel timelines, as well as having her only using Rewind years after swearing off it under desperate circumstances. It seems really odd (or strange, if you will) that no one seems to be able to come up with a continuation of the original game that does something different, not that it ever needed one. I'd be more curious than anything else to know what Dontnod would have done if for some reason they'd made a direct sequel, but that was probably never going to happen and will certainly never happen now. I don't know. I think in my head there's this half dream of "the perfect sequel to Life is Strange" that never came to be. Reunion isn't going to be it. I just hope it makes me feel something.

Thoughts before "Life is Strange: Reunion"

Back in 2024, a very wise person (i.e. me) stated regarding the Life is Strange series that "the only thing I can think that could possibly salvage Life is Strange at this point would be to bring back Chloe; I just can't see what else would get jaded fans to return to the series at this point." Well, lo and behold, it's 2026 and to the surprise of no one who had been paying much attention throughout 2025 a new Life is Strange game, Reunion, has been announced and it is indeed bringing back Chloe. Now, in all seriousness, I can't claim to be alone in having predicted this, nor was I anywhere near the first, and it's obvious even from within Life is Strange: Double Exposure itself the writers had left themselves room to bring Chloe back. However, given the strength of the backlash to the previous game, coupled with its (as far as we know) disappointing sales figures, it's difficult not to see this as anything other than a cynical and calculated move, which of course it is.

Information about forthcoming Life is Strange games has been leaking like a sieve from developer Deck Nine since before True Colors came out, and the tide has not remotely been stemmed after those concerning Double Exposure and the return of Max were proven to be true. It was subsequently stated that a followup game was part and parcel with that one, that it was always going to happen, and that it had almost certainly been in development at the same time as Double Exposure. People had also been keeping an eye on Deck Nine's projects and hirings, the resume of Chloe's actor since Before the Storm and of course the numerous surveys and focus group sessions that were conducted in the aftermath of Double Exposure's release. I myself managed to get my hands on one of those survey links and tried to give as constructive a piece of feedback as I could, not stating anything I hadn't really said in my posts about the game: that it was great to have Max and Hannah Telle back, and that the game looked nice and had nice music, but that the story felt messy, the new characters were a bit thinly written, and that from a marketing and PR perspective the developer and publisher had handled Chloe's absence in a manner contrary to their own interests in producing a financially successful product.

I'm sure they received a lot more feedback to this effect, much of which was probably expressed in stronger and less reasonable terms. Thus I've no doubt that Square Enix's big takeaway from all this was "we have to bring Chloe back", perhaps regardless of how or why. As a result, when a listing for the new game was accidentally released on various official classification websites early in 2026, I was not remotely surprised by the synopsis's revelation that Chloe was back and its focus on her return. There's been a huge amount of back and forth on Double Exposure since its release, but Chloe's absence and how that game handled her and Max's relationship has, rightly or wrongly, always dominated that conversation. For my part, as I said in previous posts, I mostly see the handling of Chloe in that game as a misfire from a business perspective. Don't get me wrong; I'm a "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" guy: I love the Max and Chloe team or relationship or however one chooses to play it in the first game, but I didn't need Chloe to be in Double Exposure, nor did it upset me that much that they took the route of her and Max having broken up. It was sad, but I don't think the concept in itself was implausible, even if the way it was handled in the actual game was very clunky. Of course part of me secretly hoped that there would be a way for them to still be together, but that was obviously unlikely from the beginning of the marketing push for the game, and I'm at the age and place in my life where I no longer get so irrationally attached to the lives and stories of fictional characters that I can't handle this kind of narrative choice. That doesn't change the fact, however, that Square Enix and Deck Nine didn't "read the room" concerning Chloe during the development of Double Exposure or during its marketing, and managed to just upset a lot of people and hurt their own bottom line when it came to producing a sequel to a beloved game with an extremely passionate and devoted fanbase.

I think the leaked premise of the new game, that Max and Chloe reunite because of "nightmares and impossible memories" (or something to that effect) that Chloe is having, doesn't sound terrible. I'm guessing they'll go with the approach that the timeline merge that happened at the end of Double Exposure also merged Chloe being alive and being dead, such that the Chloe, while alive, has memories of being murdered by Nathan during the events of the first game. [Actually it looks like it's going to be that "Sacrifice Chloe" Chloe is alive but remembers dying, while "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" Chloe remembers the town being destroyed and her mother dying, but the town's still there and her mother is still alive.] The other side of the story, that Max has three days to try to prevent Caledon University being destroyed by a fire, sounds less interesting and like another unimaginative rehash of the first game with a looming disaster, but whatever; I never exactly had a massive amount of hope that another instalment from Deck Nine was going to be anything particularly groundbreaking. At the same time, it's for this reason that it's difficult to become too excited. This is another Deck Nine game, and none of their instalments in the series have been that good. Sure, they've looked nice and had nice performance capture, graphics and music, but all of them have fairly mediocre stories and few particularly memorable new characters. Now I should qualify this by admitting that I've likewise never replayed original developer Dontnod's Life is Strange 2, but that's not because I think it's a bad game, simply because I found it so gruelling and Sean and Daniel's story so depressing that I've never really wanted to repeat it. Nonetheless, Deck Nine are not the creators of Max and Chloe, and it's hard to feel like this is a "real" Max and Chloe story without writing by the original developers. It's sort of like the comics, which I don't mind, but they feel more like licensed fan fiction than a particularly authentic continuation.

There is, of course, also Chloe's performance. Now it's almost certain that Chloe will be portrayed by Rihanna DeVries, who played her in Before the Storm and provided Chloe's voice for the True Colors DLC and for Double Exposure. I think they're one of the highlights of Before the Storm and have no doubt that in this new game they'll give a fine performance. Nonetheless, I think for many die hard fans of the original game Chloe, and especially "Chloe with Max", is Ashly Burch. Now there's almost no way she's coming back: she's too big of a name these days and she's a union actor and Square Enix hasn't hired union actors for these games since the first one. This doesn't change the fact, however, that assuming this game really is a "Reunion", it's not really a reunion unless it reunites not just Max and Chloe but Hannah Telle and Ashly Burch. For all the issues I have with its contrivances, this was one of the things that made the "Farewell" DLC of Before the Storm so special; not only were we playing as Max again, but both characters were portrayed by their original actors even though Chloe had been played by a different actor in the main episodes. Again, don't get me wrong; I think Rihanna DeVries is really good in Before the Storm, but for me the "Max and Chloe team" is Telle and Burch.

I think it's very likely that this new game will end up being a game that was already in development with a bunch of new Chloe stuff jammed in to try to placate fans, and that, like Double Exposure, it's going to feel messy. I think Square Enix thought, very naively, that they were going to be able to have their cake and eat it too with that game, that they'd be able to bring in existing fans via Max but also soft reboot the series for new players, get them on board with a bunch of new characters like Safi and Amanda, and move the series on from the first game, but that obviously completely backfired. But in that regard they probably also completely screwed themselves by, as it seems, constantly interfering in the creative process at Deck Nine, and that's not even factoring in Deck Nine's own reported internal problems. Thus, it's impossible not to see this as anything other than the cynical course correction it obviously is.

Now all that being said, do I plan to play Reunion? Yeah, of course. Square Enix doesn't deserve my money but I can't help but be curious to see what they do. I'm sure there'll be some money-grubbing ultimate edition and goodness knows what else, but as of time of writing that remains to be seen. I want the game to be good. It almost certainly won't be, but I want to see what they do. If nothing else it might be interesting to talk about.

Hindsight: A 2024 Cinematic Retrospective

Placeholder for whenever I get around to watching some or all of the following films from 2024 that I meant to watch but instead I watched loads of films from the 70s etc.:

Kinds of Kindness

The Substance

Megalopolis

Anora

The Brutalist

And various others I won't list now. 

Three Games I Didn't Finish in 2025

I played more games than just Kathy Rain 2 (and Kathy Rain 1 again) in 2025, but I didn't finish most of them for one reason or another. Here are three games I was interested in that I didn't or couldn't finish in 2025. 

Tavern Talk 

I've written here before about my love for Coffee Talk by Toge Productions, and appreciation for its sequel. There's also a third game in the works I'm curious to play. Tavern Talk was a European production heavily inspired by Coffee Talk but taking place in a more straightforward fantasy setting evocative of running an inn in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign

I gave Tavern Talk a more than fair go, but it's just too long. That statement needs to be qualified. I often feel sad when games I'm really enjoying end earlier than I would like; I think most of us know the feeling of enjoying a piece of entertainment to the extent that we want it to just keep going. Tavern Talk had the opposite problem. There were, for me, simply too many characters and their stories weren't engaging enough to keep me interested. On the one hand, I can appreciate why a game trying to give you the experience of being an innkeeper would want to have lots of different customers showing up, but the issue is that there are just so many and each has their own storyline that seemed to go on and on and on, and few if any of them were engaging enough for me to really care about them. Every time I felt that the game was surely reaching a natural conclusion it seemed to simply continue for even longer, and I started to get fed up. It all came to a head for me when my player character, over whose dialogue you have little control, had what seemed like a contrived falling out with one of the regulars, and at that point I just lost interest and stopped playing. I can't see myself going back to it any time soon; if I want to read something lengthy, I'll read real literature, not an overextended visual novel. I replayed the original Coffee Talk as well this year and loved it just as much, but its brevity and relatively tight core cast are major factors in why it's such a standout.

Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken (aka Deep Sleep 4) 

I was really keen for Deep Sleep 4 to come out. I'm quite a fan of the original trilogy of short Deep Sleep flash games and their companion trilogy of Don't Escape games. I'm a particularly big fan of Don't Escape 4, the full length point and click game from a few years ago that marked developer Scriptwelder's transition from short flash games to full blown indie adventure game development. Initially, I really enjoyed Deep Sleep for the roguelike approach to adventure gaming, with semi-randomised environments and a degree of character customisation and experience. I've often felt that point and click adventure gaming hasn't delved enough into hybridity with this kind of genre, so I was at first feeling like this was a real step forward.

What I struggled with is the combat. Deep Sleep 4's turn-based combat is meant to be part of the puzzle, involving resource management and how best to maximise damage and debuff your enemies, sort of like, say, Into the Breach (another game I couldn't get into). I understand this, but I feel like Deep Sleep 4 doesn't do a great job of tutorialising its combat; it feels very trial-and-error-y to figure out how it's meant to work, and for a good portion of the first third of the game or so I thought that you were actually supposed to avoid combat and find alternative solutions to it until I realised that it was actually a major part of the game and that to progress there were several big boss battles that needed to be played through. Scriptwelder has discussed online that there's no need to grind and that there are certain effective tactics to make combat manageable, but I feel like if the combat is meant to be like another puzzle there should be more "clues" to help the player work out the challenge of each battle scenario.

I know that due to many people's frustrated responses to the combat Scriptwelder has implemented a "story mode" that either eliminates combat or makes it much simpler, but I feel like this isn't really the experience of the game that he intended and that it's not really the "correct" way to play. I'll probably go back to Deep Sleep 4 at some point, but it really wasn't what I expected.

 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants 

I really liked the main game of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but I found the DLC to be a bit of a disappointment. Essentially an add-on to the Vatican portion of the game in which Indy explores other parts of Rome, what I played of it felt a bit samey. I was also put off by a puzzle involving water valves that I felt didn't make it very clear what you were supposed to do; it's a two step puzzle but I didn't realise after completing the first step that there was more to accomplish. I also became annoyed by some weird environmental choices in that part of the game that made a piece of decoration look like a ledge you were meant to be able to jump to.

Mismatched expectations come up here as well, as I think I was initially hoping that The Order of Giants, if not a fully-fledged new environment like the main exploration sections of the main game, would at least be equivalent to a sort of mini version of one of those set in a unique environment in another part of the world, not just an add-on to an existing area, but that was probably hoping for too much. I will probably also go back to the DLC at some point, but at this point I'd probably be more interested in a larger expansion or a fully-fledged sequel to The Great Circle.

One Game I Did Finish: Dredge

I don't have much to say about Dredge except that I thought that for a horror game it was quite relaxing and had nice atmosphere. So, I guess, I recommend that one. 

"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.

Hindsight: A 2023 Cinematic Retrospective

Once again I force myself to watch films albeit mostly a year late. Here are my thoughts in order of release if you give a shit. I watched a lot more kids' movies from 2023 for some reason.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

This works better as an exercise in making a film feel like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign than it does as a "film" in its own right. It feels like it was meant to be a Guardians of the Galaxy-esque romp but the screenplay just isn't strong enough to make it work. It has some good sequences poking good natured fun at the mechanics of the tabletop game, how different player characters tend to operate, and so on, but the characters and the story themselves needed, in my view, to be more engaging and the comedy significantly tightened up.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

I don't really know what to say about this. The animation is good and my nephews loved it so it probably did its job. Like with the D&D movie I just don't feel like the story and character moments were as tight as they could be. That being said, it tells a surprisingly coherent narrative for a movie based on the Mario games of all things.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse

This is a decent follow-up to 2019's Into the Spider Verse, but not as strong as that original in my view. I found the gimmick of all the different Spider-People and Miles's conflict with Miguel to not be as strong as the first film's focus on Miles's growth and his friendship with the alternate Peter. Add to that the horror stories about what it was like for the animators and the sequel hook ending and it feels like a classic case of a sequel that tries to be way too big and loses what made the original special. Nonetheless I admire it from moving away from the typical superhero sequel trend of just having Spidey fight a different villain.

Asteroid City

"You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." I thought this was one of the better films from Wes Anderson in recent years, certainly better than The French Dispatch, and enjoyed its structure and use of framing devices. I'm not sure I can casually say what I thought it was about, but I found it moving nonetheless, at the very least in terms of how it represented a struggle for the meaning of things. It also looks great, as they always do, and has some very odd and amusing moments. One of my highlights of 2023.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Full review here. In further retrospect I simply think that James Mangold missed the point. There was just no need to make such a sombre reflection upon the Indiana Jones legacy, nor in such an overextended manner. He could easily have made a film that celebrated the character, using Harrison Ford's age as an opportunity, while doing something more than what he clearly saw as the shortcomings of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I'm surprised so many people thought this was good (or at least okay).

Barbie

Despite not watching this until 2024, I gave myself the proper Barbenheimer experience by watching this and Oppenheimer in the same day. It's clever and entertaining, and Robbie and Gosling are both very entertaining in it, but because it's ultimately a piece of promotion for a huge toy brand it feels very corporate and safe. It ultimately offers up a very milquetoast Western middle-class vision of feminism to avoid taking too many risks and because Barbie is ultimately just not that progressive of a product. It's telling that all the memes and stuff that came out of this ended up being about Ken, not Barbie herself, because she's not developed or focused on as well as she should have been and weirdly the man ends up being the more fleshed out character. Look, I'm an upper middle class straight white guy and obviously not the target audience for this, so maybe I missed something, but as decent as it was I think this played things too safe.

Oppenheimer

I was put off watching this for a long time because of its length, so ultimately I was astonished by how well paced and engaging it was for all of its three hours. Regardless of its historical accuracy, which I think is somewhat high but not complete, it's an extremely watchable study of a man who can't seem to actually get a grip of himself, his life and the consequences of his work: a man who got carried away on an intellectual level with something terribly destructive and then couldn't handle the guilt so he lapsed into self-pity and was torn between regret and the significance of his legacy, a man swayed by stronger personalities than his own. Well-shot, well acted especially by Cillian Murphy, and terrifically paced and structured.

Talk to Me

A decent but, in my opinion, overhyped Australian horror flick. I get what it was going for about how trauma and unresolved grief can lead people to destructive and self-destructive behaviours, but it just didn't quite carry me along with it. I thought at points it was a bit over written and stated the obvious at times, and occasionally felt a bit like two YouTube dudebros trying to make an Ari Aster movie. Still, it's well structured, is a fairly effective depiction of teenagers doing stupid things for fun that end up coming back to bite them, and the surreal ending sequence was way better than anything that came before it in the film.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Another of the kids' movies I saw, it had great art, a good soundtrack, and the turtles actually felt like teenagers; it felt like it did a really good job of exploring the "teenage" aspect of the characters, which I believe was the filmmakers' intention. Yes, the big fight with the giant Superfly is a bit boring, but that's for the kids rather than me. Overall I thought this was a really well made TMNT film and it's good to see that people can still make fun films with such a well-worn premise after all these years.

Killers of the Flower Moon

This was another one that didn't feel its runtime. Martin Scorcese's crime drama about the systematic murder and robbery of the Osage community for their oil rights by trusted members of the local white community is powerful and morbidly fascinating. It's obviously approaching it from a white guy's perspective, something Marty is keenly aware of with how he handles the ending and the film's focus on the perpetrators played by DiCaprio and DeNiro rather than the indigenous population, and while that's kind of a shame one can't help but feel that Scorcese didn't think that it was his story to tell. Regardless, it's a sad and disturbing, but also very engaging, representation of the atrocities of colonialism and how people got away with them.

Poor Things

This is yet another weird one; it's a well-made, well-acted and very odd movie, but it definitely feels like a man's somewhat misguided effort to make a feminist movie which ends up still feeling very male-oriented. Emma Stone and the rest of the cast are great and the bizarre Victorian sci-fi premise is used to excellent effect, with Stone playing a young woman whose brain was removed from her unborn body and placed into the body of her dead mother, if that makes sense. Supposedly the novel this adapts has a framing device in which Stone's character, Bella, reveals that this whole element was something her husband made up, which leads one to wonder why Lanthimos omitted it and played the story straight without this postmodern twist of the diegesis.

Napoleon 

Putting aside the historical accuracy, it's just not a very good film. Despite trying to focus on the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine, it doesn't do a very good job of characterising either of them. They feel flat and their relationship underdeveloped. The title cards are condescendingly fatuous, for instance specifically pointing out that the losses at Waterloo occurred in "one day" when the same is true of most of the other battles listed at the same time. It feels as if Ridley Scott has contempt for his audience and thinks that if he doesn't spell things out then his audience won't get it, yet at the same time introduces characters and events so rapidly that nothing has any weight and no one scene feels important or even finished. Admittedly I only watched the theatrical cut, but I couldn't be bothered spending another 45 minutes of my life on the director's cut. The best thing about it is the costumes; even the battle scenes are comically small and just show men rushing at each other as all lazy Hollywood war scenes do. It feels like Scott didn't particularly care about the film, so one wonders why he bothered to make it. His first theatrical release, The Duellists (1977), is a vastly superior film about the Napoleonic era made with much less money.

The Zone of Interest

Another highlight of 2023, this depiction of the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family in their lavish home and pleasure garden abutting the walls of the camp is a powerful vision of the bureaucratic mindlessness and careerism upon which the industrialised genocide committed by the Nazis was built. A highlight is obviously the soundtrack and sound design, with the horrors of the camp only ever heard, rather than seen, while our eyes are on Höss's wife's bland pleasaunce under the barbed-wire-topped walls. Perhaps its most effective feature is its depiction of Höss as just this boring guy who cares more about his horse than his family and whose violent and deplorable deeds, such as sexual assault and ordering the drowning of an unruly prisoner, occur offscreen. Similarly, his wife Hedwig is a social climber only concerned about losing her nice house and garden if she has to move because of her husband's job; they don't care a thing or even spare a thought for the forced labour and mass murder taking place next door, Höss and his colleagues seeing the Hungarian deportations as nothing more than a series of administrative and logistical challenges in the same manner as any kind of big corporate project. It's a very effective and disturbing look at how little empathy and what misplaced priorities humans are capable of having, and the banal context in which monstrous acts are so often carried out. It's quite an effective complement to Killers of the Flower Moon, as both films depict the murder and robbery of oppressed peoples being committed by those driven by self-enrichment in a manner which either does not recognise the humanity of the victims or seems to not even register them as living beings at all.