• Kathy Rain
  

  12 hours playtime

  20 of 20 achievements

A great point and click adventure game that gets so much right.

Taking the role of Kathy Rain, a 20-something journalism student, you come back home for your grandfather’s funeral and begin an investigation into his misterious illness. What follows is the typical point & click process of investigating locations, talking to everyone, picking up items, and solving puzzles. What sets Kathy Rain apart is the pretty pixel art, interesting story, solid writing, good voice acting, and intelligent puzzles that naturally lead into the next.

The pixel art is very well done, particularly given the AGS engine’s 320x240 resolution. My favorite part, and a very pleasant surprise, is that the far more detailed character portraits change to reflect the people’s emotions. Characters will smile, or smirk, or frown, or roll their eyes during conversations, and it really serves to bring already detailed characters to life. The good voice acting helps a lot with that as well.

The story was slow to get started, but interesting, and had me guessing as to where it was going and what was going to happen next. The characters were likewise interesting. The protagonist, Kathy Rain, was particularly enjoyable to play as, with tons of personality - I loved her comments, observations, and dialog choices. The writing was good, and ranged competantly from funny to sad. This is one of the few games that made me laugh, and I laughed often due to the sharp and witty writing.

The puzzles are logical, and well connected, such that the solution to one puzzle intelligently leads you to the next. The game helps keep you on track with notes / conversation topics in your notebook, and by keeping the inventory largely limited to useful items and greying out locations that you are finished with. There’s no pixel hunting due to being able to highlight objects of interest, and there’s a clever “Think about” function that serves to both provide backstory and hints as to what the item might be used for. The puzzles are pleasantly on the easy side, though there is a noticeble difficulty spike about 75% of the way through.

I did get stuck three times, about 75-80% of the way through where the difficulty spiked. One code puzzle I just needed a hint for, one I missed that an object had a gained new interaction ability that it didn’t previously have, and the third was a poem / riddle that were so vague as to leave me completely stumped and reaching for a walkthrough.

I also encountered some initial technical issues due to the AGS engine. It failed to start when set to automatic resolution as it tried a resolution that was way too big. When manually setting the resolution, fullscreen would stretch the game out even though I had black bars enabled in the launcher. I had to set the game to run in a window to finally make it work.

Overall, Kathy Rain is a great point and click adventure game, one of the best I played. I highly recommend it to adventure game fans.