Kathy Rain is a throwback in more ways than one. For a start, it’s set in the year 1995, with all of that period's now-weird retro quirks intact. I suppose it’s quite a clever way to make players look stupid when they roll their eyes at a perplexing clue and yell “just Google it!” at the screen. It's happy to remind you of its chosen era in other ways, like when it has you hack computers with floppy disks and calls those bulbous CRT monitors you still hide in your loft "cutting edge." But, more than that, it’s a proper old-school adventure game in the same vein as classic fare such as Full Throttle and Gabriel Knight. It consists of pixel graphics and inventory puzzles and people who don't get annoyed after being asked the same question or shown the same item dozens of times as you seek out increasingly obscure solutions to problems you just can’t solve.
There’s not a lot of that last thing, to be fair. Kathy has increasingly bizarre discoveries to make, but the mystery she hopes to solve never requires ludicrous leaps of logic. Or, at least, it never ventures beyond that special Adventure Game Logic™ that insists all of the world’s complications can be solved with obscure lateral thinking and whatever junk we can cram into the infinite spaces that are our pockets.
Staff review by Gary Hartley (May 05, 2016)
Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you. |
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