Kathy Rain

« No hyperbole, Kathy Rain is yet another milestone in this resurgence of old-school point-and-click adventures. »

« Blend a setting which reminds True Detective with the atmospheres of Twin Peaks and the results will be Kathy Rain, a well-written and intriguing point-and-click adventure that proves the incredible talent of Joel Staaf Hästö, the solo developer of Clifftop Games. »

« A remarkable achievement from a first-time developer, Kathy Rain is an unexpectedly personal gem about a heroine who proves she belongs with the genre’s other big names. »

« A fantastic story well told, superbly presented. When it comes to point and click adventures on Steam, Kathy reigns. »

« This is one of the best point-and-click adventures of the year, and Raw Fury should be immensely proud of their ability to bottle that retro lightning twice. »

« A very good classic graphic adventure with smart puzzles and a bizarre atmosphere that goes from Nancy Drew to Twin Peaks. »

« Kathy Rain is a really exciting point 'n' click adventure that every fan of eerie and dark adventures should play, even if it is hard for some to swallow the pill of the AGS engine. »

« This is one of the best traditional adventures we've played this year. Long and well designed, it's a great choice for those who miss this genre. »

« This game starts very well. The story builds up. You get a notepad to track what has happened so far. The characters are interesting. You blend in with the story and can also progress the story by figuring out naturally what needs to be done. Quite fun. Now for the cons. The notebook which tracks your goals keeps overwriting old goals. That causes a disconnect with the progression. You have a bunch of names written down but not sure where you got them or why or how. Around 50% mark for me the game essentially became just go around asking everyone everything. At that point I got disconnected from the plot and it became a chore to do. What would really help is to optimize the missions a little bit so that they're more intuitive and they dont depend upon asking everyone. For example you need to ask grandma something. But the story never makes it clear that that's something of importance. The notepad should also have a way of visiting past breadcrumbs. Perhaps drilling down on each item to show the trace of clues that led to the current one. »

« The story and the locations are very original. The story has some fantastic characteristics that I am not much of a fan of. Some characters and locations made me remember of Gabriel Knight 1. The nerd assistant, the church, the crypt, the bike. The graphics are ok and the music too. The voice acting its one of the best things of the game, specially Kathys actress. Some puzzles have a lot of potential to be great but they are not very intuitive. I found myself going from one location to another asking questions. It got really tiresome. Ill play the sequel at some point, for what I saw in the trailer, they improve the graphics. »

« Lento aburrido y cargado de giños feministas, pero lo peor es que es un juego lento y mediocre… pocos escenarios…. tiene muchísimas carencias unas de las peores aventuras point & click que he jugado. »

« Kathy Rain has a lot going for it. The story starts off pretty interesting and only gets more so. The music is well done. The puzzles are largely great. There are a few downsides though. While the story starts of well by the end it does leave several questions open and I found didn’t do a very good job explaining just what was going on. Several interesting side plots are also brought up but not resolved. I also didn’t like how the majority of responses from Kathy are just hostile and impolite. It didn’t make me like the character much. I will single out the padlock puzzle, the IT puzzle, and the briefcase puzzle as my favourites. I didn’t like the poem puzzle much. Overall I liked that most of the puzzles made sense. I wasn’t a huge fan of the graphics but then again I’m not much of a fan of pixel graphics. There is very little detail on much of the game. I get that it’s meant to be a throw back to the old days but some pixel games do manage to make things look a little better than this although most are on par. The voice acting was very well done. I played Kathy Rain on Linux using Steam’s Proton. It never crashed during game play but had some other issues. The game sometimes wouldn’t launch. It wouldn’t give me an error message but just would never open. I found I had to validate the files, of which usually one was bad and had to be downloaded, and then restart Steam. The game would also crash if I set the Nearest Neighbour Filter setting to anything over 6x. Once the game could get going I had zero issues during game play. There is just the Nearest Neighbour Filter for graphical options. You can’t turn the subtitles off. You can manually save any time except for when making a dialogue choice and I didn’t notice any limit for how many save slots there are. The game had a frame rate cap of 40 FPS which is kind of strange and low. It managed to stay at a constant 40 FPS even on my Intel UHD 770 onboard GPU so at least performance was good. I’m not sure if my technical issues were related to Proton or if they would have happened on Windows as well. Game Engine: Adventure Game Studio Graphics API: DXVK Game Version Played: 1.0.4 Disk Space Used: 537 MB Nearest Neighbour Filter: 6x CPU Usage: 4-12 % System RAM Usage: 4.3-5.3 GB Frame Rate: 40 FPS Constant Overall I would recommend Kathy Rain to those who like point and click games and even to those that don’t. As unfulfilling as the story was it was a great ride along the way. The puzzles were also largely well done and despite some technical issues the game can be run on damn near any system well. The audio was great overall and the graphics were fine for what they were but don’t hinder the enjoyment of the game. I paid $3.39 CAD for Kathy Rain and would say it is easily worth that price and is also worth it’s current asking price of $12.99 CAD. That being said I would recommend going for the new directors cut as you get native Linux support and apparently they have put work into fleshing out the ending among other things. I finished the story in seven hours and fourteen minutes. My System: Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | Intel UHD 770 | Mesa 23.0.4 | Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB | Trisquel 11.0.1 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.8.9-gnu | Proton 9.0-1 »

« Very good game. I enjoyed playing this game a lot. I strongly recommend this. »

« Short version: excellent writing, interesting and likeable main character, surprisingly good puzzles. Long(er) version: I was initially put off by the low res graphics and the first few puzzles in the game. I'm glad I gave it another try though. I ended up being engrossed by this from start to finish with never a dull moment. The only "complaint" worth noting is that it was too short, but I simply didn't want it to end. Indeed I don't like pixel art, but I loved this game despite that. After giving it quite some thought I discovered that characters, voice acting and puzzles are the only things that are game breaking for me when not done right. But of these were top notch! Kathy Rain is a very likeable, very real and very human character. She develops over the course of the game and her voice actor is perfectly cast for the role. All the other characters aren't as fleshed out, but all are voiced well too. The story was well written and paced and definitely had some "Gabriel Knight vibes" going on. It is a very mature story too which can get pretty dark, but thankfully they didn't forget to add in some humor as well. While some were too simple, I found the majority of the puzzles to be just the right amount of difficulty to give you that good feeling of accomplishment without ever becoming a frustrating "how was I supposed to know that" affair. All the puzzles are logical, none require you to combine weird objects in silly ways and there's a good amount of variety too. I also loved that the game doesn't allow you to pick up stuff that you have no idea why you would need. I would have wished that this game had higher resolution graphics but I understand why this isn't the case. They still managed to create atmospheric looking locations that very much helped draw me into the story. The music was entirely forgettable, but this is not something I personally find all that important. It also would have been nice if we saw some more animations and lips actually moving when characters talked, but I understand corners need to be cut with a limited budget. All in all I had great fun with this and I seriously hope there will be a sequel - or even a whole series - because I'd love to see more of Miss Katherine Rain! »

« Nice old style game! Great atmosphere of the 90s, good graphics and a normal plot. »

« Pixellated puzzler. Surreal little indie adventure with occasionally unintuitive puzzles. The story is moderately interesting but it loses its way somewhat towards the end. Recommended, but with reservations. »