#Kathy Rain: A detective is born hack | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jimintomystery · 8 years ago

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Review: Kathy Rain

“You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it” --Harrison Ford

Last week I tried playing Thimbleweed Park, an adventure game with a retro 1980s theme, where you visit an eccentric small town with an unhelpful sheriff to investigate a mysterious crime and discover a deconstructionist macguffin. I found it unsatisfying, so I decided to look for another adventure game. I ended up with Kathy Rain, which turned out to be...an adventure game with a retro 1990s theme, where you visit an eccentric small town with an unhelpful sheriff to investigate a mysterious crime and discover a deconstructionist macguffin. Sigh.

Of the two, Kathy is the superior game. The puzzles aren’t easier, but they’re clearer and cause less frustration. The UI feels like an update to the classic point-and-click adventure games, instead of a throwback. Both games try to deal with grimdark weird shit, but the edgelord realism in Kathy is better suited for it than the “it’s satire, we don’t have to explain it” humor in Thimbleweed. The plot and characterization in Kathy is far more engaging, although it’s one of those stories that gets me fantasizing about playing script doctor.

Bottom line, if you play just one retro-themed adventure game with a good female protagonist and some charming spookiness...definitely go with Gone Home. And if you visit just one eccentric small town with an unhelpful sheriff to investigate a mysterious crime and discover a deconstructionist macguffin...maybe just watch this eight-hour let’s-play of Dark Seed II. But! If you need to do either of things more than once, Kathy Rain is okay.

The first thing I discovered while playing the game is that the voice acting is fine but the dialogue is shit. I had to turn the voice audio down because the script is slightly less irritating to read than it is to listen to. I should note that, much like my experience trying to tune out Michael Cole’s voice in WWE games, muting the voice volume does not actually eliminate all of the voices for some reason. These are the kind of quality control issues I just wish people could catch in development.

Kathy is a pretty over-the-top character. Her father was a biker who skipped town, and her mother managed to be institutionalized without anybody but Kathy ever hearing about it. She is a chain-smoker with an apparent history of juvenile delinquency. Despite this, Kathy is a journalism major at (I think) a four-year university, and can afford a badass custom motorcycle. I’m trying to imagine what sorts of jobs she could have worked to pay for all that, but none of them seem to fit the character. She feels less like a real person and more like a bunch of cool tropes balled up into person loaf.

The game starts with Kathy learning her estranged grandfather died, and then learning he spent 14 years in a vegetative state after a mysterious incident. The plot revolves around her trying to figure out what happened in 1981, which unearths a suspicious drowning in 1975, and other weird shenanigans. Since Kathy is following up on some very cold cases, most of the gameplay involves asking residents of the small town (Cornwall Springs or Cornfed Hills or whatever-the-hell-it-was) to remember old shit.

This presents a problem with the ornery old sheriff trope the game employs, because such a character would be intimately familiar with all these events and players. So the game gets around that by saying the current sheriff only moved here a few years ago, after the previous ornery old sheriff died or something. So you keep going to the cops and he’s like “Hell if I know, I wasn’t here.”

I’m usually wary of adventure games where I have to keep track of facts revealed through dialogue rather than through puzzles and inventory. But Kathy Rain does a good job itemizing plot points as they come up, and making sure you have a list of them so you don’t forget to follow up on something. This keeps the narrative and gameplay flowing well together, because the story hinges more on you asking the right question to the right person than on combine mop with bulletin board.

OK, so here’s the one puzzle that I had to consult a walkthrough to solve. You’re at a clinic to visit a patient, but you need to distract the nurse long enough to hack her computer and find out the room number. There’s nothing logical to try here. So in desperation you talk to the washed-up actor outside and a dialogue option is suddenly presented where you convince him the nurse would love a one-man show. You don’t know why this should help, but it’s all you can try. And it still doesn’t work because the nurse is listening to headphones and ignoring the bum.

So I tried this seven times and when I finally consulted my friendly bartender he’s like “Well, when I have to get a bum to create a diversion for me, sometimes I have to attack him with my stun gun so people will think he’s dying. Because that’s totally what real people would do.” After I did this, Kathy herself had to stop and be like “Geez, that was a dick move.” Because it is! The solution to an adventure game puzzle should never be “pretend you’re a giant sociopath for five seconds.”

This is getting kinda long and I don’t want to forget to mention Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. Yeah, about midway through the game you start having weird dreams about Billy Corgan rambling about some Twin Peaks shit or something. At first you only know Billy Corgan as “The Red Man” (because he wears a pink suit) but then as your investigation proceeds you discover his real name is...are you ready...“The Crimson One.” This is where the plot runs off the rails.

“Homer Simpson, smiling politely.”

Every major mystery in this game revolves around the Crimson One trying to “mend” souls by making people trip out and be judged by his “Old God.” He wanders into scenes acting like he’s beyond good and evil, making very little sense, and serving as a shortcut for the writers to do weird shit without having to explain any of it. Lights in the sky, hallucinogenic flowers, precognition, spooky cults--it’s all thanks to some omnipotent bald guy who limits his work to a sleepy little town for some reason.

Once Kathy has solved the whodunit elements of the story, it all serves as prologue to her descending into an abyss. There she visits “dark” versions of the earlier scenes and confronts her “dark world” self, and I really was expecting Mike Dawson to run through whimpering about eggs being laid in his skull or something. Anyway, she survives her ordeal and burns down the forest (!) to stop the bad guy, who is nevertheless loitering in a post-credits scene. If he’s still around, how has Kathy won? It’s fine to be cryptic but this is just inscrutability as an end unto itself.

I’ve seen some places refer to the game’s title as “Kathy Rain: A Detective is Born.” That concept still appeals to me but not when the detective work in question is a matter of detecting inexplicable nonsense. It would be neat to see a character like Kathy discover an unexpected talent for sleuthing, but this story just doesn’t feel like the right vehicle for such a project. Better luck next time, I hope.

#video games #kathy rain

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