The Nineties were a magical time. Social issues and technology were merging. MTV was showing less music and more Real World. The Internet was becoming a thing. Leonardo DiCaprio was pretty popular. It was during this time that, already 10 years a veteran of LucasArts and Sierra PC adventure gaming, I was working my way through art school and living through the gaming tech Renaissance. I played mostly on consoles those days, as the PC market was changing quickly and it was difficult to keep up with a college budget. But no matter how “high tech” things were getting, I could always go back to those point-and-click gems and enjoy their clean designs and deep & enjoyable stories.
Kathy Rain, in many ways, is a callback to that era. It not only delivers the design and aesthetic of playing on a CRT tube in my dorm, but it also works in a storyline based in the decade, complete with references to movies and music and cultural memes of the time. It’s sometimes slow, often engaging, and always endearing, and one hundred percent pure Nineties.
There’s a moment in Kathy Rain that echoes my entire experience of dorm life, completely winning me over. In the scene the title character — a sarcastic, grunge-listening, bike-riding, “nothing impresses me” college woman — hacks her way into her university’s network using pirated floppy disks and social engineering, and flipping the vantage point between her room and a faux computer OS home screen from the era. Our instructions are to “insert the disk, copy this file, restart the computer with the disk in the drive, use this password, etc etc,” mimicking the lengthy steps it took to get any nefariously acquired piece of software to work on our Packard Bells. It’s a bit of a fetch quest, as many adventure games included at that time, but it strikes every cord smoothly in its execution.
It’s scenes like these that Rain uses as reminders of classic gaming structure, strung together along a plot reminiscent of Twin Peaks and Freaks & Geeks. Kathy’s grandfather mysteriously dies, prompting her to find out why and throwing her into a plot that becomes more and more bizarre as it moves along. Kathy takes on the role of detective (because nobody else will) and uses virtually every adventure game mechanism to solve the puzzles laid out in front of her. Need access to a computer? Ask someone to distract a guard. Need to inspect something? Combine item A with item B. Ask everyone everything, and then after completing a task later on ask them again (and again).
As a fan of the classic games of the genre, the puzzle designs feel very familiar. They’re fine-tuned and perfectly executed, and worth going through as a sort of history lesson. However, they also don’t push us into new territory; it sometimes feels like we’re checking boxes or doing a chore list rather than getting through the plot. I’m high-fixing myself for completing them, just remembering how I did similar ones in the mid-90s. Perhaps this is mostly due to the repetition of locations early on; for the first hour or two of the game, we really only visit four to five places, so there is a lot of chatter with the same characters and revisiting items we saw sitting in front of us several times.
The plot itself starts off a little slow, perhaps to build up Kathy’s character and background and to introduce us to the mechanisms within the game. Set across several days, the strangeness builds up as Kathy uncovers more and more about her grandfather’s death, and by the third day we are knee deep in a story that has its fingers across all of Kathy’s life and the little town she’s from. It’s through this that her well-written character pushes the narrative forward. Kathy is endearing, starting off as an anti-hero and eventually winning us over with her wits and quick thinking. She learns about her past as we do, breaking some of the walls and distancing that she’s built up over her life and opening her up to a slightly softer side. She starts off pushing people away, but eventually rolling up her sleeves and getting to the dirty work that’s needed.
I guess it’s safe to assume that I’ve become a fan of Kathy Rain. She’s smart and sarcastic, and gives plenty of life to a game that would otherwise feel too familiar for fans of the genre’s early days. It’s a lead character like this that can grab us no matter what story she’s thrown into.
Kathy Rain is an enjoyable return to the Silver Age of adventure games, mixing classic themes with retro design choices, and pivoting around a lead that is potentially as memorable as the genre that she lives in. It may be repetitive at times, and may not push us as much as we hope it will, but its level of detail and craftsmanship is apparent, and worth dipping into.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher.
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