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Rain on your parade hltb3/21/2023 ![]() If not, it might come over as hampered, although the controls are intuitive enough, and you never need to do anything more besides the occasional click and drag. If you’ve ever played one of the old SCUMM games and liked those, you’ll appreciate Kathy Rain even more. I wanted to continue, to unfold the story, but also to keep on staring at those beautiful pixels, the purposely chosen low resolution, or the ridiculous shifts in perspective that are just dead wrong, reminiscent of Guybrush Threepwood appearing from afar. Strange swirls in those windows, father Isaac. The game’s pacing is crafted beautifully though. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of locations in the game, but you’ll be revisiting them often. The first hour or two starts of normal though: get an item, ask questions, unlock new locations, combine stuff, solve things, retrace your steps, and so forth. Strange.Īt one point, the story took quite a dark path, reminding me of Sanitarium, a psychedelic adventure game revolving around a psychiatric patient and his inner struggles. Kathy decides to investigate, finding herself getting dragged into the mysterious and mesmerizing trio-light thingies, which also happen to be present on the tainted windows of the church. The game revolves around her deceased grandfather and his strange “vegetative state” his wife called it. She regularly gets herself into trouble because of that. Kathy is a journalist major, nosy, bitchy, chain smoker, bike babe, and lover of the word fuck. What starts off as a rebellious attempt to differentiate herself ends as an inevitable path down to hell-or whatever you want to make of it. With floppies, of course, this is the nineties, remember? One of the puzzles involves hacking your roommate's PC. I never really felt the need to brute-force COMBINE x WITH y here, although admittedly, with every new item, there was the urge to go back and revisit every character in the game to see what they had to say about it, hoping for a piece of information I might have otherwise missed. She sometimes wonders what’s still missing, how to do x or y, providing a gentle way to get you back on track. Kathy and her friend Eileen are quick to give hints though, especially in the beginning. Instead of hunting pixels, you’ll be needing your head, as most puzzles are logic-based. Speaking of which: no Moon Logic or crazy fluff like in Gobliins 2 in Kathy Rain. I did play the Director’s Cut, which included a revamped soundtrack and some restored/extended puzzles. The atmosphere is great, the pixelated graphics are great, the protagonist is great, everything is fully voiced, …: everything you’ve come to expect from the genre is present and accounted for. Okay, is that it? Well yeah, I can’t fault the game on any other part, really. ![]() It’s really short, even for an adventure game: you’ll be craving for more after a little more than five hours. Let’s start with getting the negative(s) out of the way. Grandma's home, your base of operations for a day or two. A forgotten (at least, by me) retro-inspired noir point & click adventure, set in 1995, that delivers on almost all fronts. But wait, even a year before that release, Kathy Rain popped up, Clifftop Games' debut no less. Sure, there are exceptions, such as Gilbert and Winnick’s Thimbleweed Park. Then devs reveal a promising title at E3, the hype is real, the tension rises, the game is released, and everybody posts adventure games are dead again. Tactics Ogre: A Reborn SNES Masterpiece What if you take an obscure 1995 SNES strategy RPG, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together originally developed by Quest, and remaster it for the PSP?Īdventure games are dead-the title of a forum post that pops up every few months since 1996 or so.Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge After the giant failure of Castlevania: The Adventure, Konami still had the guts to continue its handheld Castlevania line in 1991, by going back to the drawing board and fixing nany of The Adventure’s shortcomings. ![]() ![]()
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