Posted on: July 12, 2018

CharlieLima79

Games: 639 Reviews: 149

A promising adventure game

'Kathy Rain: A Detective is Born' immediately captured my attention when I saw its beautiful pixel art and its mystery premise. But, is it any good? If 'Kathy Rain' is the first of a series of adventure games starring the eponymous protagonist, then it is certainly a fun, promising start. 'Kathy Rain' is quite a linear adventure game, with one set of puzzle opening up another. While this may frustrate more seasoned adventure gamers, this design guarantees players not finding themselves in a dead end or no-win situation. For the most part, sufficient clues are provided (sometimes quite explicitly) to solve the puzzles. Many are easy, but a couple of puzzles are a bit too obtuse for my liking. Coming off of adventure games like 'Resonance' and 'Technobabylon', I find the variety of puzzles in 'Kathy Rain' to be a bit lacking, too. Still, the story is slow, but well paced. I was never quite sure where the story would take me. Just when I thought I got the mystery figured out, the game threw me a slight twist that added a new layer of intrigue to the story. I liked that, especially when the protagonist is a headstrong, cynical and seemingly uncaring character. These unexpected turn of events allow Kathy to develop as a character by having her confront her vulnerabilities. Still, I wish there is more to 'Kathy Rain' than when was adequately delivered. The game is well made, but it feels like a well packaged introduction to a bigger story, much like 'The Blackwell Legacy' -- it's good, and I want more of it. Unfortunately at the time of this review, Clifftop Games has not announced plans to make a 'Kathy Rain' sequel. It's a shame because there is much potential to the Kathy Rain character and her developing skill set as a detective and journalist. Hopefully, somewhere down the line, we will see more of Kathy Rain in her sleuthing adventures.

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Posted on: February 2, 2021

PublicLag

Verified owner

Games: 53 Reviews: 2

Atmospheric modern adventure

Loved it and I hope they'll make more like this. If you liked the original Gabriel Knight adventure's atmosphere, you'll enjoy this one too. The puzzles aren't very hard and you make progress easily. So if you're in it for brain teasers, it might be disappointing. I really liked that it was light on puzzles and heavy on mood and story.

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Posted on: May 14, 2024

shylock.596

Games: 756 Reviews: 103

Great For P&C Diehards and Newcomers

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 sometimes the game wouldn’t launch. It wouldn’t give me an error message but just wouldn't open. 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 launch I had zero issues. 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. 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.

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Posted on: October 16, 2016

linus81

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 5

Great characters and atmosphere

I really love this game, mostly for its characters (really brought to life by the amazing voice actors and expressive portraits), its atmosphere (moody backgrounds and music) and mid-90s setting. The story kept me interested too, although the ending feeled a bit rushed. The puzzles were rather easy and I really liked the notepad system for the dialogues and there were some very ingenious puzzle ideas. The game reminds me of Twin Peaks (the early 90s TV series by David Lynch) in many respects. This is probably the most Lynchian adventure game to date, with some neat little nods to Gabriel Knight and Full Throttle as well. For fans of any of these franchises who like adventure games as well, this is practically a must-have.

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Posted on: November 10, 2017

Aplomado

Verified owner

Games: 135 Reviews: 13

Good game

A good adventure. Interesting characters and dialogue. The graphics were also nicely done, and the voice acting was excellent. The puzzles were logical. The only thing that detracted (a little) from this game is that I wasn't too fond of the direction the game takes at the end. I would like to see a sequel!

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