We continue to suspect when we find similar scenes (the visit to our grandmother) and we stop having doubts when we find the most compli
cated puzzle of Gabriel Knight 2 in front of our noses. There is a lot of love in Clifftop Games for these Sierra games. And in a way, with Kathy Rain they have managed to capture the tone almost with more success than Jane Jensen herself promised us with Moebius.
In the mail with which we received the game code, the study included a warning. He stated that “the game contains multiple adult themes and taboo subjects that people take very seriously […] Some parts of the game can hu
rt sensibilities, some can be reflected in them and others feel identified with Katherine herself”. If we already had interest in playing Kathy Rain for our own adventurous nostalgia, this message was the final push, no doubt.
The strange young rebel
The result, in terms of history, is not as shocking as our imagination could have wished. The taboo topics that Clifftop Games refers to are of great importance, but they could have gone deeper into it. And it is the great key to understand the argument of the
Kathy is an inveterate smoker. But despite the health risks, it may sometimes help.
You can forgive, although not so much the final section, that although captivating taking the mystery to a more surrealistic plane of Twin
Peaks , does not end with the conclusions to hit a story that had us in suspense, and that sometimes seems too forced to a convenient concl
usion for the narrator more than for the one who plays it. And that is the only one but, on the other hand, one of the best graphic adventures we have recently played. A great but, however.
Both the design of the scenarios and the characterskeep the best semblance with the time of 320×240. There are not many locations that we can explore, to the point that in the second part can be repeated interrogatories but with different options of
dialogues, but at least they are well presented so as not to overwhelm us and good design decisions are noted so as n
ot to overload the game with unnecessary elements that could lengthen production too much. All of them make the most of their possibilities and are perfectly interconnected with our trips on Kathy’s bike.
One of the best graphic adventures we’ve played recently
But maybe one of the best aspects of Kathy Rain are her puzzles . As a good heir of Gabriel Knight, many of his situations can be solved perfectly by common sense, based on questioning the characters through the notes of our notebook and even do
Where Kathy Rain shines the most is, then, in the dialogues . This strange young rebel with pints, at the time of the mid-90s , ends up conquering you thanks to well-elaborated dialogues where little by little we get to know the real person behind the
hard hat mask, without losing the opportunities that presents a gray character. They could have gotten even more game, but this responds more to a question of how far they have been able to get in Clifftop Games with the development of their first adventure.
The pixel art of Kathy Rain is very evocative. And in this scene we can not stop thinking about the visit of Gabriel Knight to his grandmother. Direct tribute.
If when you think about graphic adventure you do not do it only in the absurd humor of LucasArts, if you come here for the stories an
d for that unique style of adventure and mystery something more maturewho is capable of developing the genre, plays Kathy Rain. It is not necessary, in fact, that we tell you this or that any mail notifies us that we are going to
find a game with adult themes. We are talking about a title that imitates the style of doing things of the nineties, so it is most likely that if we continue to attract this type of games we are close to thirty or we have already overcome. Then we will d
iscuss the interpretations of the end and whether it could have been rounded better or worse. But, regardless of whether the game to
uches with more or less intensity these “taboo” topics, a title that took things a little more seriously, beyond the topics in which the genre was falling, was very much missed. It takes more adventures like this and more protagonists like Kathy Rain.
