Author: Jeremy Blum

Kathy Rain 2 review
One of the few indie adventures to feel like a proper Gabriel Knight successor, though you do need to finish Kathy Rain 1 to really appreciate it.

Developer: Clifftop Games
Publisher: Raw Fury
Release: May 20 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: £16.75/$19.99
Reviewed on: Intel Core-i9-10850K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 11
Put me in the camp of point and click aficionados who fiercely believe that 1993’s Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers is one of the best adventure games to ever touch a PC. First in a trilogy of thriller mysteries, it featured writing that was a cut above Sierra On-Line’s usual fare, puzzles that veered on the side of sensible investigations rather than moon logic, and a glorious bastard of a Cajun protagonist.
The Kathy Rain series owes much to Gabriel Knight. Swap the ’90s-era New Orleans author for a ’90s-era biker chick/journalism student, replace the voodoo killings with a conspiracy involving the death of a grandparent, and you have the first Kathy Rain, which was released in 2016 and boasted the generic-but-still-memorable tagline: “A Detective is Born”. But despite receiving fair praise from John back in the day, Kathy’s first outing had a murky plot about cults, trauma, small town disappearances, and Elder Gods that was only made understandable via a spruced up Director’s Cut in 2021. Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, I’m happy to report, needs no such re-release, though anyone who hasn’t completed the first game is bound to still be a little confused.