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.
The sequel begins with a recap of the Director’s Cut, formally canonising it as the definitive version of Kathy’s past adventure in Conwell Springs. Three years after that incident, Kathy is older, wiser, and living in the mean made-up city of Kassidy. She’s struggling to keep the lights on at her PI office, Rain Investigations, until her mentor lets her know that a $200,000 reward is out for information pertaining to a serial killer dubbed the “Soothsayer.” After deciding to hunt the killer, Kathy hooks up with her Christian roommate Eileen (the pair are a lovely odd couple) and learns that the Soothsayer is connected to the events of Conwell Springs.
The plot is more confident in its presentation than Kathy Rain 1, which often seemed unsure of what to do with its supernatural elements, and took a nosedive into Twin Peaks territory in the eleventh hour after mostly playing it straight. Here, the David Lynch surrealism and dashes of Silent Hill horror are naturally woven into the narrative at the end of each in-game day, which typically conclude with Kathy experiencing vivid nightmares that feature the Crimson One, a burgundy-suited baldie who talks in riddles. These scenes are connective tissue that make the search for the Soothsayer more engaging and sidestep all of the “Huh, what’s going on?” questions that the first game presented.
The methods of your investigation resemble Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers, but with the minimal interface of a late ’90s LucasArts game – Full Throttle, for instance. (For those wondering if this is more Sierra or LucasArts when it comes to deaths, know that you can die, but doing so just fades the screen to white, sending you back to where you were.) The bulk of your activities are standard point and click stuff – chat with folks, pick up items, use items to solve puzzles to progress further. Whenever Kathy speaks to an NPC, the well-penned dialogue and wide breadth of topics are highly engaging, and there’s an elegant system in place where you can ask folks about stuff in your inventory and objects in the immediate environment, prompting a huge variety of answers.
Roundabout, overly-complicated puzzle sequences go hand-in-hand with the adventure genre, but most of Kathy’s challenges can be solved by clicking on the right hotspots or exhausting inventory combinations. There are a few sequences that veer towards filler (ie, handing an NPC the right series of tools to help them fix their car), but most are nicely inspired, like composing the correct haiku to impress the owner of a poetry club. There are two especially tricky (and very ’90s) puzzles that involve hacking a computer and deciphering pager codes, but they’re still easier than that moment in Sins Of The Fathers where Gabriel had to decipher voodoo-speak on the side of a tomb to find a secret cult hiding place in a bayou.
Your journey is illustrated by some of the best pixel art I’ve seen in a point and click game, and the lighting effects that drench Kathy when she walks under Kassidy’s neon signs make me feel like I’m living in a parallel timeline where Gabriel Knight continued to embrace 2D for subsequent mysteries instead of FMV and clunky early 3D. The voice acting gets the job done nicely (Kathy and Eileen’s actors from the first game make a welcome return), while Daniel Kobylarz’s score provides a semi-melodic, semi-atmospheric vibe that I can listen to while writing this review, which is much appreciated. Check out the OST on YouTube if you care – the main map theme that plays as Kathy’s riding through town on her hog really gets me going.
All of these facets weave together to make Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer one of the most engrossing adventures I’ve played in a long while. It’s heavily reliant on extending the narrative of its forebear, however, and like the Kathy Rain 1 Director’s Cut, many of its more interesting twists and turns exist to iron out the rough patches of plot from the first game. But sequels don’t necessarily need to be fully standalone experiences, and you can probably blast through both Kathy Rain 1 and 2 in the span of a long weekend. If that sounds favourable, give Kathy a go. A detective has indeed been born, and as a femme Gabriel Knight, she carries the torch of a niche genre in fine form.
This review is based on a review build of the game provided by the developer.
Disclosure: I tested a beta for Kathy Rain 2 at the start of 2025.
