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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: ClifftopGames/Raw Fury Released: May 20, 2025 Requirements: OS: Windows 10 or higher Processor: Minimum, Intel Core i7 mobile GPU, 4 cores, 2.66 Ghtz; Recommended, First Gen Intel Core i5, 2.76 Ghtz Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: Minimum, Intel HD Graphics 520/Mobile AMD Radeon R7 M340; Recommended, Nvidia GTX 670 DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 2 GB available space
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By flotsam Clifftop Games / Raw Fury This is high quality pixel art, and despite a few quibbles, it's high quality adventuring as well. I didn't play the first game (which this game recommends doing when you first start it up), but you get the option to recap what went before. While that gave me a sense of Kathy’s earlier exploits, having completed the game, while I didn’t feel all at sea by any means, I certainly think that playing the first game will enable you to get the most out of the tale. I won’t say more to avoid any spoiling. As the Steam page says "When this story begins, things are looking dire for private eye Kathy Rain. It’s the year 1998, and she is utterly broke: The Katmobile (her motorbike) is running on fumes, the fridge is nearly empty, and an eviction is looming close. However, opportunity arrives when a big cash reward is announced for solving the 'Soothsayer' case — a string of serial murders with a death grip on the metropolitan city of Kassidy." And so Kathy gets to investigating. I liked a lot how the first day was put together. I got a good feel for how all the mechanics worked, and while I uncovered lots of possible leads and opened new locations, Kathy steadfastly held to her "gather information" approach before following everything up. Which didn't mean she didn't ask questions about learned topics (helpfully gathered and activated through your notebook), but when you know next to nothing, best to be as informed as possible. Which meant much of that day was spent at the library, winkling stuff out of the archives. What to look for and when was what was demanded, and I thought it was a well constructed puzzle in that it did feel like actually joining the information dots. It took me a little while to grasp the 'how' and a fair bit longer to get to the end, but it was very satisfying. It was also a good precursor for the next five days. It will give you a good feel for what the game wants from you in terms of its ‘puzzling.' Mechanics wise the game is all point and click, the visuals richly detailed in their pixelly way, and while there is not a lot of background motion it doesn't feel lifeless. Some locations visually sing, Tabitha’s Garden being one of those. It never ceases to amaze me how good looking pixels can be. You can die, or fail to stop someone else from dying, or be caught doing something you shouldn’t and perhaps a few other things that will see the screen go white, after which you will be returned to the start of the sequence and get to try again. Some of these sequences were a bit too trial and error, but it is also possible I missed the clue to make them less so. Regardless, they aren’t too difficult so they didn’t interrupt my enjoyment. Far more satisfying are puzzles like the archive. Two later ones (one involving a pager, the other a computer hack) were a highpoint for me, requiring a fair degree of deductive nous, preceded by a similar degree of head scratching. Finding and using items (and combining where required), as well as asking the right questions of the right people, provide the bulk of the conundrums. It pays to search thoroughly and question people in the same way, as a number of triggers rely on enquiring about the right topic. It’s also worth knowing that certain items won’t be able to be gathered until you have a reason to do so, and some information acts in the same way (i.e., reading a document might not trigger a way forward until other information comes to light). It makes sense - why get a random item until it isn’t, why would mundane information be important until it is – so long as all items act in the same way. Not all of them do (meaning you can gather some items before having an obvious reason), and while I acknowledge that certain items might be generically useful in the future and therefore worth picking up (a multi tool perhaps?), I don’t think all the items I gathered could be seen in that way. Which isn’t a big thing, but it is a thing nonetheless. How you feel about it will be up to you. It does mean that you will go back and forth, and revisit information, but I suspect you will do that anyway. You will open up around 20 locations across the course of the game, and while some will be ‘closed’ to you at times (Kathy might say something like, “I don’t need to go there now” or “I should leave X alone”), revisiting scenes and characters is a necessary aspect of moving things forward. Like many games, answers to questions from one character can open fresh lines of enquiry with others, and so on. In that regard, your notebook is your go-to item. It collects the various subjects you can ask about, as well as the phone numbers you can ring. There is also a way you can ask about items in the game world, and the game itself will explain that aspect to you, as it does for other things as you move along. The notebook also includes your various investigative objectives, and interrogating these might reveal a way forward. The notebook and the items you gather are in your kit-bag bottom left. Click to open the bag, and then hold and drag to use an item in the world. Hotspots can be revealed with the space bar, and along with the feedback from the game I didn’t think that it was a hard game, but some puzzles were certainly challenging. I did need a prompt from outside the game on occasion, and there is a rather good hint based walkthrough you can find online should you need help. I was also lost occasionally as to what to do next, but revisiting locations, requestioning people and interrogating my objectives tended to get me through. Randomly using items everywhere wasn’t a thing; asking a character everything possible was far more likely. Some scenes slide as you explore, others are limited to what you see. When you exit a particular scene, you get an animation of Kathy on the Katmobile, and you then choose the destination from the location icons that accumulate as you explore. Kathy won’t run but she will jump to an exit point with a double-click. You can save at will (it also autosaves on exit) and tweak a few settings. Conversations involve a large pop-up head-shot of the participants. Voice acting was generally excellent. The plot took a turn that didn’t really do it for me, and the last part of the game felt somewhat weighed down by exposition. That said, I really liked how it finished. I look forward to more from Kathy. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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