I couldn’t shake the feeling while playing Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer that having the game set in the 90s was somehow more important to the creators than making the story make sense. In the original game, set in 1995, protagonist Kathy Rain was a journalism major drawn into a cult conspiracy after the passing of her grandfather. In Soothsayer, set just three years later, she’s already worked with a private eye mentor and subsequently struck out on her own, and entered her Jessica Jones phase of being broke, embittered, and alcoholic. That’s a hell of an arc for a 22-year old. But it also feels like a decision blatantly made to avoid having modern elements like mobile phones and internet access trivialise some of the investigations.
The result is a little odd. You feel there should be a game in between this and the original, one where she meets characters like her former mentor Lucas, and Josh, a detective with whom she has a vaguely-defined romantic past. It’s weird to take a character like Kathy and forcibly make her into such an obvious allegory of Krysten Ritter’s character. They even share initials.
Luckily, though, there’s more to Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer than the protagonist. The case itself, while sharing some similar beats with the original, allows her to be much more in control of events. There’s a larger cast of characters, and some genuinely intriguing mysteries at play. It opens with Kathy drunk on the couch of her office, which is an ongoing theme. She’s down on her luck, has alienated all of her friends bar one or two who she’s in the process of alienating anyway. She can’t afford her rent, she hates everyone, and is generally just a fairly unpleasant individual. It makes most of the dialogue feel a little forced, as Kathy communicates mostly in sarcastic quips and insults, but there were occasional moments that made me smile.
Someone is murdering people in Kassidy City, including prominent local author Debra Sinclair. The enigmatic serial killer also has ties to a new super-drug called Pyre, and kills seemingly without a recognisable M.O. It’s up to Kathy to piece together the evidence and solve the case, so she can claim the reward money and pay her rent. Immediately the stakes feel lower; the Soothsayer killer isn’t obviously connected to Kathy’s past, so she has less of a personal interest this time, and her sidekick Eileen plays a much smaller role here which is a shame as she unarguably had the better character arc in the first game.
As a point-and-click adventure deliberately cast in the style of the legendary LucasArts titles of yore, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer leads you from location to location, throwing the occasional puzzle at you and asking you to click all the things on all the other things to proceed. And you will need to at times. There were moments where I had absolutely no clue what the game wanted me to do, and only scrolling my inventory and trying everything would work. For example, there’s a character who always refuses to help Kathy until she “aligns her Chakra” which means taking a Polaroid of herself in a specific place while wearing a mood necklace. One asks that she be “bathed in green”, and it took me a considerable amount of time to locate the answer as there are simply no clues beyond that.
Very occasionally there’s a fail state, which causes the screen to fade to black rather than employ any clunkily animated death sequences. One such moment had me banging my head against a wall for a good twenty minutes as I searched for a place to hide Kathy in a single room with only a couch to hide behind – which always led to my capture. When I eventually found the solution it was incredibly obvious, and yet there was no clue or indication and I got there only after scouring my inventory and forcing my brain to stop thinking like I was in a point and click game. And this is my main gripe with Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. It swings between obvious solutions that make perfect sense, to doing yoga poses under a streetlight so you can take a picture for a hippie and persuade her that your Chakra is balanced. I mean, split the difference here, Kath.
In other areas there’s some real detective work to do, like using a library computer to research Debra Sinclair, even though most of that is so you can fill out a quiz about her life and appease a super-fan. Using the phone book to find people is oddly satisfying, and when a solution pings immediately into your head it does make you feel smart. But then the game will pad itself out by making you faff around looking for marker pens and drying out herbs so you can make one brand of cigarettes look and smell like another to fool a character, when there’s no reason outside the constraints of the games internal logic that Kathy couldn’t just ride to a store and buy what she wants.
Her inventory stays mostly constant, but drops one-use items once expended, which means it makes you waste less time with red herrings, but also Kathy carries lockpicks, a tazer, and her camera at all times and can only use either once or twice when the story demands it. More than once she can’t use her lockpicks to open a locked door because the game wants you to jump through hoops finding the key, while at other times they work fine.
Yet despite giving me cause to roll my eyes more times than I care to count, I largely enjoyed Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. The constant desire to make you travel from location to location makes it painfully obvious why this game couldn’t have been set in 2005 when we all had easy access to the Internet, but I did get a kick from solving some of the puzzles and deepening my understanding of the central case. Sadly, the case itself is a pretty convoluted affair that jumps through so many plot holes to get where it’s going, that once I finished it I had to push it out of my mind so I couldn’t pick it apart.
Graphically it’s pretty solid, too. The pixel art is well-drawn, characters are distinct and animate well, and the environments are detailed, with plenty of elements to investigate in each screen. There’s a good amount of dialogue and it’s delivered believably for the most part, even if most of the characters are noticeably, perhaps deliberately, stereotyped. As an old-school adventure game Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer works, but it’s a warts and all experience that you won’t enjoy fully until you accept that, like the classics it emulates, it only makes sense if you don’t think about it too hard.
