It’s been a long time since I reviewed Kathy Rain back in 2016, but I was excited to check out the demo for the newly-announced sequel, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. Now working as a private eye, Kathy is broke and looking for a way to make ends meet. With a serial killer known as the Soothsayer active in the city, she decides to take on the case in the hopes that it will prove to be the break she needs.
Like its predecessor, Kathy Rain 2 is a point-and-click adventure game where you click items or people in the environment to interact with them. Interacting with certain items lets you add them to your inventory, after which you can examine them, ask other characters about them, or use them with objects in the environment to solve puzzles. You can press the spacebar to see all spots that can be interacted with, so there’s no need for pixel-hunting. Double-clicking an exit moves you there instantly, and leaving an area lets you choose between unlocked locations to visit. Kathy’s walking speed is somewhat slow, but the areas in the demo weren’t large enough to make that too frustrating.
When you talk to characters, you can choose questions to ask them from a list or ask them about objects in the environment. In the demo, one character tasked Kathy with proving her devotion to a popular author–the newest murder victim in the case–by filling out a quiz. Interestingly, the answers had to be manually typed in, so brute-forcing the puzzle through luck was out of the question. Instead, I had to find clues about the author to get the correct answers. That was interesting and makes me curious about how many puzzles of this style the full game will have. A more standard adventure game puzzle showed up later in the game, requiring me to use certain items together with objects in the environment to dust for fingerprints.
The demo culminates in a sequence where you need to avoid being caught trespassing on the crime scene. This section is timed, a surprising change of pace for a point-and-click adventure game. While the sequence itself is interesting in theory, I found myself frustrated by the lack of options I had compared to what it looked like I had. Hiding under the desk seemed like an obvious thing to try, but no such option was available. Standing alongside the window looked like it would keep me out of sight, but it failed, only for hiding on the other side of the window to succeed. Fortunately, a generous auto-save system meant I could retry that section multiple times without losing progress.
It’s difficult to judge the story from such a short demo that only gives us hints of the murder mystery, but one pleasant surprise is that I didn’t find Kathy to be nearly as sarcastic and grating as in the first game. She also has a pet cat, which you can pet as many times as you want. Overall the demo left me intrigued by the potential of Kathy Rain 2 and curious about what this new mystery will bring.
