Kathy Rain: Director's Cut

The game takes place in 1995 and it feels like it could have been released that same year. If you want a retro point and click that brings absolutely nothing new to the table but executes within the genre at a mostly above average level, then maybe this will be for you. The traditional point and click game's achillles heel has always been that if you're not on the same wavelength with the developers about the puzzle and story progression then there's basically no way forward. With the result that the games can often feel like visual novels but with WAY more walking around and clicking on things trying to figure out the next conversation tree. Kathy Rain "solves" that problem by dramatically narrowing the scope of places you can go and things you can do. In Day 1, for instance, there are basically only three places you can go. The puzzles lean more towards "realistic" rather than goofy and nonsensical. With a few exceptions like the locked briefcase. Seriously, you'd just use a hacksaw to cut it open! And almost the entirely of Day 2 is a time waster as you're doing stuff unrelated to the main plot helping some hacker get his internet access back. All this is pretty decent from a gameplay perspective .... but it does make the underlying "mystery" pretty weak. Kathy Rain, a loser university student with no skills, makes more progress on her grandfather's "accident" in less than a day, than the entire police department did during their investigation. The last half of so of the story starts shifting from relatively straightforward point & click detective stuff to -- as has been pointed our repeatedly in other reviews -- some mostly incoherent David Lynch inspired stuff that...eh...there's a reason why this game was a commercial failure. The real "innovation" here isn't in gameplay (bog standard) or characters (Kathy is an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and almost everyone has zero depth). It's this attempt to add twist upon twist upon supernatural twist and dream sequences and whatnot to make this Art With Meaning and not just a good game.