There's a take-no-guff sheriff there's a priest with a secret there's a biker gang that seems to have gotten lost on their way to a Sons of Anarchy cast reunion. Kathy herself is well-drawn and complex, but most of the characters she meets are gratingly two-dimensional. Her journey would probably be more emotionally impactful if Kathy Rain were populated with more interesting characters.
Seeing her journey from loathing everyone (including herself) into someone a little more open-hearted is one of the game's real delights. Though her tough-as-nails routine sometimes veers into cliche, Kathy also gets plenty of opportunity to grow and evolve into a surprisingly compelling character. Kathy didn't come by her hardened exterior by chance, and much of the game's narrative is preoccupied with unearthing the reasons for her nature and seeing how evicting the skeletons from her family's closet helps her find peace. When Kathy's grandfather dies under mysterious circumstances, she returns to the hometown she was torn from as a child and finds herself drawn into a mystery far deeper (both literally and symbolically) then the game even hints at in its opening hours.
Her affinity for motorcycles and her surly disposition make her closest corollary Ben, Full Throttle's hard-riding and harder-punching star. Kathy Rain abuses cigarettes and alcohol, defaults to "caustically sarcastic" in her interactions with those around her, and lacks any particular talent for solving mysteries. Our titular heroine is a somewhat unconventional choice for a protagonist in a genre usually fronted by well-meaning buffoons or lantern-jawed everymen. Kathy gets plenty of opportunity to grow and evolve Luckily, Kathy's got a story that, despite some reservations, is worth hearing out. Without the novelty of that nostalgia, games like Kathy Rain stand on the merits of their storytelling. Pixelated graphics and an ever-expanding inventory may have been a revelation when games like the Blackwell series and Gemini Rue revived them a few years back, but now they're something more akin to a cottage industry.
Thanks to the work of publisher-studios like Wadjet Eye, this has become something of a sub-genre itself. Kathy Rain is a throwback to adventure games in the LucasArts style.
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