After playing both The Feeble Files (a big-budget adventure game from 1997) and Kathy Rain (an Indie adventure game released in 2016) this week, I came upon an epiphany. An epiphany that might explain why adventure gaming "died" in the late-90s and early 00s and only came back to the extent that it has when the Indie development scene rose to prominence. The epiphany is thus: at a certain point in the past, around the time of the original The Secret of Monkey Island and the heyday of LucasFilms's oeuvre, adventure games hit a stride where they focused on delivering story and snappy dialogue and minimized obfuscations like deaths, "dead man walking" states, and obtuse puzzles. Eventually, however, the industry outgrew the 2D adventure games and demanded more from these big retail adventures; this lead to the risible FMV era with its terrible chroma key acting and instantly dated visual effects, but that alone wasn't what killed adventure gaming. If anything, FMV and crude polygonal graphics were seen as necessary steps for the adventure genre to make, ones that almost every other genre were having to adapt to contemporaneously. The true rot came from how these games were experimenting with all these mechanical dead ends to justify their own existence at the highest (and, at the time, only) tiers of distribution, building these elaborate but empty visuals and supplementing the core gameplay with various half-baked mini-games and action sequences. It rarely worked, and it detracted from what genre fans wanted.

Indie games like Kathy Rain, and the Wadjet Eye games it has close links with (Dave Gilbert, Wadjet Eye's founder, helped produce the VO in this game), require no such publisher-mandated "added value" complications, and by design and budgetary necessity can adhere to the core strengths of the genre by keeping themselves to small assortments of areas, each of which have no small amount of relevance to the plot and the puzzles. The Feeble Files, conversely, is a confusing mess of obtuse puzzles and an enormous world of areas mostly free of hotspots or meaningful content. I've coined a phrase for this in times past: the Adventure Game Law of Conservation of Detail. Just like how any narrative media will keep the number of moving parts low to ensure that the audience isn't distracted or left astray by too many superfluous details, so too do adventure games prosper when the world is a little more compact, and its various background dressing clearly distinct from the hotspots of more immediate concern. The Book of Unwritten Tales, still the best franchise of the modern era of Indie adventure games, went one better by eliminating hotspots once they'd outlived their utility. It took two factors to bring adventure games back: teams that grew up in that aforementioned LucasFilms golden era (I still think unreliable text parser games and Sierra's "dollops of death" approach were imperfect realizations of the genre, though I can appreciate dissenting views) and knew exactly why and how they worked, and the rise of the Indie tier of game development that allowed smaller games from smaller studios to thrive based on their quality as adventure games rather than the length of their runtimes or the budgets of their special effects.

Anyway, this was really a long pre-amble to say that, while I'm playing two games from the same genre, Kathy Rain was an excellent little game about a feisty journalism student with a troubled past (and many echoes of Jane Jensen's work, in particular Gray Matter and the first Gabriel Knight) that I enjoyed playing very much, while The Feeble Files is a growing headache I'm ready to bail on any day now. Kathy Rain follows the eponymous heroine as she returns to her home town for her grandfather's funeral. A kindergarten-aged Kathy and her mother departed the small town of Conwell Springs acrimoniously after Kathy's father walked out on them, and a desire to reconnect to her blameless paternal grandparents brings her back in town to investigate an incident 15 years prior that put her grandfather into a persistent vegetative state. Like Gabriel Knight, the game operates on a strict schedule that only moves forward once the player has exhausted all the puzzles for that day - rather than a ticking time limit, the plot simply decides to lurch forward once you've progressed sufficiently. As days pass, new events occur and more information becomes available to investigate. This daily structure is another way the game can keep itself compartmentalized: the law of conservation of detail in full effect. The game's relatively brief overall as well: it has enough time to tell its story and develop its principal characters, with a few loose threads that potential sequels could pick up, but it moves fast and ends relatively suddenly in less than an in-game week.

Remarkably, Kathy Rain has a number of puzzles that require an extra level of complexity, but smartly fudges the player's attempts into successful results - successful enough to move the story along, anyway - even if they're off by a few degrees. For instance, you need to use pirated audio editing software to take the answering phone message from a certain character and reorder their words to make it sound like they're telling a second character to give Kathy all the information she needs. The game only requires you get a certain number of key words right; it'll automatically complete the rest of the puzzle if it knows you have the gist, to ensure that the resulting dialogue follows the pre-determined voice acting. Rather than feeling too much like the game is holding your hand and leading you down the path, it gives you a pass based on being in the right ball park rather than having perfect execution: the kind of concession that makes games like this far more palatable, especially to those of a more casual persuasion who are there to enjoy a story as opposed to those few looking for an exacting adventure game experience where you have to ascertain and follow the designers' whims precisely if you want to progress. Other slightly more complicated puzzles usually rely on repeating a solution you've already employed without the guidance - so you're instructed on how you can use a hacked boot disk to discover a password the first time, and then when you're required to do it again later it feels fresh because there's no obvious prompting that time. It's little tricks like these that make Kathy Rain feel like a true modern evolution of a retro graphic adventure game, rather than simply a throwback with a typically 90s presentation to appeal to nostalgic fans (the game is set in the 90s also, as if to drive the point home).

Speaking of which, Kathy Rain follows Wadjet Eye's penchant of ensuring that everything - the character sprites, animations, backdrops, etc. - are intricately-detailed pixel art in a relatively small (320x240) resolution that uses full-screen by default but can be changed to various windowed sizes through the game's config file, which isn't an ideal solution but is perhaps a limitation of the Adventure Game Studio software used to create it. It's fully voice acted also, and contains a number of musical leitmotifs that only pop up occasionally, letting the ambient sounds of each scene do most of the work. I particularly like the way it structures its dialogue - there's an ever-updating list of key words and phrases that Kathy can ask someone about, again similar to Gabriel Knight - and a trippy final act that feels torn right out of Silent Hill, which is definitely something of a gear shift. Importantly, it establishes Kathy Rain, her quirks and attitude and backstory, and does a fine enough job setting up the character that I'd be happy to play any sequels she shows up in. It sounds like Clifftop Games's next sequel will be an unrelated sci-fi tale about AI and the singularity, named Whispers of a Machine, so I'll have to keep an eye out. (Future Edit: I reviewed Whispers of a Machine here, almost 100 entries later.)

Rating: 5 out of 5.