My review of the first Kathy Rain game was pretty short. I had no complaints, so it didn't feel like I could say too much more than "it's good, go play it" without going into spoilers. One or two goofy puzzles aside, I still think it's a near-perfect game. And maybe that was always going to be too high a bar for the sequel to clear.
The sequel is bigger than the first game, as seems to be the standard. More locations, more characters, more puzzles, etc. But for all that, I don't know if it feels like there's more story or more to do. The length feels artificial.
The locations feel emptier. With fewer characters and things to click on in each one, they just didn't come alive like Kathy's grandma's house or even the police station did in the first game.
The characters are flatter and lean harder on stereotypes, racial stereotypes especially. Whether it's the ridiculous 70s-movie-pimp-looking black drug dealer or the latino receptionist at the hospital who has to say some spanish 101 phrase every three seconds lest you forget he's latino, it's pretty cringe. But even the white characters aren't much better written. It's less egregious, but it's clear that all the religious characters are written by someone who has never spent much time around any actual religious people, who thinks that every kind of christianity is interchangeable and that new age spirituality is inherently ridiculous. Maybe this is just that the devs are Swedish, it's a pretty white and nonreligious country. But it really took me out of the game.
The villains are barely developed and their story relies heavily on stuff from the first game that isn't re-explained very well. I guessed the twist once I learned the pattern of the killings and was kind of let down when we actually got there, but the friend I was playing the game with (who only had the recap at the beginning of this one to go off of) was just confused. Feels like a failure on both fronts.
Also, it's not really in the script, but either the voice actors or the voice director clearly decided to play Kathy and Eileen as exes who still have feelings for each other. I thought that was great and I wish the game had actually followed through with it.
The puzzles are often too-obvious "get item a to location b" affairs. Every time I got stuck, it turned out I had just missed a small item in Kathy's house. And as over-helpful as the in-game hints can be, it's never as useful as it would be to highlight all the items you can grab.
There are some good puzzles though. My favorite moments in the game are the times you have to do research in the library, actually looking through documents and finding clues. There's another section where you have to improvise a poem based on vague prompts to impress a hot trans girl, it was like playing something straight out of my life! Genuinely, any time there's something other than an inventory puzzle, it's extremely clever. I wish there were more moments like that.
Overall, Kathy Rain 2 isn't a bad game. The art is beautiful, the music is fun and atmospheric, the jokes are mostly funny, the puzzles are often really fun, and the mystery is really compelling until the third act where it stops being a mystery. It's good enough that I wish it were better.
