Kathy Rain - Director's Cut (2021)

I'm playing the director's cut, as that's the version I have on Steam. I also have the original version on my shared Prime account, but that's a bit more of a faff to access. Apparently the DC introduces: "Extended storyline, including a longer and more satisfying ending and 700+ new lines of dialogue with the original cast; Several new areas to explore with unique puzzles to solve; Streamlined controls with a single-click mouse interface and controller support; Enlarged all game environments for widescreen without black bars on the sides; Extra character animations, improved lighting/shadows and better weather effects; Remixed and expanded soundtrack; Five brand new motorcycle designs to unlock". Not sure about the 'streamlined interface' thing, and even the added content (which for all I know is just unnecessary filler to justify the price tag) but it seems people generally prefer the DC so I'm going to go with it.

Apparently they switched from AGS to Unity for it as well. I think Fowl Fleet (2016) was Unity, as was LOTCG (2020) and this Director's Cut (2021 - I've put it in my playthrough chronology on the original's release date!), so perhaps a bit of a shift away from AGS even with indie adventure devs over the last ten years.

Okay, gave it a couple of minutes just to pique my interest. Pretty funny so far - you're Kathy, a rock chick student rolling drunk into her shared dorm room and talking to your roommate who's your polar opposite. You have a poster of The Thing, she has a poster of Titanic. Kathy is coming across a little try hard, though; I'm not sure exactly how cool I'm supposed to think she is! We'll see.

Otherwise - portraits and egg-timer, booo! But it looks nice enough and it's got proper resolution and discrete volume settings and all that. Also, it seems to be a single-click interface, not even a left button for interact, right for examine set-up. Can't help but wonder if some puzzle complexity has been streamlined away...

Got a little further with this. Some more UI irritations - you can't turn the subtitles off, the one-click UI means I'm forever examining my inventory items by mistake when I actually need to drag them out and over other stuff, and the inventory is a 10-item strip along the bottom that already has 4 items in it to start with and gets filled up very quickly with various bits of paper and junk so there's lots of clocking to scroll every time you want to try something. All minor stuff, but it adds up.

Kathy definitely still feels try-hard but I don't think that's sharp characterisation, just bad writing. She comes across like a porn video version of a bad chick, saying stuff like "free lightbulb, score!" when she picks up random crap, and she's always going on about how much of a rebel she is and all the vague naughtiness she's got up to in the past. Meanwhile, her grandma speaks like excerpts from a memoir. The shy young deputy says things like "Do you like to eat foot?" when trying to ask you out for dinner. It's all quite clunkily unnatural.
Storywise, it's your usual Twin Peaksy mystery, complete with a drowned teen girl (Lisa Myers, rather than Laura Palmer) and a Sheriff Truman in a spooky small town. It feels a bit contrived and indirect right now - my estranged grandfather died, so I went to his funeral, my grandmother told me he mysteriously went catatonic for the last ten years of his life, and asked me to investigate. And that's it, so now I'm just scrabbling around for scraps of clues until a story coalesces. Puzzles-wise, it's fine but it's got that detective game thing of just circling around asking people about stuff until another option somewhere is unlocked. To be fair, it's broken up a little with regular adventure game puzzles, but they're all very basic so far.

So, looking back at all this, I guess I'm not enjoying it that much! But I haven't been playing for long, the presentation's nice, and it's well thought-of, so I'll give it a while longer.

Hmm, okay, looking at Metacritic it's just got 6 reviews from nothing outlets, and even John Walker seemed lukewarm on it - he says that the conversation topic unlock spiral gets worse as it goes on and the pace gets slower! He also refers to Kathy as "faux-rebellious" and a complex character, so maybe I've misjudged the writing there, though I doubt it!

Played a little more. It put me in my dorm room and gave me a bunch of computer password puzzles to do, which aren't the most interesting or fun puzzle type ever but at least it wasn't topic-spiralling. The writing still keeps on clunking but I do like how some characters start off abrasive to you and then warm up once you find ways to get in their good graces, it gives them a little bit of depth. And the Christian roommate is pretty adorable. Kathy is still low-key obnoxious, though - it's been revealed that she had an abortion at 16 and she has a recurring dream about it, so maybe the idea is that she puts on a super-tough front now to protect herself or deny her trauma or something, but the game isn't really getting that across. I think I'm around 40% through; I'm done for today but I'll keep going with it unless it gets more irritating.

Finished. I think the big letdown with this game was the puzzles - whether you're Lisbeth Salandering your way around Twin Peaks or you're fighting your way through a nightmarish alternate fear dimension, you spend most of your time figuring out riddles and passcodes or bouncing back and forth between conversation trees (to be fair, these at least always made sense, so it wasn't the full unlock spiral of trying everyone constantly). It never felt connected to the story, and the story in turn never had much structure or depth to it. Your overarching goal is to help your grandmother figure out the mystery behind what happened to your grandfather, and then at some point your friend gets overtaken by the dark forces and so you have to free her as well. But then you unravel the mystery (there's some sort of alternate dimension that drives people mad if they see these lights that it broadcasts, but if you find a sinkhole in the woods you can travel there and confront your emotional baggage and either get stuck there or escape), and not only does it turn out your friend wasn't really in jeopardy, you never tell your grandmother about it either! And Kathy finds out that you can destroy this entire dimension by burning some flowers in the real world so she does that. All the nightmare stuff is really literal as well, it's just creepy versions of places you've already been to and Kathy meets spooky versions of her estranged parents and aborted kid and tells them that she's done with being upset about them now. Nightmare dimension defeated!

Sidenote: it's not a Wadjet Eye game, but Dave Gilbert did produce the VO, so I get to do my Dave self-casting round-up. This time, Dave played a hulking private bodyguard and a big gruff biker gang member!

So, presentation generally very good (some lovely pixel skies!) but too much clunkiness across the whole thing to stand out amongst the crowd.

Nelly Cootalot: the Fowl Fleet (2016)

Gave it a very brief start, bit of a mixed bag so far. The background art is lovely, the voice acting is charming, full of regional British accents, and the opening tutorial puzzle was well pitched; but the 3D cel-shaded characters (boiled down to 2D) just don't have the charm of the original game's 2D art, there's no way to disable the subtitles (which come in great big speech bubbles), and the cursor doesn't hide during cutscenes. So far the humour is very very gentle (which iirc it was in the first game too), and perhaps a little sparse but I've only been playing for a few minutes so presumably it'll pick up a bit!
The negatives are mostly mild irritations, though, and it's still got the same vibe as the first one, which is the main thing.

Aggh, I can't name savegames or delete the older ones either! More minor irritations!
Have to say, though, the subtitles thing is the most glaring, as I find they always kill comedy, whether in tv, movies or games - it's hard not to read ahead and ruin the timing of it all. So I'm trying to look at other areas of the screen while characters are speaking, but that's not ideal either, it's a mental distraction.
Anyway, am pottering about at the moment and have found a classic 'win a competition by sabotaging the other contestants' set-up. I've chuckled a fair few times, so obviously the comedy hasn't been completely scuppered by the subtitles!
Also, hooray, it handles alt-tabbing fine!

Okay, got through the first batch of puzzles, and so far they're really nicely pitched, making me think but not stumping me, and not giving me too much to deal with right off the bat. Very much in the Spoonbeaks/Wallace & Gromit realm. Plus I've been laughing a lot, so that's good! (One of my favourite moments was finally taking a second to consider the character name Commodore LXIV and then laugh-groaning.)

I think I'm about three quarters through now, very much enjoying it. I've laughed a lot, and the puzzles are the same pleasing difficulty level as the first game - I've not got stuck but I have had to think things through. It's not the 'idle clicker for adventure game veterans' that a few other games on this list have been. My favourite joke so far was the pirate called Lucas who exists purely to do lazy Lucasarts references, and gets booted out of the game after a couple of them.
Speaking of which, this instalment feels a lot more indebted to the MI games that Spoonbeaks Ahoy did - gathering a ship and crew, defending oneself in court, fixing a competition etc. Obviously there's going to be overlap with another comedy pirate PnC series, especially when said series has 6ish games in it, and it feels like a remix rather than a rip-off (similar to what we aimed for with TGP's clock puzzle), but I do hope that we get a bit more of the weird leprechauns/ships made of bloomers/etc energy of the first one in the final quarter.

There was indeed some weird energy in the next section, a classic 'go into someone's mind, represented by a liminal void with floating platforms and a series of doors, and fix their mental issues'. It then went to a tight little village section and then wrapped up with an action finale. The credits song was great, poking fun at the Monkey Island influences (of which there were more in the village section!) and making a brilliantly groanworthy joke about Google Chrome. Nice to be laughing right up to the end.

Rating: more of the same Nelly Cootalot gently amusing comedy adventure goodness, which was exactly what I wanted it to be.