Kathy Rain

Kathy Rain, by Swedish developers Clifftop Games, is a glorious example of a straightforward, unembellished point-and-click adventure, not needing to add any fancy new bells or whistles but instead delivering a rock-solid storyline with fantastic voice acting and a pile of great puzzles to solve along the way.

Kathy Rain is a college student, dragged back to her hometown after the death of her grandfather in 1995. She had a complicated relationship with him and her surviving grandmother, adopted by them when her own parents proved unable or unwilling to raise her, but always resenting them in the way a mixed-up kid will. Heading back to Conwell Springs and seeing her loving grandmother again for the first time in years obviously dredges this all up—even more so when she learns that the police never properly investigated an accident that had happened to her grandfather, leaving him in a permanent vegetative state many years earlier.

What follows is an untangling of mysteries that might be supernatural, or just very natural, and not knowing which is very much part of enjoying the game.

An awful lot of the games listed in this article are running on the same engine: Adventure Game Studio. There’s a reason for this: the open-source project by Chris Jones is designed to replicate the sorts of adventure games that were popular in the 1990s, while letting developers take any graphical approach they wish. Kathy Rain combines some stunning rendered art with traditional pixel work, but with a level of detail that still blows my mind. That was all boosted even further when the game received a Director’s Cut in 2021 that extended the story, added new puzzles, and made the art even more impressive.

Clifftop also made the excellent Whispers of a Machine which also deserves a place on this list (I recently replayed both, and they are just so good), and are now working on a sequel to Kathy Rain in which the grumpy protagonist is now a failing private detective.