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Mr. Burgundy Hanging Out

"I see you, Kathy Rain."

Kathy: So, what, you offered Eileen up to this...God of yours?
Isaac: She is but one of many. I guided them all to the Stairs of Judgement.
Kathy: Wait... so YOU were responsible for all those people disappearing? Going crazy?
Isaac: All I did was bring them face to face with God. If they chose to reject Him, they were beyond redemption.
~ Ah yes, the common rationalization of every religious fanatic for the terrible things they do. When in doubt, blame the victim.

A few years ago, I watched playthroughs of a point and click mystery adventure game called Kathy Rain. It was a fun story, with the titular protagonist making for a very complex and interesting heroine who I related to in a few instances. Her dynamic with her partner and bestie Eileen Summers was enjoyable as well due to their differing but complementary personalities. I was over the moon when the developers released a sequel called "Soothsayer", where the stakes are much higher due to her conflict with the titular serial killer and her lingering flaws and trauma.

At first I was considering using one of the titular Soothsayer killers, Kathy's own vile doppelganger Faith Cyrene, on account of how much of a blatant sadist she is and the cruel methods she uses to murder people and the personal villainy she gets in at Kathy. But there are some issues her overall heinousness since her body count is rivaled by her partner Wiktor and there's also some potential moments of sympathy I should take into consideration before proposing her.

So instead, I'm going to propose her boss and the "true enemy" of the game. This villain had been introduced in the first game as a somewhat well-intentioned but still ruthless villain who had a pitiable death but made an unexpected return postmortem in the sequel where he's presented as a far more repugnant individual with no sympathetic beats to his character at all, which led to me reevaluating his seeming redeeming moments from the first game.

This villain is the fanatical priest Isaac Price, or as he is known in the sequel, Mr. Burgundy. I'll be using information from the Director's Cut of the first game only since the way events are presented in that adaptation more line up with the sequel than the original version. Seeing as I made the man's page, me copying the summary for his biography into the proposal is no issue since it's all my writing.

What's The Work?[]

The Kathy Rain games are a duology of point and click detective games by made by the "Raw Fury" game company. The games follow the adventures of the aspiring young detective, the titular Kathy Rain. Having had a difficult childhood due to her mother's mental instability and her father abandoning her when she was young, Kathy has lived a punkish and hedonistic lifestyle. Sharing a dorm with the cheerfully mischievous Christian Eileen Summers, her best and only friend,

Kathy eventually returns to her hometown Conwell Springs to pay her respects to her grandfather, the highly respected town hero Joseph Rain, and reconnect with her grandmother. During her homecoming, Kathy learns Joseph had spent the last decade of his life in a vegetative state. As she investigates the events leading up to him being rendered catatonic, Kathy finds herself entangled in a conspiracy centered around an enigmatic evil entity known as the Old God, forcing her to confront her inner demons as she pursues the truth.

Who is He? What Has He Done?[]

Isaac Price was one of the two sons of William T. Price, a travelling salesman. One day in 1971 when the Price brothers were young, William took them through Conwell Springs during one of his business trips. William had become depressed and was on the verge of committing suicide when 3 bright lights appeared out of nowhere and gave him strange visions. These visions led to him coming to a sinkhole in the middle of Conwell woods, which was really the Threshold to a pocket dimension known as the Malleable, ruled by the enigmatic Old God and overseen by his servant the Crimson One. In the Malleable, William was made to face his inner demons and trauma in a psychological test known as the Mending and left the Malleable a changed man in the worst way. He established the Church of the Holy Trinity, which was really a cult built around the Old God and the Crimson One. Calling himself Father Bill, William began to project his newfound fanatical beliefs onto the Malleable and the Old God, using the Mending's to break and brainwash people Bill believed were sinful into his idea of a redeemed soul.

Isaac for much of his life tried to distance himself from his father, but over time came to believe in the Church's zealous ideals of penance and contrition, becoming ordained in his adulthood and becoming an avid supporter of the Old God. When his father died in 1983, Isaac took over leadership of the church and continued his father's work. However, due to lacking his father's charisma, Isaac was unable to attract new disciples to join the church. So instead, he decided to kidnap people in and out of Conwell Springs, drug them with Red Scythe flowers that acted as a conduit for the Old God and drag them to the Threshold were their souls would be forced into undergoing the Mending. This process ends with Isaac's victims either being driven insane or rendered catatonic, leading to Conwell gaining a high number of missing persons cases. Isaac was apathetic to his victim's fates, rationalizing the disastrous outcome of their Mending's as them being deemed "unworthy" in the eyes of the Old God despite being the reason they ended up this way.

Isaac was particularly obsessed with reestablishing contact with the Crimson One, presumably to gain his and the Old God's exaltation, and believed the key to finding him was the art of the young painter Lily Myers, a would-be Mender who had been driven to depression by her interactions with the Crimson One. In 1986, he hired a biker gang called the Black Hats to steal Lily's paintings from a rich connoisseur named Charles Wade who had bought the paintings from Lily's mother following the girl's death, afterwards using paint thinner to destroy the paintings looking for a secret message that he believed would show him how to contact the Crimson One. But this didn't get him any closer to finding the Crimson One, leaving him frustrated.

Isaac drugged Eileen

Poor Eileen. The worst part is that she wasn't the first person that Isaac inflicted this horrible mind breaking process on, just the first one that was saved from it.

In 1995, he would host the funeral of Kathy's grandfather Joseph Rain, who had passed away after over a decade in a vegetative state following his failed Mending ritual in 81. Noticing Kathy paying her respects to her grandpa after the funeral, he offers her a brochure to join the church under the guise of consoling her, with Kathy noting the manipulative nature of this gesture during a moment of mourning and grief before departing. Kathy later comes to question him about events in Conwell in her investigation of Joseph's catatonia in 81, with him lying about his knowledge of the Red Scythe flowers when shown a picture of them. When Kathy's friend Eileen comes to him later pretending to want to join the church in order to help Kathy's investigation, he uses the opportunity to kidnap the girl and drug her like he had his previous victims before offering her soul to the Old God to undergo a Mending, leaving her in a state of shock. When Kathy breaks into the Church to uncover evidence of his crimes, he frames her for breaking and entering to have her arrested by the sheriff. Upon escaping the police station, Kathy later finds him in the Mausoleum looking over Eileen's drugged and tied up form, whereupon she shocks him unconscious and calls the police to have him arrested for his crimes.

When Kathy later interrogates him in his cell at the station after dropping Eileen at her grandmothers, he continues to remain remorseless and self-righteous about his actions, even having the gall to call Kathy a Sinner for getting in his way even after admitting to being responsible for the various disappearances and insanity cases in Conwell. After investigating the church further for clues, Kathy returns to Isaac and plays a recording of his father revealing he had apparently foreseen Isaac's crimes and considering them a violation of the Church's beliefs, with Kathy hoping hearing this would convince the priest to redeem himself and help her. While the recording does shock Isaac and cause him to question his actions, even giving Kathy a clue to finding the Threshold in a moment of weakness, he stubbornly insists that his actions were still just. Following Kathy leaving to confront the Crimson One and save Eileen's soul, Isaac, believing his actions were for nothing and that he would never gain the acknowledgement of the Old God, used his priest sash to hang himself in his cell in his despair. But death wasn't the end of Isaac's story.

Following Kathy destroying the Threshold by burning the Red Scythe fields and cutting the Malleable and the Old God off from our world, Isaac's spirit manifested in the Old God's realm following his suicide. Learning of Tom Ward abandoning his role as the Crimson One and the Old God weakened in power, Isaac willingly took on the role of the new Crimson One and becoming the Old God's vessel, taking on the name Mr. Burgundy. For the next 3 years, Mr. Burgundy would manipulate the evil doppelganger of Kathy Rain, now called Faith Cyrene, and a mental patient named Wiktor Kopernik into his service as part of his plan to create a new Threshold and return the Old God to full power. Under his manipulations, Faith and Wiktor would manufacture a Red Scythe infused drug called Pyre and dose junkies and mentally disturbed people throughout the city of Kassidy in order to test the drug's effects. In 1998, under the collective alias of the Soothsayer serial killer, they would then dose a total of six people with Pyre before subjecting them to ritualistic murders involving Obsidian mirrors, with Mr. Burgundy feeding off the pain and misery of his underling's victims through Pyre.

Mr. Burgundy tortures Kathy in her dreams

Isaac had no real reason to put Kathy through these hellish nightmares. He did it just because he could. Nuff said. It doesn't help that, with the way they're both positioned, this "liturgy" looks almost like a literal mindrape.

During Kathy's investigation of the Soothsayer killings, Mr. Burgundy would subject Kathy to sadistic nightmares involving the thoughtform specters of the Soothsayer victims and of her mentor and father figure Lucas Longhorn's future death at Faith's hands. After Lucas's murder and Kathy's hospitalization following her failed attempt to chase Faith on her motorcycle, Mr. Burgundy would attack Kathy in her following nightmare personally, strangling her in her bed seemingly out of spite for her defeat of him in 1995. He appears in her dreams again after she's rendered unconscious by a trap Wiktor left at his cabin, where he hangs from the ceiling like he did when he committed suicide as Isaac. When Kathy, having initially mistook him for the original Crimson One, realizes Burgundy is Isaac, he mocks her for thinking he was gone forever before Tom wakes her up.

On the night of the ritual when the new Threshold is to be created, Kathy, Eileen and Tom confront Faith and Wiktor to stop Burgundy's plan. After Wiktor overdoses on Pyre in a botched attempt to open the portal early and Kathy injures Faith in the briefly reopened Malleable, Mr. Burgundy appears before the detective in person. Ignoring Faith's cowardly pleas for help and all but dismissing her as a now useless pawn before urging Kathy to kill her doppelganger so that he may feed on her pain as well to complete the Old God's resurrection. Kathy refuses and turn her gun on the demonic priest, with Burgundy taunting her thinking he was immune to the gun. But Kathy reveals she had loaded the gun with a bullet made of Selenite steel, a material that wards off evil spirits, that Tom had given her before she entered the Malleable. Mr. Burgundy's smug smile is quickly replaced by a look of fear before Kathy shoots him in the chest, causing him to dissolve into static energy, ending Isaac Prices wicked life once and for all.

Mitigating Factors?[]

There are some aspects about Isaac's character in the first game that should be discussed.

First of all, he states that his actions are born from a desire to bring salvation to mankind and thinks having people undergo Mending's to be made "pure" is a necessary evil in his own words. There are a few problems with this line of thinking. The first one is that, unlike his father, Isaac doesn't give the people he's "saving" a choice in undergoing a mending, drugging them against their will and forcing them into the Malleable for "God's judgement". The second problem is that his actions actively leave his victims insane or comatose, and his only response is to claim that they deserved their fates for "rejecting God", showing no remorse whatsoever for them. These facts alone indicate that his motivations are far from altruistic and likely stem from a Belos esque desire to feel like a holy savior when he's far from it.

When it comes to his loyalty to the Old God, I feel like there's even less to talk about here. Even though he considers himself a servant to the eldritch being as a priest and as Mr. Burgundy, his devotion is a fanatical obsession with his idea of the Old God as a substitute Christian God. This is especially notable in the second game, where one of the Tulpa's Kathy encounters in the Malleable calls him a delusional mad man projecting his own selfish motivations onto the Old God and he doesn't truly understand the being he supposedly serves. It certainly doesn't help his case that his actions in both games were implied to have actually disgusted the Old God himself, who he calls a "wrung out malice run amok" who let his newfound power as Mr. Burgundy go to his head and carry out "distorted directives" of the entity's true will. You know you're a piece of work when the entity you worship (one that is shown to have a rather flimsy morality in his own right) thinks you're a monster.

There admittedly was a moment at the end of the first game when he seems remorseful over his actions after hearing his father's recording made him realize his crimes were for nothing, even promising to atone for his sins after Kathy leaves. This is followed by him committing suicide in his cell, something that earns him pity from Eileen and even Kathy, who regard him as a victim in his own way due to being raised around worshipping the Old God. But this sympathetic moment is promptly subverted in the sequel when he returns as Mr. Burgundy, where his "remorse" has been completely discarded, not to mention he became an even worse person as he masterminds ritualistic murders and tortures Kathy in her dreams with sadistic glee. In fact, the opening recap of the plot of the first game (mainly the Director's Cut's take on it) reframes his so called "atonement" via suicide as him taking the cowards way out to avoid facing the consequences of his actions after coming to believe he wouldn't be acknowledged by the Old God or the Crimson One. Any remorse he may have had in the first game was apparently overtaken by his satisfaction from seemingly gaining the Old God's recognition as Mr. Burgundy, leaving him as little more than a vile zealot. By the time Kathy kills him for the second and final time, he's treated with no sympathy at all, and his final death is arguably played for satisfaction after all he's done.

As far as moral agency goes, him lacking it is out of the question. Even though Kathy calls him "brainwashed" by the Church of the Holy Trinity's beliefs, he still comprehends the morality of his actions enough to consider his crimes a "necessary evil". And even though he's an apparently avid believer in the church's doctrine, unlike William and his followers, Isaac is never once stated or implied to have undertaken the Mending ritual that he forces his victims to take, presumably out of a cowardly desire to avoid the consequences of the process. When it comes to his role as the new Crimson One, there's nothing indicating he was forced into the role like Tom Ward had. Whereas Tom states his identity had been all but stripped away from him and was effectively a prisoner in the Crimson One's signature suit right up until Kathy's destruction of the Red Scythe fields freed him, Isaac declares that he "donned the mantle" and willingly transformed into Mr. Burgundy following his death. Even the Tulpa's of the Malleable regard him less like a forcefully conscripted underling but as someone who deliberately seized an opportunity to rise above his station in life to fulfill his selfish goals.

Aside from these instances, there's not much else to say about Isaac. Despite following in his father's footsteps, there's little evidence suggesting he actually loves him and doesn't even seem to care that his actions disgusted his old man, and his relationship with his brother is given no exploration to the point of being non-existent. He also doesn't care for Faith and Wiktor, being apathetic to the latter's death by overdose and actually encourages Kathy to kill the former after she'd played her part in his plan despite having promised to make her the "prime" Kathy.

Heinous Standard?[]

There's the Old God, the root cause of almost every problem Kathy faces. He kidnapped and enslaved Tom Ward as the Crimson One and used him to to lure many unfortunate people in an out of Conwell Springs into the Malleable where he mentally tortured them in Mending rituals that left them either insane or comatose. Kathy's grandfather Joseph Rain was turned into a vegetable, Jimmy Cochran and Wiktor Kopernik suffered mental breakdowns that got them committed to Engstrom's psychiatric hospital, and Lily Myers was driven to depression and tricked her own brother into helping her commit suicide after each individual's encounter with the Old God. Not to mention that he enabled the creation of the Church of the Holy Trinity via William Price and by proxy inspired Isaac's villainous actions. Whether he is simply "curious" or genuinely evil, it's impossible to deny that he's ruined a lot of lives with his curiosity.

Then there're the Soothsayer duo, Kathy Rain's Tulpa doppelganger Faith Cyrene and Wiktor Kooper. The former having attempted to kill Kathy during her Mending, she escaped the Malleable after her face got burned by the torching of the Red Scythe fields. Desiring to spite Kathy in every way possible, she and Wiktor manufacture the Pyre as part of a plan to reconnect the Malleable to Earth, with Faith manipulating a florist named Tabitha Caldwell into cultivating new Red Scythe flowers as an ingredient in the drug and tricking the prodigy Andrea Hall into helping create the drug by playing on the girl's romantic attraction towards Faith. They test the drug on junkies like Corey Finnegan before using the perfected samples as part of six systematic sacrificial murders throughout Kassidy. Wiktor would stab his victims, which included his former lover Rose Taylor, renowned author Debra Sinclair, and the aforementioned Tabitha to death. Faith however would take a far crueler approach to killing her victims, befriending Eric Holloway and Benedict Townsend before shoving the former off the roof of his apartment and making the latter hang himself in his own church and burns Andrea Hall alive after she uncovers the true nature of Pyre. Faith would also kill Kathy's mentor and father figure Lucas Longhorn and gaslight her mother Sharon into seeing Kathy as an imposter to manipulate her into siding with Faith against Kathy, before creating tormented Tulpa clones of her victims to torture Kathy while also murdering a Tulpa in Lucas's image out of sadism.

But despite all this, Isaac is able to stand out. For one thing, he abducted numerous people throughout Conwell and subjected them to the Mending, leading to a large number of insanity and missing persons cases in a county that otherwise has a low crime rate. He even tries to put Eileen through this mind breaking process, which deeply affects Kathy and leads to her going through the Mending herself to save Eileen. Then, after becoming Mr. Burgundy following his suicide, he manipulates Faith and Wiktor into committing the aforementioned mass drugging's and serial killings in order to feed off the pain and suffering of their victims. During all this, he also torments Kathy in her dreams with visions of the Soothsayer victims, including one foreshadowing Lucas's future death at Faith's hands, and her insecurities by having her friends and family condemn her for her past mistakes and toxic lifestyle. Hell, he even tries to strange her in her bed in one such vision seemingly just because he could. And the climax of his scheme would've been recreating the Threshold to the Malleable and restoring the Old God to full power, something that would've put many more people at risk of being subjected to the Old God's mental tortures all over again.

And considering he did this while starting out as little more than a cowardly priest of a declining cult, I'd say he passes relatively easily.

Final Verdict?[]

I give him a yes.