Catherine has been described as a “horror action puzzle game with social simulation elements”. What this equates to is an extremely odd, but enjoyable game.
What I Liked:
Vincent Brooks is a man seemingly floating through life. His girlfriend of 5 years, Katherine, is very much a “plan ahead” type of person, and wants Vincent to clean up his act, and marry her. Vincent himself is much more unsure of this, being comfortable the way things are.
One evening, after getting extremely drunk, Vincent finds himself waking up next to a blonde bombshell named Catherine, and from this point on, his world turns upside down. In addition to this, Vincent begins having horrible nightmares where he much run from horrific beasts by arranging and climbing a wall of blocks, which always leaves him extremely tired when he wakes.
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| Upon finding Catherine in his bed, Vincent prepares to fire his laser. |
The plot itself is quite adult oriented, for a game. I mean this in the context that it is more complex than your typical “there are bad guys, shoot them” storyline. Nothing in this game is clear cut for you – choices you make for Vincent may seem one way, but affect things differently than one might expect.
Add the multiple subplots to do with Vincent's friends' relationships and you get quite an enjoyable plot.
The game is initially presented as a television show, with the intro sequence briefly introducing the concept. Once this is over, you typically have a playable sequence in the bar (where the social simulation portion of the game is spent). Once the player leaves the bar, you end up in your nightmare realm, where the action puzzle game takes place.
These sequences are linked via cutscenes, occasionally as full blown 2D anime scenes, but more often using the in-game graphics (gloriously cel-shaded). If you don't like a cartoony art style, then you won't like the art here folks!
The presentation simply feels quite polished.
The level music is an interesting set of remixes of classical music. While aficionados will likely think this as an absolute travesty, I found myself enjoying the remixes. Not a lot to say here though.
The gameplay whilst in the nightmare realm consists of pulling and pushing blocks in such a fashion as to allow you to climb the wall whilst being chased. More often than not, you are being chased by nothing at all other than the blocks simply falling away into nothingness. However, on the boss stages (which are all amazingly cool) you are typically being chased by a large beast of some variety, all relating to what's been on Vincent's mind during that day. For example, one of the more memorable bosses is a giant demonic baby – during the cutscenes for the day before this sequence, Vincent learned that Katherine was pregnant, hence the giant baby.
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| BLOCKS! |
The bar gameplay is much more relaxed, allowing the player to immerse themselves in the world a bit more. You control Vincent in the bar, have some drinks and chat with the other patrons. You will receive text messages from both Katherine and Catherine, and get to choose whether to reply or not, and if so, how to reply to them. You select what to drink (and if you finish a drink, are given trivia about the particular drink), and when to go home. While it doesn't sound thrilling, I found that these segments of gameplay immersed me in the world more than any plain cutscene ever could.
Whilst I am usually a skeptic of moral choices in gaming (they have a tendency to make you either saintly or baby-eatingly evil, with nothing in between), it is somewhat well executed in Catherine. For starters, while you have a red/blue bar showing where on the spectrum you are when you answer a question or reply to a text message, it never tells you outright what the spectrum is until you finish the game. It's not a “Good/Evil” bar, it is a little more complex than that. However, it still is totally possible to game the system and force your way to a particular ending as a result. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, when you consider that there are 8 endings to view!
Eventually during the story, Vincent needs to make a decision about whether he'll stay with Katherine and break up the affair, or whether he'll go the other way. You never make this decision outright – the bar makes that decision for you, as it reflects Vincent's state of mind at the time. While this prevents you from saving before the key decision making point in the game (since said point doesn't really exist for the player), you still are able to at the very least get the broad spectrum of endings associated with the decision he came to in your game (since the Good/Bad/True ending is decided by how you answer the questions in the final area).
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| Catherine also thinks Vincent is single when she gets with him, further complicating matters. |
I would also like to point out that a bunch of the questions it posed to me made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. Whether they were about things I had never experienced or even thought about in my life, or simply difficult questions is a tough one to decide. The theme of cheating on a partner, and the consequences of that made me feel quite uncomfortable at times playing as Vincent – and this is why the plot succeeds.
In a world of generic shooters, Catherine is a breath of fresh air. It's nice to be able to play something completely different from practically everything I have ever played previously. The last time I played a title that was so different from the pack (that was NOT an indie title) would be Mirror's Edge!
What I Hated:
The block puzzles difficulty ranges from absolutely trivial to hair-tearingly, insanely difficult. I found that certain block puzzles held me up for ridiculous amounts of time (I was stuck in a 5x5 confinement of blocks for over an hour – and considering that the floor falls away consistently, this also means many, many continues were used up here). On the other hand, certain puzzles were also seemingly too easy.
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| You will see this screen a lot, but now's not the time to be dead! |
Obviously, early puzzles should be easier than the later ones, but this is not what I'm referring to. I found that the final boss encounters were much easier than some of the “regular” puzzles I had encountered in chapters gone by!
As frustrating as this is, its certainly not a deal-breaker.
As I have mentioned in prior posts, Australia is not allowed to have nice things. This includes Catherine. To get a hold of a copy, you will need to import. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is something worth mentioning, since certain people are unwilling/unable to import games, and one cannot simply walk to the games shop and pick up a copy.
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Catherine is an interesting title that, while it may not appeal to everyone, is definitely worth a play to anyone after something a little different. Those who immediately look at it and think that its not worth playing must truly be jaded. Or scared to try something that's so far removed from the umpteenth WWII shooter.
On a side note, the voice actor list reads like a who's who of English anime/game voice actors. Vincent is played by Troy Baker – who played Snow in Final Fantasy XIII, and Yuri in Tales of Vesperia. Catherine is voiced by Laura Bailey (or Lust from Full Metal Alchemist, Chun-Li from Street Fighter 4), and many other recognisable voices.
