Catherine Review-Spoilers Ahead-

[Obsidian]

Disclaimer: Being a story-driven game, many of my criticisms will likely spoil parts of the story. If such things bother you, then do us both a favor and stop here. You’ve been warned. This is my first review in a while, so I hope I'm not too rusty.

 

 

Every once in a while, you find a game that manages to stand out from the herd of mainstream gaming most people flock around. Catherine is certainly a black sheep, especially in Western markets, brought to us by Criware. Fans of this studio know them best for their work in the Persona games, and as such we all wondered what Catherine would turn out to be. So, what is Catherine? The game is best described as a hybrid between a mild dating simulator and a block puzzle game. Right away, we can already see this game is similar in only the social aspects, with the puzzles being new territory for the studio. Even in the social side, though, things are clearly different from the social links we’ve seen in other games, but I’m getting ahead of myself...

 

Without further ado, let’s venture into the strange game of Catherine... to mangle the words of a certain someone.

 

The game opens on the Golden Playhouse, a sort of television show, where we meet the show’s host “Midnight Venus,” a woman with a big red afro only to distract us from her crazy red sideburns. She goes on to introduce the story and our main character, 32-year old Vincent Brooks. Right away, I’m already having problems with the presentation of the game, as this setup adds nothing to the main story, since this is all information we find out within the first 15 minutes of gameplay. The game would be better off without this touch, and I wish I would’ve skipped it on my first play.

 

Ignoring that unnecessary intro, we’re quickly introduced to Vincent and Katherine McBride, Vincent’s girlfriend of 5 years. Right away, we’re not given a good impression of either character. Vincent appears to be a clueless idiot and Katherine appears to be an ice-cold wretch, which doesn’t make either character that appealing from the start. This cutscene, luckily, is short lived and we’re quickly thrown into a tutorial puzzle.

 

 

The block puzzles are where this game really shines. Aside from the tutorial puzzles, of which I believer there are three, they move fairly quickly in nature, since the floor below you is falling and you earn a better prize by climbing it faster. At times, even on normal mode, I sometimes found these puzzles a tad frustrating, but never to the point that I wanted to stop playing. This is a fine line games in general tend to avoid, as most are either clearly defined as being on one side or the other. Catherine walks this line very well, which is a plus. The games mixes the puzzles up by introducing different kinds of blocks (such as trap, ice, monster, spring, mystery, heavy, and black hole blocks) in addition to adding enemies that try to keep you from climbing.

 

The only downside to the puzzles is that they never change from playthrough to playthrough, meaning once you’ve discovered the trick to getting up the tower, they’re no longer a challenge. Luckily, the game helps alleviate this on multiple playthroughs by changing the puzzles based on difficulty, but only slightly, or by letting you skip them altogether if you earned the gold prize on the stage in a previous attempt. Skipping the stages gives the game a visual novel feel and is a nice option to have if all you want to do is see the different cutscenes. Oh, and there’s also a church bell that starts ringing as you approach the top of the stage. For the most part, if you’re moving along pretty well, you won’t care too much about the bell, but if you’re on a stage that stumps you on that last stretch, you’ll probably be hearing the bell at some point or another in your day. It doesn’t stop until you reach the top, end of story.

 

After the first tutorial puzzle, Vincent wakes up in his tiny apartment to find he pissed the bed, which is totally normal, right? I mean Vincent and I can’t be the only ones. Then we get another scene between Vincent and Katherine that actually makes me feel better about the two characters. It’s really strange that the first scene started off so poorly when they clearly have a pretty good relationship going. Oh well, the game then moves to introduce us to Vincent’s friends and the central hub of the social part of the game, the Stray Sheep bar. In this part of the game, you can interact with cell phone texts, other bar members, an arcade game that’s just 64 additional block puzzles, and a pretty rad jukebox. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get excited later in the game when I was checking the Jukebox and found some pretty cool Persona 3 and 4 tracks on there, as well as some DDS tracks. Being a fangirl, it really made things more entertaining to walk around the bar with Backside of the TV playing. Something tells me I’ll be drinking a lot to this song in the near future, just like Vincent, except I won’t get random factoids about the drinks I just finished. This really happens in the game, and what’s worse, there are trophies related to hearing all the factoids.

 

 

It’s at the Stay Sheep bar that we learn about the game’s morality system, which iis represented with a meter by red (bad), gray (Switzerland), and blue (good) bands. The game kind of leads you to believe that your interactions in the bar are necessary to influence the meter in any meaningful way, but I’ll be frank and say it’s all just a time waster. A good one if you enjoy story-driven games, but a time-waster all the same. About half of the time, your interactions with NPCs in the bar (or the the nightmare world hubs, which I’ll get to soon) don’t affect your morality meter, and there are required in-game events that will influence your morality meter. Even your cell phone text messages hold more immoral weight to them than NPC interactions. How sad is that? Well, not too sad when Catherine sends you a cell phone pic, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

But not by much. Before you leave the Stray Sheep, we’re finally introduced to the game’s namesake character, Catherine, a hot, Hitler-bait 23-year old girl wearing what is no doubt a rejected character costume from some japanese fighting game. Still, before things get too far here, we find Vincent again in another nightmare, this time entering it with... Bipedal sheep? Yeah the nightmare NPCs (many of which are also Stray Sheep NPCs, in case you couldn’t tell) take the form of sheep. It’s symbolic or... Something... Just like Vincent being in his boxers and carrying baby pillow in all the nightmare. It’s symbolism! Or rheumatism... I get those mixed up every so often.

 

Completing the first stage of the second night’s level takes us to our first nightmare world Hub, where you can save, interact with sheep NPCs, get hints on how to effectively climb the towers, and answer a moral choice question with a basic good or bad answer. The hints are the most useful interactions, but they don’t change, so if you get stuck on a stage, you’ll have to figure it out yourself. As the game progresses, I noticed, the hints start to fall behind the actual stages, meaning you’ll complete a stage and the hint will have been most useful on THAT stage. The moral choice question takes place in a confessional, where a child’s voice antagonizes Vincent a bit each time he enters the confessional before answering a question that causes the confessional to blast off to the next stage. Space confessionals, anyone?

 

Also, the game tells you how players answered the question you received on their first playthough between stages. From what I saw, most of the players went for the good endings on their first playthoughs. It’d be nice if the game kept track on your playthoughs and told you how others answered on their second playthoughs, too. However, with youtube and what not, I can believe that most players don’t bother with a second playthrough, sadly. I also recall one time the game giving me an option to separate the results based on gender, but I have not seen this feature come up again.

 

In general, some levels have the same amount of stages per level, with a few black sheep thrown into the mix. All the levels, however, end in a boss stage, where a boss symbolizing something recent in Vincent’s life tries to kill him before he makes it to the top. They’re not so bad, but can make relatively simple stages very difficult, and they’re pretty clever designs I think. In fact the second boss is quite the setup for the next morning’s scene. I’ll give you a hint, it involves a monstrous girlfriend trying to eat you with her butt. Oh whatever could it mean? I wouldn’t know, personally.... What?

 

Further on the subject of bosses, I found the death of the baby or fetus boss (it was an ugly baby, so I’m not sure) to be especially symbolic and thought that Vincent just successfully aborted his girlfriend’s pregnancy via the nightmare. I laughed, and this explains why I went for the True Cheater ending on my first playthrough.

 

In case you couldn’t gather, upon waking up from the second nightmare, you find out you cheated on Katherine with Catherine. This conflict serves as the driving force for our main story, putting Vincent in awkward situations, which slightly differ depending on your morality meter. Unfortunately, the story does get fairly repetitive at its core, but it gets really interesting once you complete Night 7. In fact, I don’t think I’m going to mention the actual story since I’d feel bad for spoiling it. However, I will talk about the block puzzle.

 

Despite the promises of the Cathedral being the end of the line, there’s still one more puzzle. Actually, thinking about it, I guess a final puzzle would be the end of the line... Anyway, this stage is incredibly easy. I’d love to say that, but despite the tower being almost as simple as the stage 1 puzzle, you’re handicapped by not only a boss, but also a stupid NPC co-op partner that does nothing but get in your way. It doesn’t help that the boss is pretty fast and has a ranged attack that seems to hit your partner too often. Finally, though, after reaching the near-end of the tower, you better slow down. Even though it’s very tempting to just race up to the door (trust me, I did it twice), going too fast is pretty much instant death for your partner and you have to start all over again. This is probably the most broken puzzle in the game for that reason, since being three steps ahead of your partner will somehow permit the boss to somehow kill her instantly. I don’t know how it happens, though, since the camera never showed it.

 

Following level 8 is one of the longer cut scenes I’ve seen in a video game in years, as it nearly clocks in at a half hour. A lot happens here, including Vincent’s temporary insanity scare, the big reveal as to who threw you into the nightmare world, why it exists, and Catherine’s true identity. I never expected things to get as deep as they did in this scene, but they did and it was, quite frankly, amazing to take in. Once the scene finishes, you get one last chance to derp around the Stray Sheep before going to the last level of the game, which operates very similarly to the other levels. The biggest difference is there are two boss levels, and the nightmare hubs lack NPCs and the “Questions to Freedom” are always the same, which is a plus if you’re trying to shoot for a specific ending. Yes, while these questions don’t affect your morality meter, they will affect the ending you receive. I think you’re better off to shoot for the True Endings, since they kill two birds with one stone. If you really want the trophies, then you’ll have to play through level 9 two more times (which isn’t a problem if you got gold, but lets assume for a second you didn’t) just to get the trophies. I only have three words on that subject: “Screw that,” and “youtube.” The endings presented to us, even the Bad endings, are some of the better, if not the best, moralty-meter influenced endings I’ve seen this generation. Let’s face it, though; other mainstream games with moral-choice don’t exactly deliver on good endings (See Bioshock 1 & 2, Fallout 3, Infamous 1 & 2, et cetera).

 

 

Catherine’s art style is heavily anime influenced, with some cut scenes just being animated scenes, and the rest of the game being that sort of watercolor animation we’ve seen in games like the recent Dragon Ball Z or Naruto fighters. Unfortunately, this art style is hurt by the limited facial animations provided by the Gamebryo engine, and make simple things like character movement and facial expressions look dated. The anime scenes are top notch, though, and look very good and similar to the styles seen in Persona 3 and 4. The eye candy is pretty sweet, but it’s not without disappointments.

 

The game’s soundtrack, however, is quite different from the soundtracks found in other Criware games, as Shoji Meguro elected to include remixes of classical genres because it would be unexpected, in addition to his original songs. The classical remixes mostly serve as the background music to the block stages, and while on paper that sounds like a really strange match, Shoji’s style makes it work. A common criticism toward the soundtrack is the similarity in his remix of “Pictures at an Exhibition” to Ravel’s remix, which isn’t a similarity Shoji is blindly unaware of, as he makes a note of it in his commentary of the sound disc. In his defense, having listened to all his other soundtracks, I would’ve been surprised if it sounded different since this is the style he’s committed himself to over the years. Overall, the sound track is a pleasant mix of jazz-esque pieces and classical remixes with Shoji’s personal touch and is a very nice fit for the game.

 

All in all, is Catherine worth a second look to players who haven’t experienced it? That’s a tough call, as the game address two specific audiences (those who like puzzle games and those who like dating sims) and is targeted to the members of both audiences. While I thoroughly enjoyed my playthoughs, I also knew what to expect from Criware studios (the the most part).The story’s explicit plot, as there are scenes featuring mild nudity (for the record, 10 minutes from a Friday the 13th movie has more nudity than 7 hours of Catherine), is also something that may defer prospective gamers. Still, if you are in the audiences this game is targeted toward and don’t mind a more adult storyline, then you’d be stupid to skip out on this title. While not perfect, it’s definitely a wild ride you shouldn’t let pass you by.

 

I give Catherine 8 hungry girlfriend butt monsters out of 10.

 

Afterthoughts that didn’t belong anywhere else:

 

Before we get into the main story, I’d like to note something regarding the title screen. When you start a new game, the game invites you to enjoy the story. I remember this kind of dialogue box appearing in Persona 4, and I think it’s a nice, civilized touch to Criware’s games.

 

The trophies/achievements in this game made me suddenly realized how sad the whole concept is. Seriously, there are trophies for viewing each different ending, which is bullshit, because the True ending contains the Good ending in each respect.

 

For puzzles, the game uses a life system. At first, it would have you believe that these lives are incredibly important, but they come a dime per dozen and you can easily max out to 99 lives without even trying.

 

[Alyxx Thorne]

*applauds* A very solid review there. I quite enjoyed reading it. Probably not going to make me pick up the game, mostly because I'd have to buy a 360 or PS3 to play it, but I love the art style of it.

[Obsidian]

Why thank you very much, Alyxx I appreciate that. I can understand the woes of not being able to play because of the console barrier hope you get a chance to try it, though!

[Pinkie Pie]

Was planning on getting the game anyway, but now I'm definitely getting the game.