Review: Catherine

Being an adult is hard. You have to learn to save money, pay your own bills, fight your own battles, and think all too hard about the future. You also have to learn to navigate complex, adult relationships, and if you’re serious about them, consider the feelings and opinions of another person when you’re making life decisions. At some point, it becomes not just ‘What do I want from my life?’, but ‘What do we want from our life?’

At the beginning of anime game Catherine, protagonist Vincent is resisting the pressure to become an adult, at a point when culturally he should already be considered one. He’s 32 years old and in a long–term relationship, but has come to a crossroads – his girlfriend, Katherine, wants him to settle down, focus on his career, and put a ring on her finger. Enter Catherine, a cutesy, fun-loving 19-year-old who Vincent meets in a bar. Next thing Vincent knows, he’s woken up next to her in bed. In other words, Catherine is an adult game that deals with adult themes about, well, adultery and consequences.

Running parallel to this story is a subplot that works off of the myth that if you die in a dream, you die in real life. Despite the story being focused on Vincent and his relationship(s), the actual gameplay is based around this dream world. Vincent begins to have strange dreams in which he has to climb a tall tower made of blocks by moving blocks around to create a path. At the end of the level, Vincent has to answer a question that will alter his overall morality. The morality meter ultimately affects which ending you get in the game. While the story of the game is quite intricate and well thought-out – most of the time – mechanic-wise you shouldn’t expect more than a straight block-puzzle game.

In between dream sequences, Vincent visits his local bar, chats to his friends and texts both Katherine and Catherine. You get to choose the content of his text messages, and those too affect his moral compass and the ending of the game. Like in all games that have this kind of morality–meter, I found it a little too black and white – they aren’t tough decisions, they’re decisions you make based on whether you want to be ‘good’, or ‘bad’. There are no grey areas or in–betweens.

And despite the fact that Katherine is supposed to be the representation of ‘good’ and Catherine is clearly ‘evil’ incarnate, one thing that struck me about Catherine was that none of the game’s main characters are particularly likeable. Katherine is nothing but a stereotype of a woman with a ticking biological clock, constantly informing Vincent that he’s not good enough. Catherine is immature and clingy. Vincent himself refuses to take responsibility for anything, especially his decisions. Nobody is perfect and no one is really the hero of this story.

The art in Catherine is very nice, and as it’s anime it will likely age very well. It’s drawn with an interesting mixture of pinks and reds, of femininity and blood. The music and sound effects are also superb, although I grew incredibly tired of hearing the ‘game over’ music after dying for the zillionth time.

There’s really no shame in putting Catherine on easy mode. No, really. It is a notoriously difficult game, and even the easiest difficulty setting is going to challenge the most hardened gamer. I’m ashamed to admit that there were points in the game where I had to look at video walkthroughs, after half an hour of frustration at not being able to pass a certain mark. Not a puzzle gamer? Give this one a miss, regardless of how interested you are in the plot. It’s just not worth it. Even if you are, you may get too frustrated with the game to continue, and I wouldn’t blame you. I gave up several times and didn’t pick up the controller again for days.

The major let–down of Catherine, however, is the way the whole thing is resolved in the end – without getting into too much detail and spoiling the game, I found the ending to be a bit of a cop-out that avoided really dealing with the issues the game had set up to begin with. That said, it’s worth a play-through for art’s sake. I’m not saying you should go out and buy it right now, but developer Atlus has really tried to do something different, and that’s to be commended even if it does make the game a bit disjointed.

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