Catherine has been a surprise since it was first announced. I was impressed first to find out that it was coming stateside, but also with the relatively high profile marketing and buzz of curiosity it got. With its M rating and suggestively disrobing anime chicks with come-hither eyes on its posters and cover art, it’s the sort of title that usually gets relegated to Japan. There, in Catherine’s native land, sexual repression collides with WTF fetish hard enough for there to be a whole market for weird games about sex. Here in the U.S., on the other hand, it represents something different, new, and ballsy: a simple action-puzzle game dropped into the context of a very adult, very Japanese, creepy, sexy thriller story.
This game is not for anyone who quickly grows impatient with non-interactive dialogue and slow-moving plot, or easily gives up when stuck on a time-sensitive puzzle that might require many attempts to complete. Hell, I’m actually not really sure it’s for me. But that’s the weird thing about Catherine. Like the titular character, it’s a new and refreshing seductress that keeps you coming back, if only for what a unique experience it is.
Storyline seemed like it was approximately half of the game. If that makes your eyes glaze over in indifference, I don’t think you’ll enjoy Catherine‘s avalanche of cutscenes – both hand-drawn and CGIed – and dialogues. I’m usually all for a hefty dose of story, but even I roll my eyes when there’s a load screen, followed by a cutscene, followed by another load screen, followed by another cutscene. I haven’t had this sense of “get on with it!” since the Metal Gear Solid games. These complaints aren’t to say the storyline is bad. I was sucked into protagonist Vincent’s life and problems, and he’s both flawed and likable enough that I always wanted to see what happened next for him. It’s a videogame equivalent of a page-turner, if you will. But if you’re the type who prefers to skip all the talking, you’ll want to skip this one.
A strong story is critical to this game, not only because its unique thematic material would fall flat without one, but also because there’s just not all that much to the action-puzzle content. It plays like a weird cousin of Q*bert and Lode Runner, you must control Vincent to quickly push and pull arrangements of cubes to form shelves, stairs, and climbable ledges to escape falling into the abyss and survive his nightmares. You are joined in your climb by fellow terrified climbers who get in your way, and there are occasionally curve ball blocks in the form of ice, bombs, springboards, and the like. But for the most part, the game is just forming vertical pathways before time runs out.
Unless you’re some kind of Rubik’s Cube genius, you’re going to fail. A lot. Like puzzle games from Professor Layton to Portal, Catherine is at its most satisfying when you just seem to click everything into place to advance through a tough spot. It’s at its most frustrating when you accidentally zig when you should have zagged and die, bringing you back to a checkpoint way down the mountain, only to discover you’re now stuck on a section you must have just completed just 30 seconds ago and you can’t remember how you did it. During higher levels, the game would be unforgivingly unplayable if it weren’t for an “undo” button that lets you take back the last block movement you made if you get stuck. This feature gives you a bit of leeway to think things through, but I ended up abusing the hell out of it. I also had occasional problems with how the controls would relate to the camera angle and Vincent’s relative position, and sometimes I felt it was too easy to get stuck hanging off the far side of a block edge that I couldn’t see. Then I’d accidentally release onto what I thought was a block below but instead plummet to my death.
If taken by itself, the block-climbing would have been a strong downloadable arcade game, but it’s the context that makes Catherine what it is. The surreality of stress-induced nightmares are a perfect backdrop for a game about endless, rushed puzzling. The game absolutely nails that tone, from hazy, jumbled scenery to a soundtrack that goes between skincrawling and pulse-pounding. Who hasn’t had bad dreams about getting chased by something awful through a giant maze, or been on a dreaded deadline to finish some seemingly possible but ultimately endless task? The oddball, spooky nonsense haunting Vincent isn’t just random, it’s laden with metaphor about his personal demons, and anxieties from his waking life take monstrous, deadly form in his nightmares. If marriage, having kids, and a hyper-controlling significant other are what you fear, then don’t touch Catherine right before bed unless you like being very creeped out.
Aside from the climbing, there are some interactive elements to dialogues, and your reactions to other characters shape some elements of the plot. The most engaged players get with dialogues comes through an entertaining and interesting take on text messaging, highlighting that technology’s capability to allow multitasked and evasive conversations. The game integrates it well enough that anyone who has been stuck trying to present two different stories to two different parties via extended text conversations might find it unsettlingly familiar. But, again, they are ultimately pretty thin in terms of real gameplay.
Despite gameplay being a bit lightweight, I have to give Catherine props for creativity. In an era of play-it-safe concept design, Catherine is a breath of fresh weirdness to a stagnant field of major console games. It’s a game for which premise and themes matter, only instead of space wars, fantasy wars, modern wars, World Wars, archeology wars, dystopian wars, sports wars, and Super Mario, Catherine chose to work with sex, dreams, and anxiety in an offbeat and mature style. If there were already a lot of games that did this sort of thing, maybe I wouldn’t have thought so much of Catherine. But since its quirky take on the dangerous psychology of sex and relationships is so new and strange in the videogame industry right now, Catherine gets an bump to must-play status.
