Who is Catherine and what exactly does she want? Get ready to figure out the mystery as you explore a game full of freshness and welcomed oddities.

Catherine is that rare type of game that comes along with an abundance of originality and leaves people with nothing to compare it to. While knocking someone out of their comfort zone with a splash of uniqueness can add huge value to a video game experience, taking chances on trying something new can be very dangerous. Does it end up paying off for the people over at Atlus, or are some things just too weird?

Story

Catherine is definitely not your typical game…

You are Vincent, a 32 year-old man stuck in a dead end job who now has to deal with the ever-increasing pressure of marriage from your long-term girlfriend Katherine. Already content with how things are, your hesitant to think about commitment. While you spend your days at work, at night you retire to the local bar, the Stray Sheep, to sink your sorrows in a drink while you and your group of friends chat about your troubles. On one fateful night, after your friends have already left the bar, a cute young blonde bombshell named Catherine (that’s with a “C”, not a “K”) walks in and for some reason takes a real liking to you. After a few more drinks, and some playful conversation, the rest of the night turns into a foggy haze until you wake up the next morning next to a buxom naked Catherine (Uh Oh!). After sufficiently freaking out, and temporarily defusing the situation (rather pathetically and hilariously I might add), Catherine’s persistence to stick around quickly becomes the catalyst to force your hand in making a decision: Stay with Katherine, or explore this new relationship with Catherine. To top it all off, you begin to have very strange nightmares that you can’t seem to remember, while rumours spread about a strange series of deaths (Talk about having a bad week!).

What makes Catherine so odd, is really the fact of how down to earth it is – there isn’t a hero sequence, there’s no illusions of how your going to save the world and despite what the cover might lead you to believe, the game isn’t filled with a bunch of sexual themes… your just a guy caught in a sticky situation and you have no idea what your going to do other than make your way to The Stray Sheep to share a drink with your buds. While the game does eventually dip into some surreal elements, it retains the humanity of having to make difficult choices about life and love.

Like I said, this isn’t your typical game.

Gameplay

Catherine’s gameplay unfolds within a daily pattern that consists of: Cut-scenes and story development, followed by roaming around the bar at night to talk with your friends; the other regulars; and answering text messages. After you’re done roaming around the bar, the series of events ends with going home to sleep, which triggers the nightmare sequences. These nightmare sequences account for the greatest chunk of the core gameplay.

During the nightmares, the objective is to move Vincent up a tower, which is rapidly collapsing, with the hopes of racing to the top before being devoured by the darkness below; but in your way lies a series of increasingly difficult patterns and obstacles for you to overcome. It sounds simple enough, but Atlus takes a simple idea and proceeds to throw a heap of depth on top of it. Main concepts like pushing and pulling blocks, or hanging off of edges to maneuver Vincent around blocks, work together to create all sorts of structured concepts like building staircases, collapsing walls, creating platforms… the list of techniques you will be figuring out is astounding for a game with such a basic mechanic. Most importantly, the mechanics efficiently utilize a key aspect of puzzle-based gameplay: Applied knowledge. As you start to realize more and more of the climbing techniques and really begin to understand the concepts, your growing arsenal of ways to tackle problems will feel quite rewarding – I was pretty astonished at how much this game actually made me feel smarter, forcing my brain to think of new ways to tackle different problems with only the same basic mechanics at my disposal.

Every night begins a new tower, which is separated into stages. The game gradually increases new concepts with each new tower so that the player can ease their way into eventually needing all the lessons they’ve learned to tackle the final towers. Between stages you arrive at safe platforms where you meet up with all the other climbers, who all look like sheep for some reason, and who are also suffering from similar nightmares. Here you can converse with your fellow sheeple, which regularly consists of having to talk them out of losing all hope (baaaaaaad times). You’ll also encounter a group of sheep who discuss and share new climbing techniques – so if you fluked your way past that last stage, now’s your chance to catch up on some techniques you should have been figuring out for yourself.

When you decide to tackle the next stage, you exit the safe platform by entering a confessional and answering a question posed by an unseen entity. These questions usually concern themselves with relationship situations like, “Could you forgive your significant other if they told you they cheated on you?” How you answer these questions, along with how you respond to text messages from your two ladies while at the bar, will tip your Karma scale in the direction of either Katherine or Catherine; Which ultimately decides what kind of ending your going to get. It’s also important to note that if you keep your karma in the middle, endings like the True Freedom ending exist to reflect taking neither choice.

When you reach the last stage of a tower, no longer will you simply be running from the darkness but instead will be chased by a demonic abomination that reflects the progress of the main story – I think it’s a pretty clear sign of cold feet when you have nightmares of a giant deformed Katherine face chasing you up a tower. These sections add additional gameplay elements as these foes come equipped with a few tools to seriously hinder your progress and make for some of the more intense climbs.

Aside from the main game, unlockable additional towers exist for the simple purpose of proving just how much you’ve learned. These towers, unlike in the main story, create completely random scenarios so there’s no memorizing or cheating by looking up the answers to set pieces. These towers will truly test your skills and are not for the faint of heart, or the easily frustrated. Time spent in the bar also leads to a few interesting things like factoids about the alcoholic beverages you drink, or playing the arcade game, “Rapunzel”. It takes the same climbing gameplay, but limits the amount of moves your allowed to make, requiring the maximization of every decision.

Aesthetics

While the gameplay comes in a solid unique package, it isn’t all that’s to be said about Catherine. The story’s presentation is a huge factor in the gameplay experience. Catherine (The game) exudes personality with the colourful people you meet at the bar, to the colourful palettes of the anime styled artwork, to the ridiculousness of Vincent himself – on more than a couple occasions you’ll get to see Vincent freak out to great effect. That’s what really works here – the feel of every scene comes across so perfectly; high tension sequences, like almost being caught by Katherine, are filled with all the anxiety and adrenaline that should be there.

As for the art itself, the demonic models used for the boss stages are of particular note, retaining an air of horror as they crawl up the cliff-side, drawing closer and closer.

Sound

Catherine’s incorporation of quick sweeping classical pieces during the climbing sequences completely sets the tone for the chaos and tension of being stumped – and knowing it. Those who got this game accompanied with the soundtrack will be pleasantly surprised to find a great collection of classical pieces that features the likes of Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Rossini and Chopin.

The English voice acting is done well enough to avoid being a distraction, and does shine in a few passages, but doesn’t really contribute as a true highlight of the Catherine experience.

Conclusion

Catherine is definitely a very different kind of game. A large facet of its appeal lies within how much the player can enjoy the challenge of its puzzle oriented gameplay – requiring a perfect balance between difficulty and reward… and this game can prove to be very difficult. For some people, having those moments of insight when you finally figure something out often can’t fill the hole of frustration that was dug trying to solve it. The story plays out nicely, but sustains such a real feel for so long that it may have trouble appealing to those who are looking for some sort of crazy plot that’s going to continuously blow their minds away. Catherine feels very niche – those who have heard of it and are interested will play it despite what they might hear, and those who haven’t heard of it and weren’t ever interested probably wont ever play it despite what they hear… and that’s a shame, but Catherine certainly isn’t for everybody. In short, Catherine is best described by the very themes it explores: If your already fine with what you currently have, don’t be afraid to enjoy more of that; But, if you’d like to see just what else is out there, this is one stranger in a bar you don’t want to pass up.