[Game Review] Catherine

The idea anyone would make a "horror-romance-comedy" game, let alone the titans at Atlus, is so excitingly original I'm honestly surprised it took me this long to check into Catherine from the Persona alum.  Unfortunately, there may be a good reason for why such a genre is so unique in the gaming sphere.  That isn't to say Catherine is bad by any means, but rather that its concept and execution have a queasy relationship with one another that only partially works.

Catherine, despite what you might have thought given the game's marketing material, is primarily a puzzle game with visual novel elements between grouped series of stages.  The game essentially boils down to pushing and pulling blocks in order to climb.  The mechanics of your pushing and pulling is surprisingly well developed, something you may not realize relatively early in the game as new mechanics are thrown at you quicker than what the game calls "techniques" are revealed to you.  Techniques amount to different strategies you can approach given block configurations, many of which would be extremely helpful earlier in the game, although it risks making the game a bit too easy too early.  To complicate things, you are timed on all but the easiest difficulty while solving the puzzles.  While effectively stressful, there is something about being timed while solving a puzzle that feels inherently unfair.  Likewise, the later levels include random blocks that won't set to a specific block type until being stepped on, which can screw up your plans through a section.  While an undue button does alleviate a lot of the frustration of being unfairly screwed out solving a puzzle (or at least solving it efficiently, which is paramount in a timed puzzle), it also allows you to spam it until the random block becomes what you want it to be.  Boss battles and enemies also have an air of unfairness to them, but are more so just annoying.  Again, when you are solving a puzzle, having an enemy stand on the block you need to climb stopping you from progressing until they move isn't fun.  It just feels like the game is arbitrarily wasting your time.  Bosses are even more tightly timed, and while their puzzles are almost always significantly easier than the main stage's, having blocks destroyed or targeted by projectiles while trying to ascend at an even quicker pace lead to more than once having to restart or checkpoint because of RNG.  Fortunately, this isn't nearly as bad as it could be because the puzzles are actually fun, and the game is throwing new things at you to play with relatively quickly.  There are special blocks and concepts being introduced with every level, from things as simple as an ice block or bomb block to the more complex conceptual stuff such as how to easily ascend a flat wall of blocks three wide.  Learning these concepts is rewarding, but more often than not you will feel as though you've learned how to properly approach these challenges a level or two late.

Part of this may be because the game strongly encourages you to replay it.  Catherine's story follows Vincent, a low-ambition bachelor whose girlfriend of 5 years, named Katherine, begins pressuring him into marriage.  Vincent, not sure if he's ready for any kind of commitment (or even anything resembling passion), is extremely hesitant and hangs out at the bar the Stray Sheep with his buddies.  After a particularly drunken night, he wakes the next day to find a young, sexy blonde named Catherine in his bed, naked.  Despite the titillating marketing, the game is relatively tame compared to the likes of Grand Theft Auto or The Witcher (you wouldn't be out of place to have assumed this was basically softcore porn, by the looks of the cover).  There is no nudity, no graphic sex, and outside of several "fucks" barely earns its M-rating.  This is something relieving, allowing the sexual tension and maturity to come from the plot, not from something easily exploitable.  After finding Catherine in his bed, Vincent is thrown into a tizzy over whether he should stay with his current, dull girlfriend or whether he should go for the chaotic nymph he's accidentally found himself bedding every night, despite no memory of ever having invited her over.  To make matters extremely worse, a couple nights before waking in bed with Catherine, he started having these dreams where he and a group of sheep - all men - attempt to climb walls of blocks (the puzzles that make up the main gameplay).  It is rumored the men have been cursed for being unfaithful to the women in their life, but things get complicated the further in the game you go.  Several of the men in the game haven't cheated at all, but are instead either reluctant towards their significant others or are incredibly misogynistic.  Those who do not make it to the top every night in an 8 night sequence will die, something attributed to the mysterious deaths that have been happening around the city (an unnamed city, but if I were a betting man I'd say it were meant to be San Francisco).  It becomes quickly apparent that several of the patrons of the Stray Sheep are the sheep in your dreams, and helping them out in their personal lives while at the bar is paramount to their success or death by the end of the game.

The game's social, visual novel aspect is the most immediately rewarding, especially on your first playthrough where you are still feeling like you are playing catch up with the puzzle mechanics of the other part of the game.  You can talk to friends, drink, practice your puzzle skills with an arcade version of the puzzle sections (meant as a practice, but incredibly long in its own right and with its own unique challenges), and most importantly for the story read and answer texts.  How you answer texts from the two C/Katherines affects your morality meter.  This morality meter isn't meant to be good and evil, but its hard to make a strong argument for that.  The game attempts to make the morality meter about freedom and order, chaos and law, but when "freedom" means "immoral behavior" and deceit, it is kind of hard to make that argument.  If you think I'm being prudish or limiting my scope to monogamous relationships, the game doubles down on this good and evil iconography in the different endings, of which I won't spoil here.  The game gives you no choice in transparency, so the polyamorous option isn't available, making that counterpoint a bit moot.  Within the structure of the game and the narrative, it is strictly expressed as good and evil, faithful or anchor-less wildcard.  Frustratingly, all of this moralizing does little outside of give you a different ending (of which there are 8 in the classic version of the game).  Your choice of Catherine or Katherine won't affect your path much to the end, outside of some specific scenes where Vincent has to come up with a response by himself where your morality meter will pop up on screen to indicate which response you've earned by your choices up to this point.  There is a part late game where Vincent will make a decision and break up with one of them, and that choice is always the same regardless of how you've played (despite the fact that you can get endings with either girl, here he will always break up with the same girl).  As fun as it is to try and find different parts of the story by playing the bar scenes correctly and texting the two C/Katherines, it has very little actual affect on the story.

The game's story is very overtly thematic, to the point that some of the themes are directly told to you after the game's end.  The whole chaotic vs. order approach to romance is framed within misogyny and toxic masculinity.  The first half of the game's plot can be frustrating or downright gross depending on your stomach for these themes, but the game doesn't squander them.  It belittles women as nags, as restrictive forces in men's sense of masculinity, and considers them conquerable objects all so the game can stress that this is an unsustainable system, one that directly contradicts the human need for compassion and relationships with their fellow (wo)man.  The people trapped in these sexist mentalities and male insecurities are constantly trapped and hounded by them, unable to confront them and wishing to outrun or otherwise brutalize them so they can continue in their delusional sense of self.  Catherine is decidedly for a a male audience.  It is meant to appeal to a particularly less appealing group within that male audience and try and force them into feeling the futility of their ways.  Its success in this is more than likely mixed given the game's endings don't really help build on the themes, rather patronizing you with cliche or fantasy.  It feels like the game hoped the journey would suffice - of which the journey is really well executed - and gave an ending it hoped would leave you satisfied.  The idea of choice in this game feels contrary to the themes, anyway.  Catherine is a sex object, and Katherine is dull and pushy.  Vincent has no chemistry with either, and they both feel rather objectified in their own way.  Your choice between the two doesn't really help the themes the game does well wrestling with.  As is, your choices are sexual objectification or the need for a not-so-loving motherly figure, each of which feels far more Freudian than it does any kind of poignant commentary.  It feels impressed on me by way of the rest of the story and themes that what they were trying for was an open, sexual respect without the need for total commitment or control of your significant other, or someone motherly helpful, and generally meant as a fully committed partner you work out life with.  The game plainly does not execute on this, but it is really hard to give the game too much flak for it because of how unique the concept is and how fun the game is throughout.

Catherine is a sincerely flawed game, one I recommend highly despite how imperfect it is.  It is unique, it is funny, it is well acted and even though its characters aren't particularly great or well defined, they are still somewhat compelling for the same reason Larry David is (albeit less masterfully than him).  Even though its themes are largely mishandled when considered as a whole, the parts where it deftly executes them are still better than most everything else trying similarly to attack these subjects.  It gives me hope that these themes will eventually get the attention they deserve in an interesting matter, rather than used in simple, condescending way for easy moralizing.



7.0