Catherine (PS3) Review

“The thing is with Catherine, you should just watch the trailer before you buy it, you can pretty much tell from that whether it’s your thing or not.” This statement, rather irritatingly, pretty much is all the review you need for Catherine, it’s such a niche title you can probably decide for yourself  whether you want it or not. Regardless, it is one of the more unique games to come out this generation so there’s still plenty to talk about.

Catherine is largely story driven but comes in two halves, events play out across the course of a week with daytime sections where lead character Vincent Brooks mopes around his apartment and his local bar complaining to his friends about his lady troubles, and nightmare sections where you solve timed box pushing puzzles. Vincent is in a long term relationship with “Katherine” who is beginning to pressure him into marriage, but is seduced by a young girl “Catherine” who represents the freedom and fun that he desires.

The two Catherines are unfortunately probably the weakest part of the story aspect. Neither of them really branch outside their obvious symbolic positions of “Freedom” and “Order”. Catherine is a little more endearing because she spends the entire game walking around in a kinky outfit that looks like a bunch of napkins tied together with strings that could fall off any second, but even then Vincent can’t remember any of his time spent with her so you never see any bond between the two other than the obvious implications that “they just had sex, it was hype.” Katherine on the other hand is a boring motherly, particularly non-human entity who only shows genuine personality in one scene of the game that turns out to be a dream sequence she doesn’t even remember, so god knows what would ever make you want to go after her.

As a result both become hard to care about, and when the whole game is designed around a decision between the two Catherines this is a somewhat damaging flaw. It also highlights, as so many games this generation have, the weakness of a moral choice system. Catherine wants to access and test you based on your own morality and relationship experience and give you -your- true ending based on that, but you’ll figure out very early on which Catherine you want and how the decisions you’re given play out and just play the game in a way that guarantees you the ending you want. It’s another example of how a moral choice system completely undermines itself in what it wants to achieve.

However, this is an Atlus game so there’s good writing in here somewhere, and it’s all in the side characters. Vincent’s friends are all likeable, and it’s interesting talking to other characters in both the nightmare and real worlds even though it’s entirely optional and doesn’t affect your ending in the slightest. It might seem like a minor thing to praise but with the quality of video game writing these days any game where you outwardly seek out extra dialogue as opposed to whamming the X button until it all flies off the screen to go die in a fire deserves to be acknowledged.

What about the gameplay side of things, well, it’s block pushing puzzles. If the term “block pushing puzzle” horrifies you to your core then there’s not much that can be said to sway you on them. It has to be said though, even though the term usually inspires thoughts of boring, completely uninspired and trashy puzzles to prolong gameplay there’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of block pushing puzzles. Boxes are nice, they have equally sized sides and corners and fit into each other nicely which soothes the logic loving part of your brain if done correctly. For a lot of its stages Catherine gets it right and you can go into a lovely trance as you make your way up the tower. This feeling quickly disappears on the boss stages though when you start having to dodge attacks and the camera drunkenly swings around to highlight how awesome the anime blob of unsubtle metaphors chasing you this time is, which doesn’t exactly help when you’re trying to think fast.

Catherine comes with an easy mode (just like the character, AM I RIGHT!?) and unless you want to be stuck in the puzzle side of the game for hours on end its recommended that you use it. The key benefit to easy mode isn’t that it’s just easier, it’s the “Undo” option and it’s hard to imagine not rage quitting Catherine without because the controls and camera views aren’t always your friend and making genuine “sleight of hand” errors can be very common. These sequences can be frustrating, there’s an especially awful escort mission late on the time which is so bad it can almost be described as broken, but even if you’re not a massive fan of block pushing puzzles they’re never a deal breaker in Catherine.

Overall, Catherine is an unique if troubled experience that turns out to be very engaging. It’s a tad formulaic in how it transfers from puzzle section to cut scene to bar section (the only playable non-nightmare area unfortunately) apart from the last couple of days, which actually turn out to be a lot more interesting for it. Even with the eight endings it’s hard to imagine playing Catherine more than once over just looking up the other endings on Youtube or something , but the one time you do play it will be a memorable trip indeed.

If you like angsty anime dramas that have a tendency to fall into insanity and don’t hate block pushing puzzles, consider the score a 4 and go play it NOW. For everyone else, if Catherine isn’t your thing then it just isn’t your thing and there’s nothing anyone can say to sway you into liking it, so for you lovely people consider it a 2. Now Atlus, hurry up and get Persona 4 Arena released in Europe already.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.