[Catherine][PS3/360][Review]

In Catherine you play as Vincent Brooks, a 32-year-old man who is struggling with the thought of settling down with his long time girlfriend Katherine. There are mysterious deaths happening in his town where people are dying in their sleep. The rumor going around is that when someone cheats on their partner they start having nightmares and if they die in the nightmares they die in real life. One night Vincent meets a 22-year-old girl named Catherine. He wakes up the next morning to find this girl in bed with him and he has no recollection of how this happened. He begins to have nightmares in which he is in a sheep filled world and is told that the only way to live is to keep climbing.

I am going to go through the basics of the game and then talk about my like and dislikes afterwards, so if you are wondering where my thoughts are on all of this stuff, don’t worry they are down there.

There are two parts to this game; hanging out at the bar which is called “The Stray Sheep”, and climbing the tower. Let’s talk about the bar first.

The bar is where you will be given the chance to talk to other characters in the game, read and respond to text messages, replay stages, drink a variety of alcoholic beverages, and play a puzzle mini-game. Talking to people adds a little to the story but it mostly serves as a means of fleshing out characters, making them feel like real people and not just random NPCs. In some interactions you will be given the chance to select your response to them which will move your moral meter. This meter has three colors; Red which stands for chaos, black which stands for freedom, and blue which stands for law. If you answer a question in way that seems like the wrong thing from a moral standpoint, for example; is marriage where life begins or ends. If you say it ends then it moves to the red. You can go for the chaos by picking those kinds of answers, go for law by picking morally correct answers, or try to balance it and go for freedom (which is neutral). It’s a simple concept so I’m sure I don’t need to explain it.

At various times, depending on your actions, you will receive text messages. They can be from various characters, but in my playthrough they were mostly from Katherine and Catherine. I don’t know if their texts are supposed to be the majority or not, and in my experience I only got a handful of them but there are supposed to be more. Anyways, when you get these messages you have the option to respond to them. There are a couple of dialogue trees you can select for each line of the message and they change depending on the previous line you used. These responses will impact your moral meter just like your interactions with the characters at the bar. Make choices wisely because this game has multiple endings and your actions will change the story.

Aside from responding to text messages, from the phone menu you can also check out your scores from levels you’ve played as well as replaying them to go for a better score and aim for the gold medal. You may also save from this menu as well. You have the choice to have drinks while at the bar as well. The more you drink the drunker you become, weird huh? The perk of drinking is the drunker you are, which is represented by bottles on the left side of the screen, the faster you move during the nightmare stages. There are four types of drinks to have; beer, cocktail, whisky, or sake. The type you have doesn’t change your intoxication level. While drinking Vincent will have inner monologues reflecting his mood at that point in the game. After finishing your drink you get a bit of trivia about the type of drink you had.

There is a game called Rapunzel at the bar, it’s basically the same as the nightmare stages except that you have an unlimited amount of time but a limited number of moves instead. I only played a few levels of it personally so I can’t say much about it. It’s not really pertinent to the gameplay but there is a jukebox in the bar as well. You can unlock new tracks by beating levels and achieving good scores in them. Songs are not only limited to Catherine tracks but Persona 4 and other game tracks as well. Go to the ATM to see Vincent’s inner thoughts on his financial situation. Last but not least is the bathroom. You can go in there to wash your face, and head into the stall to look at pictures you may have got in a text.

It’s important to manage your time at the bar, certain actions consume time and characters will come and go. Don’t miss your opportunities to talk to them. Exit the bar to move the plot forward.

Ok on to the Nightmares. After you finish up your bar sequences you go home and fall asleep.When you do you’ll arrive in the tower you have to climb. Believe it or not this game is a puzzle game, yeah whoever thought of a puzzle game with an awesome story? Anyways, you come face to face with a world of blocks, the object is to use these blocks to create a pathway to climb to the top. Oh did I mention the blocks are disappearing behind you, you need to move a good pace if you want to survive. Sounds easy? Well it’s not. The game becomes increasingly difficult. Sounds boring? It’s not. The game does a good job introducing new challenges with each level.

These challenges come in the forms of different types of blocks, new enemies, and harder bosses. You will come across sheep that will try to prevent you from climbing, try to kill you, and try to knock you down. You’ll also come across blocks that blow up, try to impale you with spikes, or make you slide across them. Of course there are more types of enemies and blocks but I’ll let you discover those on your own. You come across various items along the way that will help you on your path to freedom.

Stages have multiple levels to them, once you complete a level you’ll arrive at a landing point. When you are on the landing you will have the opportunity to talk to other sheep or learn new techniques. After you’ve done that you enter the confessional where you will be asked a question. Depending on your answer you meter will either move towards chaos or law so choose carefully. Once you complete the stage you will wake up from your nightmare and be greeted with more cutscenes.

The audio in this game is a bit iffy. The music is pretty good but not amazing, though it does fit the feel of the game. Unfortunately the audio levels are a different story. I found it to be all over the place at times. What I mean by that is that you’ll get used to the nightmare audio levels and then boom it may get loud during a cutscene, then quiet during dialogue. I’ve seen other people with this issue so I don’t think it’s an isolated incident. It’s not a deal breaker, but it can be annoying.

I think that about covers the game itself, if I forgot anything let me know and I’ll correct it.

Ok now that is over, lets hear my thoughts.

This game is good but it does have its flaws. For people not familiar to games with a lot of dialogue may be turned off by bar sequences. I enjoy a lot of dialogue so it was right up my alley, but for other this can cause you to lose your attention after a while. The puzzles can be slightly repetitive, and can feel annoying when you are forced to back track a bunch in order to create a pathway. I didn’t find it too bad, but for people that aren’t fond of puzzle games this may annoy you. That being said if you don’t like puzzle games you probably shouldn’t be playing this game in the first place. Enemies annoyed me in the later levels in the game, sometimes they make you waste too much time trying to get around them. But this can be avoided if you collect the right items so it’s not really a negative. I did not like the fact that when you hang on the edge of a block and go behind it the controls reverse once you stop moving. It made it extremely complicated for me sometimes and caused me to waste way to much time to do something I could have done quickly. Explanations seemed really dragged out, many of them could have been said in fewer words than they were. There were also way too many of them to be honest. One little problem for some is the bell that constantly rings when you get near the end of a level/ when you are at landings. I pretty much tuned it out though. The last little annoyance of mine was the “Golden Playhouse” logo during cutscenes. Again this is not a negative but merely an annoyance for me personally.

Lets talk about some positives though. The story is absolutely fantastic. I feel like the characters are real people and they are all relatable. Character interactions feel real and not too cheesy. Vincent’s inner thoughts are pretty realistic as well. This is a good thing, many games fail at this but Catherine succeeds. The puzzles are fun even with some of the negatives I mentioned above. The controls feel smooth and fluid with the exception that I mentioned above. Graphics look gorgeous, and the animated cutscenes look fantastic as well. For a puzzle game it lasts pretty long, multiple endings makes for more replayability. The game lasted about 17 hours for me but can probably be beaten in 12-14. Voices (English in my case) were pretty good and seemed to fit the characters. I know it looks like there is more about the negatives, but it only appears that way due to explanations.

I would recommend this to anyone seeking an entertaining story or anyone seeking some fun puzzles.

My honest score is an 8.4

Puzzle gameplay can feel repetitive but this games fantastic story telling gives it a nice bump.

If you’d like to see the “Love is Over” unboxing you can do so at my old site. A link to it HERE

Also check out my good friend Asura’s review of the game HERE

This is my review in this style, I am hoping for it to feel a little more professional and not just a personal fanboy chat about why a game is purely awesome in my mind. Please feel free to give me comments about how I can improve.