Catherine is unique, I'll give it that. But although it's slick it's one of the most frustrating games I have ever played. From the creators of Persona and Digital Devil Saga, we have what feels like a dating sim game crossed with a platform puzzle game. You play as Vincent, a guy having a personal crisis about committing fully to a relationship with his girlfriend. At the same time he is suffering bizarre nightmares about climbing never ending staircases, and then waking up with a naked mystery blonde in his bed!
The gameplay of Catherine is very, very simple. During the day you play Vincent in a bar, drinking with his friends. The bar is the only playable area of the game (apart from the nightmares) and it's only one room, with conversation options that pop up with people as you walk about. You never play as Vincent at any other time of day. When you decide you've had enough of the bar, you can go home. Once you decide to leave, the other half of the gameplay kicks in...Vincent goes home to sleep and the nightmares begin. In these dreams Vincent has but a single task: to climb an immense staircase made of square blocks. Well, it's not really a staircase because the puzzle is that the blocks can be pulled and pushed and you have to work out how to make an initially unscaleable surface or pile of blocks climbable, so that you can reach the top and end the nightmare.
So why do I think this game is painful? Because these dream stages are so freakin' difficult! I ended up screaming, wailing and jumping out of my chair far more often than I care to remember. Ok that's an overstatement, but be warned - if you like brain teasers you'll be delirious, but if that's not your forte, "Catherine" can be almost unbearably challenging. The reason it's so hard is that the block puzzles require you to think predictively, logically, and fast. That last one is the killer. There's no luxury of contemplation, because in the dream, you must climb steadily and quickly as the bottom rows of the staircase fall away beneath you at a constant rate and if you're too slow you fall off with them and thats Game Over. Well you get retries, but these are NOT unlimited, and the main menu is not what you want to keep seeing. So things start of simple, but very soon the puzzles become quite tricky, and then they become more challenging, and then they become maddeningly difficult. As they get worse, the game designers throw more evil at you in the form of trick blocks that crack and explode, make you slide off the edge, or kill you with sudden spikes. And every few levels there is a boss, in the form of a giant ..creature that attacks you as you climb and rips away blocks as you scrabble to get higher. As a result I can tell you, that the end of some stages will be a blessed relief, but for me it was not a sense of achievement I felt, but relief at knowing I would never have to go through it again.
I should of course praise the game designers for having successfully designed such a devilishly difficult game, but, well maybe people who play for distraction and entertainment don't need their challenges to be quite this...punishing.
So in short, you have to like the block puzzles because that really is the entire game. Outside of this, the "plot" part of the game (Vincent's real life) is as weak as dishwater. Vincent is a loser with no charm or ambition. As his girlfriend Katherine berates him about not being serious he sweats and fidgets like a spineless worm, even going into full scale meltdown when she tells him she wants to start a family. It's actually quite pathetic to watch. Equally loopy are Vincents encounters with the mysterious blonde babe Catherine, who he can't be man enough to dump even though there's obviousy something a bit psycho about her. The whole plot revolves around helping Vincent come to his senses and make the right decision but he's so dumb I really didn't care about him. Some of this is due to the really terrible script, in which you hear the kind of dialogue they only seem to write for video games, along the lines of: "Vincent, you've been acting really weird lately", "Vincent what are you talking about? I don't understand you?" and the classic "Won't someone just explain to me exactly what is going on?" All of which happens in the bar and the lines of dialogue are little more than cliches tossed about to fill enough screentime inbetween the nightmare stages.
The design of the game is drawn anime style, totally flat (and actually quite poorly drwan) in the cut scenes, quite nicely cel-shaded in the bar, and full blown 3D in the nightmares. The best looking part of the game is the nightmares by a long shot, although they always look pretty similar (wall of blocks, always from the same angle), but the bosses are great, really fun to watch..if you can appreciate this while desperately trying to climb away from them!
So my bottom line is, there were times when I absolutely HATED playing this game. It's quite hard to recommend, you really need a masochistic streak to keep coming back to it and trying to solve the puzzle stages, but there are sure to be a few people that eat it up. The final few levels are insane, although I have a tip for you, in that things peak in difficulty at about 75% of the way through the game, and then actually feel easier as the last stages are more about speed and dodging attacks than solving seemingly impossible climbs. But it IS difficult, and when I finally finished it (I admit a couple of tricky moments meant I had no choice but to turn to the internet for clues, but the final chapter was all my own doing), I thought to myself: "Thank God that is finally over!!"
Is that the kind of feeling you want to have as you watch the closing credits of any game? Up to you!