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Review: Catherine

Developed and published by Atlus. Available on XBox 360 and Playstation 3.

2011 has been an odd year for video games. With the current console generation lasting longer than any before it, innovation has languished, and we gamers are stuck treading water in an ocean of CoD-a-bes, Zeld-alikes, and undercooked, oversold gimmick-fests that lean on half-advancements like motion controls and 3D visuals. So when a game like Catherine comes along, we should be pretty excited about it…shouldn’t we? Catherine is definitely a unique game; I know I’ve never played anything like it, but having beaten it, I will firmly say that I don’t want to play anything like it again. It’s a puzzle game with a very thick, unskippable story wrapped around it, and while I don’t have a problem with that in theory, the puzzles are so frustrating, and the story so juvenile, that I can’t recommend it.

You play as Vincent, a thirty-something who’s stuck in a relationship with a successful woman named Katherine. Vincent and Katherine don’t love each other. They’ve been dating for years, but the bloom’s off the rose. They never say “I love you,” they never kiss each other goodbye, and their dates consist of awkward pauses, eerie stares, and Vincent breaking into cold sweats. Vincent is a milquetoast in the process of developing his independence, but Katherine is not going to wait for a late bloomer.

Meanwhile, bachelors, similar in look and age to Vincent, have been dying in their sleep. A rumor spreads of a deadly nightmare, one designed to punish those young men who cheat on their girlfriends. Vincent first hears about this rumor from his buddies at the local watering hole, and everyone is wondering who will be the next to die. That same night, Catherine, a ditzy blonde with curly fries for hair, hits on Vincent while he’s toasted, and the premise of the game is set.

Catherine, the game, is split into two styles of play. The first is the adventure/story portion, which is set in the real world, and which sees Vincent struggle with his new temptation and discuss his relationships with his friends. The other is the puzzle/action game, where Vincent enters the nightmare world and is forced to solve a series of block-pushing puzzles to wake up alive.

The adventure segments are mostly cutscenes, but they grant control to the player once Vincent visits The Stray Sheep, his neighborhood bar. This plays out like a town in most RPGs: you move Vincent around the bar, you make him talk to people, watch the news, drink his cocktails, go to the bathroom, play the arcade game, and answer his phone.

The phone is probably the most interesting element of the adventure scenes. Occasionally Vincent will receive text messages and calls from Katherine and Catherine, and the player will get to decide how to respond to them. As you’d expect, Katherine’s messages are angry and impatient, warning you not to drink so much, while Catherine’s messages usually include pictures of herself, though they are really quite tame for a mature-rated game.

How you respond to these calls and texts will affect Vincent’s attitudes toward these women. You can choose to be affectionate and accommodating, icy and rude, or detached and indifferent to either or both of them. Your choices will affect the direction of the story, and, of course, the ending. Since Vincent is introduced as such a weak-willed wimp, it feels good to seize him and make him do what you feel is best for him.

When you send Vincent staggering home from the bar, the weird stuff starts. He drifts off to sleep and finds himself in a gothic nightmare world, where he, and hundreds of other prisoners (who take on the shapes of man-sized sheep to Vincent’s eyes), is forced to climb massive walls of blocks if he wants to escape.

This is the heart of Catherine: these action scenes are the only places where Vincent can die. The walls that Vincent must climb are constantly crumbling, one tier of blocks at a time, and you also have rival sheep who will shove you around in their fear and confusion, so it’s very easy to fall to a horrible death. At the end of each night, you will be pursued by a monstrous freak-demon of a boss, one that is usually related to a social challenge that Vincent is facing in real life, and these bosses will throw all manner of deadly weaponry at you as you try to climb. Expect to die repeatedly, because this game is very hard. I often looked upon the enormous, sheer walls I was asked to climb, and wondered just what in hell I was supposed to do.

The good news is that Vincent, armed with only his pillow and a pair of boxers, is extremely maneuverable. He runs quickly, he can pull and climb around blocks, and he can knock enemies around himself with his pillow. The ubiquitous blocks have special physical properties in these peculiar dream-dungeons, and they can balance themselves on edge, hide spike traps, launch Vincent high in the air, or make him slip and slide long distances. Negotiating these hazards requires a little time and thinking, but you’re under the constant pressure of the crumbling wall, and time is a luxury.

The game tries to help you out by offering special items to buy and fellow prisoners to swap climbing techniques with. If you can grab some of the stacks of coins that are scattered in the block walls, you can trade them to a shopkeeper who hangs out between flights for nifty tools. Some of them are quite handy, like a talisman that creates a pushable block out of thin air, or a bible that instantly destroys all enemies in sight. The problems are that Vincent can only carry one item at a time, and you won’t know what kinds of challenges you’ll be facing in the puzzles to come, so you’ll have to buy the item that you think might be useful, and hope for the best.

As for the chatty sheep, you’ll find a couple who are very helpful, in that they’ll show you video demonstrations of climbing techniques that you can use to get out of tough situations. It’s rarely easy to remember these complex moves when you have a time limit, but you’ll find that some of them will save your hide more than once.

If you’re a fan of puzzle games, these action scenes will probably be a joy to you, but you have to remember that the game doesn’t give you much time to think. Unlike games like Tetris or Dr. Mario, which give you a chance to make up for mistakes, a single wrong move, or a single moment in the wrong place, can mean an instant loss. Also, the plot doesn’t move or twist much during puzzles, so if you’re playing the game for its story, the action scenes, which get longer and longer as the game goes on, won’t excite you. Toward the end of the game, there is one puzzle scene that plays very differently from all the others, but it only ends up being even more difficult than all the others as a result.

I found the puzzles so frustrating, that I began to look forward to the adventure scenes so I could see more of the story. Though Vincent was a bit of a emotional lump, I still was quite curious to see what would happen to him. I was sorely disappointed, though, to see that the story was episodic, and its cycle doesn’t change much until near the very end. Vincent whines to his friends, his friends console him, Vincent gets drunk at the bar, and then he goes home. I kept hoping that something would just happen now and again to keep things interesting, but it doesn’t. I like the calm, casual conversations that occur between Vincent and his pals. They seem like real dudes, guys you’d expect to hang out together. Their banter is believable, but it never goes anywhere. There’s no drama to it.

Most of game’s major plot events take place in Vincent’s head, as he rationalizes his behavior and decides on what woman he wants to be with. His decisions are based on your treatment of the women. It’s a little strange, though. You can be extremely cruel to Catherine one night, even outright ordering her to stop texting you, and she’ll still send you a bright and cheery message the following night, complete with annoying emoticons and a sexy picture. Again, there’s no drama to it.

The game tests your own values about love and relationships with its phone calls, text messages, and it even asks moral questions that it expects you to answer honestly. Now, a normal, intelligent human being is a nuanced thing, whose opinions on a subject may differ depending on the circumstances. The game, however, only offers its greatest rewards (and best endings) to extremists: those folks who would practice the same values all the time. There’s just something…childish about that.

Worst of all, as the story nears its close, it decides to smear its evergreen, real life issues with its silly, supernatural ones, and that’s when I just stopped caring. Remember how Metal Gear Solid raised our eyebrows with its heavy discussions about nuclear proliferation, and then the second game went and threw a goddamn VAMPIRE in the story? That’s what the end of Catherine feels like. Maturity is simply heaved out the window, and for me, that is the game’s greatest and saddest fault.

Catherine is presented and packaged as a game for grown-ups: its cover art looks like it belongs on a hentai comic. However, after seeing the way it plays out, I began to wonder whether the designers ever dated a woman in their lives. Love is reduced to a frightening practicality, and the “sex” is merely implied, and very, very mildly. Most nights, Vincent stumbles home from The Stray Sheep alone, and then wakes up with Catherine beside him the following morning. Even Vincent wonders whether sex is happening at all.

And the way Catherine talks? It’s not the way a woman talks.

Catherine is a harlequin novel by writers who don’t understand love, an erotic painting by a man who’s never touched a woman. Catherine wants to reach out to grown-ups and tell a mature story, and I’m all for that, but a work can only be as wise as its creators, and it doesn’t seem to me that Catherine’s creators do much more than play video games most of the time. Atlus needed to hire a real writer for this game, not some proven manga artist who specializes in titillating teenagers.

Now, I’m not in favor of sex in entertainment for its own sake, but I honestly expected Catherine, which sold itself as a sexy game, to take some risks in this area. This game had a chance to do something unheard of in video games: to talk about sex the way that real adults do. Believe it or not, sex can be depicted and discussed in a manner that doesn’t involve measurements. Watch Raul Julia gaze into Anjelica Huston’s eyes in The Addams Family, see Orlando Bloom kiss Keira Knightley’s legs in Pirates of the Caribbean, witness Jake Gyllenhaal playfully pounce on Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs: there are so many ways to show love and desire without being insulting, but Catherine doesn’t know how, so it skirts around it, plays it safe, shows no passion, and comes off as timid and faint-hearted as Vincent himself.

Even if Atlus didn’t know how to take the mature route, they could have at least tried the opposite way and gone completely overboard. We gamers are undeniably an undersexed lot; a Google search for “portal sexy fanfiction” will prove that. Why not give us fat, bearded nerds what we can’t have in real life? I don’t care that they’re cartoons; if you want to talk sex, then show me some oinkin’ and boinkin’! Where’s that Japanese debauchery that I hear is so prevalent in anime? Come on, Atlus, push the envelope! Thrill me, shock me, make me say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe they put that in the game!” But no, you get nothing. No orgasmic moaning, no private-stroking, no making out, not even a nip-slip.

Video games are so far behind movies that we didn’t get to hear anyone say “fuck” in a game until Max Payne 2 came out. Eight years later, we have Catherine, a game where everyone says “fuck,” but you still can’t see anyone do it.

I’m sure there are plenty of reasons for Catherine’s hesitance: the youth of the medium, the image of video games as being for children, the repression of the Japanese culture, but these don’t make the game’s failures acceptable. There are some fascinating ideas in Catherine that just aren’t developed enough, and this is sad because stories about real relationships could be a huge step forward for video games. Most gamers today are adults, after all, people who grew up with video games and who now crave material that suits their tastes. Catherine, however, can’t muster more than a tentative poke at the subject matter, and it comes off as adolescent as a result. I guess I should just be glad that it tried, and I should hope that another game, one inspired by Catherine, will try something a bit bolder in years to come. For now, though, Catherine is just another aggravating puzzle game, the kind of thing you might find on the iTunes store for a buck. In fact, I think there is a clone or two available there. Buy that instead of Catherine, you’ll be better off.

Controller1.com rating: 2/3 for puzzle game lovers, 1/3 for everyone else