Catherine
Romance is not a genre you see much in gaming. You might have the occasional romantic subplot but it has never been the core of a game, outside of dating simulators which are often dodgy hentai games anyway. Catherine quite nicely blends Romance with horror and the supernatural to provide an experience with very few rivals.
You play as Vincent Brooks who is in the middle of a long term relationship with his Girlfriend Katherine. She starts pressurising him to take their relationship further with talk of marriage and settling down. Vincent typically isn’t reacting to this all that well and at the same time starts having nightmares. To make matters worse a young seductive blonde named Catherine wakes up next to him one morning.
You spend the game juggling both girls and trying to conquer his nightmares where you have to climb walls filled with deadly traps, while being chases by manifestations of Vincent’s troubles.
The game is split into two, the bar stages and the nightmare stages. The bar stages are safe areas where you interact with other characters, check and reply to phone messages, play mini games and drink alcohol (which helps you in the nightmare stages). This is to set you up for the Nightmare stages which are the bulk of the game. The bar stages feature an interesting mechanic which allows you to reply to text messages by selecting phrases. How you respond to texts are up to you and play their part in what ending you get.
The Nightmare stages see you climbing large walls of blocks by pushing and pulling blocks to create stairs. These walls hover over the dark abyss below which eats at the bottom row of blocks every so often. You have to climb the wall before the row you’re on gets swallowed by the darkness. As you progress more hazards are placed in your paths and it gets harder to create stairs. Hazards include weak blocks that collapse as you stand on them, Ice blocks that make you slip as you walk on them and trap blocks that kill you if you spent more than a second on them.
The higher scores and ranks come from climbing the walls quickly and collecting the various coins scattered across the wall. Catherine will test you Skill, Intelligence and your patience to their limits even on Normal difficulty but rarely feels unfair.
What does need work however are the controls. Sometimes you think faster and react faster than what Vincent can. This can leads to moments of frustration when a misstep occurs such as standing on a block when you just want to face it, or pushing a block when you wanted to pull because the controls didn’t register the switch from up to down quick enough.
By far the worst offender is the camera which gives you the option to look around the wall, but not far enough. You can climb around the back but you do so without being able to see where you are going. On the Hardest difficulty in particular there are instance where you have to go round the back and this becomes a bit unfair when you can’t see where you are going.
Between each Nightmare stage you are asked a random question which moves the meter the determines your ending either left or right. For some of these questions it can be obvious which choice will sway the meter in which direction, but for others it can be very vague. For example you are asked “which is better Boxers of Briefs?”, while there is no wrong answer, when you go for a particular ending it needs to be clear what answer will lead where. Although Catherine does record what people say and gives a pie chart after each question showing what people answered first time around, which is pretty cool.
The story is a nice length and made for multiple playthroughs. The challenge and multiplayer modes also expand its life and it has a nice lengthy mini game that will take sometime to finish (which obviously inspired the nightmare stages). So there’s plenty of life in the game. It’s a shame the multiplayer mode is offline only though, would’ve been interesting to see if it could take some of the share away from more popular online titles.
Overall Catherine is a quirky, different and above all challenging game that will test your skill, intelligence and patience in a way that most games should. It has some interesting ideas that don’t always work but it’s always nice to see a developer try something different. Barring some noticeable control and camera issues there isn’t really a lot wrong about Catherine. It all works well for what it is even though it’s unlikely to win any GOTY awards. Then again this year hasn’t been the best for games, not compared to last year anyway.
8/10
You play as Vincent Brooks who is in the middle of a long term relationship with his Girlfriend Katherine. She starts pressurising him to take their relationship further with talk of marriage and settling down. Vincent typically isn’t reacting to this all that well and at the same time starts having nightmares. To make matters worse a young seductive blonde named Catherine wakes up next to him one morning.
You spend the game juggling both girls and trying to conquer his nightmares where you have to climb walls filled with deadly traps, while being chases by manifestations of Vincent’s troubles.
The game is split into two, the bar stages and the nightmare stages. The bar stages are safe areas where you interact with other characters, check and reply to phone messages, play mini games and drink alcohol (which helps you in the nightmare stages). This is to set you up for the Nightmare stages which are the bulk of the game. The bar stages feature an interesting mechanic which allows you to reply to text messages by selecting phrases. How you respond to texts are up to you and play their part in what ending you get.
The Nightmare stages see you climbing large walls of blocks by pushing and pulling blocks to create stairs. These walls hover over the dark abyss below which eats at the bottom row of blocks every so often. You have to climb the wall before the row you’re on gets swallowed by the darkness. As you progress more hazards are placed in your paths and it gets harder to create stairs. Hazards include weak blocks that collapse as you stand on them, Ice blocks that make you slip as you walk on them and trap blocks that kill you if you spent more than a second on them.
The higher scores and ranks come from climbing the walls quickly and collecting the various coins scattered across the wall. Catherine will test you Skill, Intelligence and your patience to their limits even on Normal difficulty but rarely feels unfair.
What does need work however are the controls. Sometimes you think faster and react faster than what Vincent can. This can leads to moments of frustration when a misstep occurs such as standing on a block when you just want to face it, or pushing a block when you wanted to pull because the controls didn’t register the switch from up to down quick enough.
By far the worst offender is the camera which gives you the option to look around the wall, but not far enough. You can climb around the back but you do so without being able to see where you are going. On the Hardest difficulty in particular there are instance where you have to go round the back and this becomes a bit unfair when you can’t see where you are going.
Between each Nightmare stage you are asked a random question which moves the meter the determines your ending either left or right. For some of these questions it can be obvious which choice will sway the meter in which direction, but for others it can be very vague. For example you are asked “which is better Boxers of Briefs?”, while there is no wrong answer, when you go for a particular ending it needs to be clear what answer will lead where. Although Catherine does record what people say and gives a pie chart after each question showing what people answered first time around, which is pretty cool.
The story is a nice length and made for multiple playthroughs. The challenge and multiplayer modes also expand its life and it has a nice lengthy mini game that will take sometime to finish (which obviously inspired the nightmare stages). So there’s plenty of life in the game. It’s a shame the multiplayer mode is offline only though, would’ve been interesting to see if it could take some of the share away from more popular online titles.
Overall Catherine is a quirky, different and above all challenging game that will test your skill, intelligence and patience in a way that most games should. It has some interesting ideas that don’t always work but it’s always nice to see a developer try something different. Barring some noticeable control and camera issues there isn’t really a lot wrong about Catherine. It all works well for what it is even though it’s unlikely to win any GOTY awards. Then again this year hasn’t been the best for games, not compared to last year anyway.
8/10
posted by Master hunter at 1:43 pm
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