Catherine

Vincent Brooks has to choose between two women; Katherine has been in a relationship with him for years and now wants to take the next big step, while Catherine represents freedom and flexibility with sexual desires. However, during nights, he experiences horrible nightmares involving weird sheeps and climbing up to the top!

Catherine is an original mixed video game with psychological horror, intimidating timed puzzles, social parts and some questions regarding your own morality. I answered honestly at the confession questions, but I was leaning more towards going for Catherine or the naughty route.

Take heed, Catherine is both the name of the game and the other mysterious girl of the story, representing lust and cuteness and what else going through Vincent's mind. There doesn't seem to be a clear reason for why both female characters sound similar.

So the main course is about living up the nightmares, climbing through towers of blocks in your way towards the next level in order to reach "true freedom" at the end. At the end of every night, which is usually divided into 3 parts, there is a nightmare boss chasing you, not a boss fight.

How do the puzzles work? Well, you push blocks around in order to create stairs or swivel your way around them using the edges in order to reach new ground. As these puzzle stages have a time limit, you will have to think quick before confusingly moving blocks around.

There is an undo button should you mess up once, and between each stage, there are several sheeps walking around on a floating field where they can give you techniques during the puzzle sequences or give you insight into the unfolding mysterious story.

After you reach the top, the game switches over to daytime, and you will be able to socialize with your friends, communicate with your girlfriends and have casual talks with others at your favorite bar while seeing cut-scenes as well, rendered in cell shaded graphics or anime.

While walking around the bar, you are able to do a few things, but the most interesting feature is to play a bonus version from the main game itself. It is called Rapunzel and the difference with it is that time is now infinite, and you are only able to move around blocks for a few times.

Back to the main gameplay, there are different kinds of blocks which stand in your way, Such as ice blocks, trap blocks and bomb blocks. The difficulty of facing these obstacles as well as all of the levels can range from driving you nuts towards driving you even more nuts.

Luckily there are collectable items for you to use, such as making you able to climb up to two blocks, killing off all of the enemies or creating a block. There is a particular sheep that sells you these things too should you have the need.

Catherine is no breezeover. This is a lengthy title only because the puzzles themselves took me sometimes so long to get past before reaching the next part. But I am not alone, Catherine is kicking a lot of asses around. Expect to die often here.

As the story continues to be quite thrilling to follow in the sense of how it will continue regarding Vincent's dilemmas, the nightmares and the mysteries, in retrospect, for me it did have a happy end. Even though I leaned towards Catherine's side, I turned out to have the good ending instead, possibly because I answered honestly pretty much all of the time.

Beating the main story will unlock Colloseum mode, where you will be able to compete with another friend. You could also co-operate by opening the Babel mode, where single or multiplayer trials await you, although you are advised to be adept at the game before trying this.

Oh, and did I mention that Catherine is a very Japanese video game? It could even have been a Grasshopper Manufacture or Suda51 game, when looking at the scale of weirdness of this. The presentation is pretty much an eye catcher because nothing else looks like Catherine out there.

But it's not all well done. The game suffers from clunky controls. Circling around with the camera, especially at the back of stages can be frustrating. Once you are manouevring at the back, controls are reversed as well, which although logical in the end did not work out great.

And the difficulty curve, or just the balance between Easy, Normal and Hard is unconventional. I managed to beat it on Normal Mode, but I felt that there should had been one mode instead. For me, any game should start out easy long enough for the majority of players to keep trying.

Having said all of that, Catherine remains an unusual title which became a surprise hit published by Atlus. If you are looking for something completely different, then you should give this an attempt and support the creativity found in it.

Rating: 7.5