In this review, I beat Catherine. Now if only there was a way that I could say that without someone filing for domestic abuse charges.
Atlus continues its fascination with making us climb up ridiculous towers that lead to some existential place during the middle of the night with their latest game from the Persona development team, Catherine. If anyone played Persona 3 or its various incarnations, the main goal of the game (other than dating imaginary characters) was to climb Tartarus during the dark hour. Good to know that 5 years later, Altus now has us climbing a tower again in the middle of the night, but this time its comprised of blocks and sheep.
First off, the anime, cell-shaded graphics are awesome. It disappoints me that more games with this same graphic styling haven't made their way over to the States, and I will be further disappointed if Persona 5 doesn't have the same styling as well. All the character emote properly and move convincingly; the voice acting is solid. The only hiccup I experienced with the sound was with the dialog running into each other. Sometimes characters wouldn't properly finish their sentences before starting the next one, so it seemed like they were talking over themselves which has to be the greatest ventriloquist feat ever executed.
The story isn't that deep and the characters aren't the most developed, but an impression is left. You're Vincent Brooks (and I'm Ryan Brooks) and you're put through guilt-trip-induced trials because you have cheated on your girlfriend, Katherine, with another girl named Catherine. Everything the game is based around the concept of atonement and relationships. It's nice to see a game define a concept and stick with it through every facet. The one thing that doesn't work so well is the moral choice system. What you're supposed to do whenever a game throws this mechanic at you is choose the route you'd personally take while playing the game. What you're probably going to do, like I did, was just go to one extreme to see one ending, and then replay and go the other to see the other ending. Thus, defeating the real point of the moral choice system. Let's face it, no one acts out in games the way they do in real life. In a real zombie apocalypse, I'd probably piss my pants and hide somewhere until someone rescued me and my drenched pants. In a game, I'll find the nearest firepower and unload round after round of prejudice towards anything remotely undead.
One could make the argument that this is a simple mechanic employed to make the player go through the game to get different endings, but I counter with the point that games have done multiple endings in the past without needed a meter to tell me how good or bad I am. It is interesting to see scenes diverge depending on how you've previously answered questions and acted, but I'd rather not see the meter or have the moral points be so obvious. After every block puzzle, the game literally stops you to ask a question about what you would do in a situation. The 'good' and 'bad' answers are obvious and don't really enhance the game play or story. I'd rather have my actions decide what course the game takes, and with a dating simulation game, there should've been no problem setting up situations to question how I would handle different relationship-based moments.
Game play consists of two different scenarios: there are the moment where you are in your bar, chatting it up with friends, looking at naughty pictures or playing Rapunzel, which is a block game within a block game... within a dream and there are the moments you spend climbing blocks in your sleep. The bar interactions are very reminiscent of the simulation moments in Persona 3 and 4. It's interesting to interact with different characters or just sit down at the table and get drunk, and most of the actions do have an effect on the outcome of the game and it's 8 different endings.
The block-climbing faces you off with different varieties of blocks, usually a new one introduced with each new level, and you have to climb your way to the top while sections start falling off periodically. The puzzles can be solved many different ways, and the game lets you reset up to 9 moves in case you completely botched a climb like I did on soooo many occasions. Nothing like pushing a support block out of the way just to see the level above you come tumbling down. In case you really mess things up, which I did, you can choose to reset the entire level and start over, or start over from a checkpoint. Both options expend one retry, which can be accumulated by collecting pillows that are found on each level. And trust me, you will fail a puzzle many times before you figure out the magical combination of block moving needed to move on. Though each level, especially the later ones, are difficult, I always found myself having an excess of retries. Pillows will give you two retries, and if you fail, the item will re-spawn for you to collect it again. Thus, you can amass continues quickly by simply retrying a level over and over again.
The different variations of blocks in the game are interesting and creative, but not all are well executed. There are blocks in the later levels that have a face attached to them, that are supposed to knock you down or move randomly and can easily be defeating by stand on top of them or resetting back one move. There are cheap ones that will only reveal what type of block they are until you stand on top of them. Usually letting you get comfortable standing on them while you look around for somewhere to climb, only to have them turn into a spike block and demolish you; you have to constantly keep an eye on your footing as well as where you want to go.
Nothing beats the utter frustration when you mix in a camera that does not turn around the entire block and mind-bogglingly bad controls. If you're unfortunate enough to try to navigate behind the puzzle, I hope you didn't need to navigate anywhere you intended to in a hurry. And if you're playing this game, that's the case all the freaking time. Some brain child at Atlus decided that controls needed to be reversed for left and right while hanging off the back of blocks, but only when you move across them. When moving from block to block, they're not reversed. So moving across the back of a set of blocks turns into a guessing game of if you need to adjust for reverse controls or not reversed controls. Or you'll give up and never try it again. I had a handful of moments where I was just pressing left and I kept going left, then right, then left again, amounting to getting nowhere. It's utter insanity.
There's a small selection of items in the game, all of which have a purpose and serve to make the puzzles a little easier if you need some assistance. Two ways to get items are buy them in the store at the end of each level, or find them on the levels themselves. Trick is, you can only carry one item at a time. I had to rely on items twice to complete a stage, and if the item you want isn't on the level, you have to reset the game, go buy it, and then start the climb again.
Throughout some levels, enemies are scattered around. Most of them are just other sheep trying to climb up to freedom as well. The issue is, they always get in the way. Atlus takes this competition seriously, so you cannot move to a higher block when another sheep is occupying it. This leads to many moments where the floor is collapsing underneath you, and you can't move anywhere because the freaking sheep are blocking your way. The opposite of that is, if you're moving to a block on the same level or a level below, you can knock them off. Eventually, you'll encounter enemies that wield axes and will kill you if you're close enough. So on top of everything else going on in a level, you now have sheep murderers to look out for.
Bosses usually aren't apart of puzzle games, but they're here. Usually they all involve the same idea, just keep climbing higher and higher as fast as you can. Some use attacks that will knock out a section of the puzzle, all of which can be undone by your magic undo move. I actually managed to lock one of the end bosses in a constant state of readying an attack for a while by doing this, thus allowing me to progress further than I had before without them blasting away a precious section of the puzzle.
Of course no game is complete without some dumb escort mission, and there is just one in this game. And it is every bit of annoying as you'd think it'd be. Your AI partner has no sense of self preservation and has to be constantly attended to or they'll stand around as their death comes flying at them. There were a few moments where I had to shout at the TV "MOVE DAMN YOU" because there's no way to directly get them to move.
In true Atlus fashion, the game doesn't end when you think it will. It took about 7-8 more puzzles to actually beat the game than advertised. It wouldn't be an issue if the game didn't keep telling you, 'oh, don't worry, this is the last puzzle'. It was about the 3rd time the game told me that, that I just stopped listening to what it had to say on the matter.
At the end of it all Catherine is a unique game, but it could've executed the whole moral dilemma situation better. I wouldn't say it's team Persona's best game, but it's not their worst. The game will run you about 10-12 hours, not counting deadly plunges into the abyss. All I can really say is, I could live without it.
