Catherine: Smart and Sexy

I'd like to warn any readers that this review will not contain major spoilers, but might give away a little bit about the flow of the game. If you REALLY want to go into the game without expectations, I wouldn't read this.

Any of my friends can tell you, I'm an enormous fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series. Have been since Nocturne/Lucifer's Call came out (I think I even failed a class or two because of it). They're dark, adult, occult, deeper than most, and have varying themes. I've loved every game since then without exception. It's a love that I don't have for other series. I'm normally the type of person that will probably buy a game used when I get around to it, even if I was looking forward to it. I only just a couple of months ago bought Mass Effect 2 for my PS3, I get every Ratchet & Clank game second hand, despite the fact that they are the best platformers the market has to offer at the moment.

SMT games simply cannot wait. I pre-ordered Catherine, a measure I haven't taken since the last in the series, Persona 4, came out. Strictly speaking, Catherine isn't part of the series but it's the exact same team with the exact same style exploring the exact same vein of storytelling. So, even if it doesn't bear the spooky SMT pentacle sigil, it's still a spiritual part of the series and something I've been keeping my eye on for a while now, anxiously waiting to see what STUDIO4°C would place before me this time.

You see, from the very first preview, this game promised to be a step up on the grown-up scale. Not with gore or boobies, but through some genuine mature content. When the rating warnings on the back says, "mature themes," it looked like they wouldn't be fucking around this time. Most of the games in the series have caught a bit of controversy because of the occult aspects in them. They delve into some very interesting and deep ideas and concepts (Teddy's "true self" monologue comes to mind) but any serious musings about power, sexuality, suicide, the self or other deep and personal issues were stifled a bit by a few things. For one, they had to keep things at a reasonably tame level since a large part of their projected audience were teenagers. As a result, most of the time the characters in the games are teens themselves and since they tend to focus on issues that everybody faces (particularly Persona 3&4) attention was given to the trails of teens and highschool (granted, everybody was a bit more fucked up than your average youth, but they had to make it interesting).

Not today, folks. That's just the box art, too.

Not so with Catherine. Our main character is 32-year-old Vincent. He's a pretty cool guy who's good to his friends, but is coasting on a low-income job and his girlfriend, Katherine, is dropping serious hints about taking things up a notch. As in marriage. He has reservations about this as he's pretty comfortable going nowhere fast. At night he's started having recurring nightmares, where he's climbing a huge tower trying to get away from a huge monstrosity. Already, the tone is set. Nice guy who doesn't know what he's doing exactly but he likes it that way, and isn't keen on making major commitments. While he seems comfortable where he is, we already get the feeling that he's running away from his own indecisiveness. Sound familiar? It sure hit home for me.

One night, while he's at his usual watering hole, a gorgeous young blonde strikes up a conversation with him and before he knows it he's waking up in his bed with no memory of the night before but the girl from the bar (Catherine) is lying next to him. Thus begins Vincent's journey of guilt, self-sabotage and discovery. The coolest part of it is that they actually manage to make you suffer along-side him; yes, he cheated on his long-time girlfriend and is now two-timing. However, he is constantly trying to set things right but is sabotaged every step of the way by circumstance and his own cowardice.

As the game progresses you get several opportunities to talk to people and develop Vincent's moral code and flesh out what he wants out of life, i.e., Catherine or Katherine. How you play determines your ending. There are conversation options, or even text messaging while you are at the bar. The texting option is pretty cool actually, you can build them sentence by sentence until you have the complete text and it gauges the tone of the text, modifying the response of whoever you sent it to. Not amazing but I think it's neat. However, this sounds cool and all, but it just sounds like a lot of talking and cinematics. Where's the game part of the game? Well, remember those nightmares I mentioned?

Each night, Vincent has to make it through a nightmare where he is climbing the same tower. Other people from the real world seem to be showing up in the nightmare world as well (but only men... hm), only in the form of anthropomorphic sheep, with the promise that if they escape and reach the top they will attain "true freedom," but if he dies in the nightmare, he dies in real life. This tower kind of functions like an old arcade platformer. You run along on blocks and can move them around to create stairs and bridges until you get to the goal. Sounds weird, but it's pretty straightforward while still being challenging. Really challenging, actually. Really, really challenging. Catherine is a really fucking challenging game.

I'm never very good at describing what I like/dislike about gameplay but I liked the tower climbing. It was fun and hard. I'm kind of disappointed that the developers are still hanging on to the rpg-by-day, dungeon-crawler-by-night structure but to their credit it's always worked well with the themes. Which, in this case, are guilt and indecision. Everybody involved in the nightmare world is plagued by some form of guilt that makes them stagnate in some form or another. In Vincent's case, it's the fact that he's cheating and doesn't seem to want the same things as his beloved and rather than tackle the issues, he's dancing around them and trying to get his life back to the way it was without moving forward. As you progress you get to see how torn up he is over the ordeal and you really start to feel for him, despite the fact that it was his own doing. He's a guy you can have sympathy for.

So is Catherine, in the end, the big game changer I was waiting for? Well, yeah, but not as much as I'd hoped. It approached sexuality, interpersonal relationships and life stages in a way I haven't ever seen in a game before. It was a sexy adult drama/tragedy, rife with symbolism and a strong focus on it's themes. Anybody looking for gratuitous violence or nudity had best look elsewhere. Everything is done in a tasteful but completely unabashed way. Well done in that respect.

On the other hand, it's entirely too short. It didn't have to be RPG-length, but I did expect upwards of 16-20 hours at least. I strolled through it in 12. I was hoping for a little more time to get to know the characters. Also, the story is really well paced up until the last 2-3 hours or so, then it takes a turn for the wonky and speeds by far too quickly. However, as a counterpoint to that, the story is still awesome, if a little weird and a little fast. Thankfully it has some replay value, as it's not just the endings that change, but the tower itself can change depending on how you play during your daytime hours. Plus there are extra game modes once you beat it, but for somebody mainly interested in the story, that doesn't entice me much. Still, the tower is pretty fun so I might get a few extra hours out of it.

Also, while the game mentions a few times that there's no "wrong" way to play and that the morality compass is "order vs chaos," it's merely a thinly veiled attempt at seeming ethically impartial. One option is clearly good and the other is, if not evil then bad or at the very least, mean.

So, with all that said, fun levels will range from okay to awesome but it's something that I hope developers will take note of. I was hooked on the story from start to finish not just because it was cool and entertaining, but because it resonated with me on multiple levels and it even stuck with me and gave me something to think about. I sincerely hope this game gets a lot of attention because it's exactly the sort of thing I have in mind when I defend video games as a legitimate art form.

Is it the Goethe's Faust of video games? Well, probably not (that might actually belong to Silent Hill 2), but there are certainly similarities and it's really paving the way for something like that to come along soon.