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Catherine is a rather unusual game from the team behind the Persona series. When it was first revealed, I somewhat expected a by-the-numbers Shin Megami Tensei game. A sexier, more adult Persona, perhaps. In the months leading up to its release — February 17th in Japan, and I expect a Western release announcement soon after — it became clear that just as its characters are different from what this team usually makes, so is its gameplay.
Catherine is not a JRPG, and its length is shaping up to be closer to 20 hours, rather than 200. In fact, the best way to describe it is as a horror puzzle game with a relationship mechanic. What it does have in common with the Persona series is that it’s awesome.
The demo begins with a video mixing old and new Japanese art styles, which beautifully depicts animated look-alikes of Godzilla, The Ring, along with other generic horror tropes and genres such as mystery, science fiction and romance. It’s completed with an old cinema-type soundtrack, which constantly changes to accompany the scene, before ending with a Hollywood Biblical motif: a man resembling Charton Heston’s Moses in The Ten Commandments.
Before we’re given any grounding in the plot, the game drops us into the first puzzle (called Nightmare Stages) on easy difficulty. It’s called Underground Cemetary, and the premise is simple: navigate Vincent around the the tower of blocks, climbing and pulling them into position so that he can progress to the next level. The tension comes from the fact that layers of blocks below you are falling row-by-row, and if you’re not fast enough you’ll end up falling with them.
Complimenting this gameplay is Catherine’s soundtrack. Much of it is famous classical music, such as Gustav Holst's 'Mars' used in the first stage, which makes the whole scenario feel more dramatic than it actually is. This is a good thing since it adds to the game’s goofy humour.
At the end of each stage, the game tallays your score and awards you with bronze, silver and gold trophies depending on your score. Points can be achieved by collecting gold coins found throughout the stage, whilst moving quickly and climbing each row fast enough will build up a combo meter. When the bar at the top of the screen empties, your meter is broken and you’ll go back to low scoring again.
Another way to rack up lots of points is tied to the number of blocks remaining at the end of the stage. Each row which hasn’t fallen by the end adds to your safety bonus, meaning speed and quick thinking in Catherine’s nightmare stages is paramount.
On the game’s easy difficulty — the only option available in the demo — players also have the ability to push select and rewind their gameplay by one block movement, so as to not lose a life if they screw up. Considering the amount of lives the game seems to give you (ten if the demo is anything to go by) this reverse time feature really isn’t necessary, even for an easy difficulty. I’m glad I’ll be able to remove the temptation to use it in the full game by playing on normal or hard.
After reaching the top and travelling through the door with bright light shining behind it, the game takes us straight to the daytime story segment.
The first thing that’s striking is the anime cutscenes by Studio 4°C. They compliment the gameplay’s art style wonderfully, and whether it was the animation studio copying Atlus’ art direction, or Atlus following the studio’s lead, the transition from FMV to in-game 3D is smooth and painless.
It’s revealed that Vincent is in a relationship with Katherine, an old friend from high school who he met again at a reunion. Five years after hitting it off, she’s pregnant with his child and suggesting marriage. This leads Vincent, who is uninterested in such things, into the arms of Catherine, a girl ten years his junior.
After spending a drunken night with her, he starts having the strange nightmares which make up the puzzle gameplay segments, and his woes are further compounded by the bizarre deaths in his neighbourhood and a rumour spreading around town: young men who dream of falling cannot wake up, and die in their sleep with a shocked expression on their face.
The more plot-focussed gameplay segments involve Vincent chosing between Catherine and Katherine. In the demo, he receives a text from Katherine which he has to reply to. In a similar gameplay feature to GTA IV’s emails, the player can chose the tone of the reply. By pressing circle you can write a line, and then you can delete it and revise it with a new line that changes what Vincent writes. How you construct your text message will impact the Good/Evil bar that appears after you send it, and will ultimately determine the game’s ending.
After sending the reply, the story segment draws to a close, and the demo once again takes us to the nightmare mode. This time the ante is upped, as a giant hand with a fork appears and tries to kill Vincent. If you take too long to climb up, worrying about the floor falling beneath you will be the least of your concerns once the fork turns you into a mushy red paste.
The hand also has the ability to swipe across the tower, turning some of the blocks scorched black with gold ridges. This makes them harder to push and pull, meaning you’ll have to think even quicker to escape this one’s grasp.
After reaching the top and watching a ray of white light from behind the door burn the giant hand, Vincent wakes up. Next to Catherine. She smiles and his jaw drops, before he wakes up again in an empty bed, at which point the demo ends and the game jumps to a trailer.
Overall, Catherine is shaping up nicely. The initial disappointment that it isn’t a Persona-esque JRPG is quickly remedied by great anime art style and fascinating story. But that’s not to say the gameplay is disappointing. It’s surprisingly good, and there’s potential for it to ramp up in exciting ways in the full game. However, it seems pretty obvious that this one is about the story, and Atlus aren’t about to let complicated and lengthy JRPG gameplay get in its way.
Once a Western version is announced, this’ll be one to watch. Let’s just hope its release doesn’t slip into next year.
You can grab the Catherine demo from the Japanese PlayStation Store and Japanese Xbox LIVE (Gold membership required until next week) right now.
You can get in touch with Chris via Twitter, or you can explore his website, Been There, Played That!