From the developers of Persona (which should have been a sign of interesting concepts), Catherine follows a week in the life of Vincent Brooks, a man in a long-term relationship at a crossroads. As he starts to feel the pressure to take the “next step” with his girlfriend Katherine, he begins to have strange nightmares at night. Things are made worse when he meets Catherine, a beautiful girl who seems unattached to social expectations. Everything is made worse as he begins to have an affair with Catherine at the same time that Katherine announces she is pregnant. Vincent’s anxiety over these pressures, and the awareness that he is making things worse are at the core of the experience.

The game is broken down into two sections: day and night. During the day, players control Vincent around the bar he frequents. There, you talk to your friends, other patrons, or manage relationships with Catherine/Katherine through text messages. And it is every bit as stressful as managing relationships through texts in real life is. If unsure what to say, you can just ignore texts as well, although that often exacerbates the situation.

While the day section is about managing relationships and trying to figure out how to stop screwing up, the night section is about overcoming deadly puzzles. Each night, Vincent must ascend a seemingly never-ending mountain of blocks as the ones below him collapse. Dying in the dream means dying in real life, so there is certainly pressure to move quickly. As the game points out in the end, these puzzles represent the pushing and pulling required of human relationships. Indeed, the metaphor of the puzzles is not very subtle, even without them blurting it out in the end.

For their part, the puzzles can get pretty challenging. On the most part, there’s plenty of time to figure them out, but the end of each “section” is a Boss level. In those, some nightmarish creature – usually representing whatever Vincent is feeling most anxious or unsure about – give chase and try to kill you on the spot. These levels require quick thinking. The difficulty ramps up here, as players can no longer take time to push things around or experiment with approaches. It can get frustrating, and with a limited number of “rewinds,” you actually can wind up in a position where you cannot go forward. However, those situations aren’t common. They do just stand out as especially infuriating when they occur.

Using a puzzle game anime video game to express feelings of anxiety and uncertainty about what one wants or desires in relation to public pressure is pretty interesting and, on the most part, well-handled. It is definitely told from a male perspective, which can be a tad off-putting. For example, the pressure to marry Katherine because she might be pregnant makes Vincent seem like a crappy dude, but that’s a real pressure put on many men in society. It is both understandable and repulsive behavior, and when you boil it down, is pressure put on men by a male-dominant society, although that aspect does not get covered very much beyond his male friends telling him what he has to do.

Unfortunately, the game does rely on some tired gender stereotypes, and that isn’t helped with transphobic jokes and moments. One of the biggest problems with the game is how it presents Katherine versus Catherine. K-Katherine is the long-term girlfriend who is presented as the cliche overbearing, controlling, nagging girlfriend. Meanwhile, C-Catherine is the hot new model, the one who is more open to a more relaxed lifestyle. She is sexually adventurous and more interested in the moment than the future. Again, the game spills its subtlety at the end, declaring that K-Katherine represents order while C-Catherine represents freedom, and argues that the whole game is ultimately about players discovering what kind of lives they want.  It is often presented as right and wrong, really. K-Katherine is unreasonable. C-Catherine is great.

That, needless to say, makes the overall metaphor muddled and messy. It also causes it to not really work. Using human relationships to push this idea of order versus freedom is misguided, and forces a false comparison. It gets even more sloppy when they attempt to give Katherine a moment of softness when she brings Vincent a cake, and Catherine a moment of intimidation when she threatens to kill Vincent if he ever cheated on her. In reality, the game could have used more moments like this, especially with Katherine. A big part of the problem with the game is that in every cutscene, no matter what choices you make, both Katherine and Vincent seem miserable together. Often, it feels like Vincent should wind up with Catherine, that it would be in both his and Katherine’s best interest to split up. It could have stood to include more moments of actual warmth between the two old lovers if we were meant to believe that relationship were worth protecting. Still, even these moments as presented are annoyingly predicated on sexist stereotypes. Both women are ultimately viewed as “crazy” and “unreasonable” when their feelings are hurt.

It also kind of falls off the rails at the end, going from strange, mysterious mystical element that serves as a creepy but clever context for the events of the game to a full-blown explanation incorporating concepts of deities. For some reason, when gods start openly discussing their godhood in the real world, it just kind of makes everything feel too clean for a story that otherwise feels like it should not end cleanly.

Since choices are a big part of the game, there are various endings, each with their own merits and flaws. You can literally go from marrying Katherine for an undeserved “happy ending” to Vincent turning into a demon to be with Catherine in an undeserved…well…I guess that’s also a happy ending? It’s confusing. That’s partly why I love it, but also why the game winds up being almost as frustrating as it is interesting and unique.

A short game, it has flaws but can be completed quickly. Probably won’t be something everyone enjoys, and certainly there are obvious sources of criticism, but it is an interesting game that does a number of things well. At any rate, it at least attempts to do something that most other developers and designers would simply never try. For that reason, it’s worth checking out.

REDUCTIVE RATING: Problematic, but also kind of interesting.

Director: Katsura Hashino & Kenichi Goto

From: Atlus