Catherine is a puzzle adventure game with a light touch of the horror theme in its story. It is one of the most unique video game you will play and this is the major draw card of Catherine. You see, the story is about Vincent, who is with his long-time girlfriend. After recently forced into talking about marriage, Katherine exerts her control over Vincent. Vincent frequently goes to the bar called Stray Sheep, and drinks heavily. One night, he meets Catherine and the next morning, he wakes up with her next to him. Thus starts the story involving infidelity and the effects it is having on Vincent's life. Initially, Catherine is portrayed as the better choice as Katherine is the one that gets what she wants through force. Eventually, both characters' backgrounds will flesh out making it harder to pick the character you like more. The plot is something a game has not really done before and Catherine presents it perfectly. The story is partially told via beautiful 2D animation that is used sparsely, while most of the story will be told via in-game rendered cutscenes. These cutscenes are still great although character motions can be a bit stiff. The cutscenes do get progressively longer though, to the point where some will take half an hour, which is a slog when you're forced to watch something that long, no matter how interesting the story gets as at the end of the day, it is just a heap of dialogue.
What makes up the interesting part of the story is that Vincent is thrown into nightmares every night. If he dies in the nightmare, he dies in real life. He is trapped along with other cheating males as a curse, and he must make his way up the nine levels in order to escape, but the last person to escape was 100 years ago. This is not just a blatant excuse for the plot, there is a proper motive behind the happenings which is revealed in a spectacular way towards the end. There are dialogue choices at various parts of the game, which presents the moral choices. These choices (labeled "Law" or "Chaos") will influence some of Vincent's inner dialogue in scenes, and also determine what set of endings you will get. There are a total of eight endings to obtain and will require you to play through at minimum half the game three times, and also the final set of levels at least eight times. You can skip levels if you get a Gold ranking in them, but they are already hard enough as it is and will probably take more effort than just replaying the game on an easier difficulty. The developers have integrated the puzzle gameplay into the story, during the nightmares, you control Vincent as he climbs up a tower to the next level. The puzzle arena is comprised of cubes stacked on top of each other. Vincent can push and pull these blocks, which stay in place as long as one edge meets another, otherwise they will fall. If Vince falls, he dies. What helps is that Vincent is quite nimble and can hang from blocks.
To keep it interesting, there are various types of blocks such as trap boxes which kills you if you stay on them for too long, ice blocks where you slip and bouncy blocks which bounces you higher up. Then there are items which help you, including creating a block out of nothing or defeating all enemies. Enemies, which are other males (portrayed as sheep), will roam and you will need to destroy them otherwise they will hinder your progress. Catherine is notorious for its difficulty, even after the patch update. These puzzles are hard as you are on a time limit with the lower sections falling away over time. Getting over gaps or multiple levels (as Vincent can only climb up one block at a time) will take some serious thinking. From Stage 2 onwards, it gets frustratingly hard and require multiple trial-and-error retries to complete. Dying too much will force you to go back to the last save file, which isn't as bad as it sounds as you can save before every puzzle. If there was no time limit, then the pressure, and frustration, would not be as high. It is very easy to make just one mistake and you die, requiring you to redo the same sections again and again. Catherine finds a way to introduce boss battles, and these levels are worse not only in that the levels are more complicated, but because the boss constantly attacks you. Later boss levels will involve instant death blocks, frequent instant death attacks, making the arena dark, and unfortunately, even escort missions. These make for some of the most frustrating and rage-filled levels in the game.
The final few bosses were extremely aggravating if you're playing on Normal or above, with too many instant death attack at times and other enemies obstructing you, leading to cheap deaths. In each level, you can aim for a high score. You can obtain the best score if you get all the way up in an unbroken chain which means you would have had to had memorized the layout of the level (or looked at a walkthrough and paused the game frequently to mimic the moves). That said, once completed, there is a good sense of satisfaction. There are four difficulty levels: Hard, Normal, Easy and Very Easy. The two easy difficulties are for casual players and meant for you to enjoy the story. Normal is actually quite difficult and don't even attempt Hard difficulty unless you're on your second playthrough. While the puzzle aspect makes up the primary gameplay, the rest of the game when you're not in a nightmare takes place inside the Stray Sheep. You talk to various people as you help them by talking about their troubles. You can respond to texts and collect trivia about alcohol. There are some bonuses such as a 2D version of the game called "Rapunzel", featuring a further 128 levels (64 "Normal" and 64 "Hard"), four randomly generated levels which are extremely long and hard, and a two-player co-op mode. Finally, the music is fantastic and the graphics are amazing in their cel-shaded glory. Overall, Catherine is such a unique game that you can overlook the oftentimes frustrating and hard puzzles. Catherine's story is its biggest strength and the game is worthwhile on that alone.
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