Catherine - PlayStation 3

Catherine's gotten a bit of attention in the gaming world because of its unusual story and reputed difficulty, not to mention its unusually prominent (at least for a video game) sexual themes. Fortunately, Catherine succeeds both as a puzzle game and as a tale about adulthood, infidelity, and love. The actual game is nowhere near as sexual as its packaging or advertising makes it out to be (though you probably still don't want your 10 year old kid playing this game), so if you're looking for that, you'll probably be disappointed. There are three main characters in Catherine - Vincent Brooks, the protagonist, Katherine (yes, that's with a "K"), Vincent's longtime girlfriend who is starting to push Vincent towards marriage, and Catherine, a mysterious young woman who enters Vincent's life out of the blue. Catherine is unusually aggressive in pursuing Vincent, and before he knows it, he has a drunken one-night stand with her. Needless to say, this causes all sorts of complications in his relationship with Katherine. The fact that various men around town are dying strange deaths in their sleep only adds to Vincent's stress. There are two distinct modes of gameplay within Catherine, and the game keeps them more or less separate from each other. On the one hand, there's the story of the game, which occurs during the day. The story is told through anime cutscenes and an interactive environment in the local bar, the Stray Sheep, where Vincent can walk around, talk to other patrons, the staff, play an arcade game (which is a variation on the puzzle game which takes place during Vincent's nightmares), watch the TV news, and even get drunk. The gameplay here is surprisingly deep - your interactions with other customers early in the game can drastically alter their stories in the latter part of the game. Responses Vincent makes to other people (and there are lots of these decisions) also alter an "order/chaos" meter, which impacts the ending of the game. The story-driven part of the game probably occupies something like 1/3 or so of the total playtime of Catherine. The puzzle part of the game takes place during Vincent's nightmares. He needs to climb up massive block structures before the bottom part of the structure falls out from under him, thereby killing him. It's a bit hard to explain the gameplay in words, but you can watch lots of videos on game review sites or Youtube. Basically, you want to climb up this large vertical structure, and can climb onto blocks one level above you, so you need to push and pull blocks to arrange them in a pattern which makes it possible to keep moving up. The bottom of the structure gradually falls away, which acts as the timer for these puzzles. The game starts out relatively simple, but as you get further in the game tosses more and more types of blocks at you, like heavy blocks, spike blocks (which kill you if you don't immediately walk off them), bomb blocks, ice blocks, and monster blocks. There are also items which grant beneficial effects to Vincent. Each night concludes with a "boss fight" of sorts, where you don't actually fight a boss, but each boss has its own distinct mechanic it adds to the climbing puzzle. It's not immediately obvious from the description above that the game is hard, but as many people have already mentioned, the game is hard - definitely harder than the average game out there. Fortunately, Catherine comes with three (actually four, there's a "secret" Very Easy difficulty) difficulty levels, and "Easy" isn't prohibitively hard, although I don't think the average player would call describe it as "easy" either. The developers did a good job making death frustrating. There are checkpoints scattered throughout most levels so you don't have to restart at the very beginning if you die, and the levels aren't prohibitively long. As the story puzzles are designed in advance, if you repeatedly die on a level you will gradually get better at it as you learn to climb more efficiently. There was really only one level (out of more than twenty) which gave me any noticeable amount of frustration. A full initial playthrough of the game should take most people between ten and fifteen hours. Fortunately, Catherine has A TON of replayability. Replaying levels you have already completed (for higher scores or just for fun) is incredibly convenient. If you get gold medals on enough levels, you unlock bonus levels which are outside of the story. These levels are randomly generated, long, and incredibly difficult (substantially harder than any of the story levels), so if you're up for the challenge they will keep you occupied for many, many hours. (If you look at the online leaderboards for the random levels, only about 250-300 people in the entire world have posted a completion of the most difficult bonus level.) The arcade puzzle game, called "Rapunzel", has over a hundred (short) levels, and is a nice variant on the primary puzzle play in that it requires you to complete block puzzles not in a fixed amount of time, but in a fixed number of moves. The story also has immense replayability; the game has eight distinct endings, all of which are quite different from each other. The conclusion of the story can vary tremendously based on your actions during the story portion of the game. In perhaps one of the most pleasantly surprising design decisions in Catherine, once you get a gold medal on a story puzzle level in either normal or hard difficulty, you can skip that level entirely at that difficulty. What this means is that if you want to see all the different endings or just see how the story part of the game changes if you play differently, you can quickly do so by skipping the puzzle portions of the game. This game really does a lot of things right; to be honest I can't identify any major flaws. There are some frustrations with the controls and camera work when Vincent climbs behind the blocks, but this happens so infrequently that I can't really describe this as a "major" flaw. The game definitely is not for everyone; if you hate puzzle games you're probably not going to like Catherine. If you're aren't sure whether this game is your cup of tea, try downloading the demo from PSN or borrowing it from a friend. The story is surprisingly mature and grasps with issues that no other game really has addressed, like commitment and infidelity. The initial playthrough takes a comparable amount of time to most other non-RPG games, but the replayability can easily extend the amount of time you play this game by a factor of, say, five. It's good to see original, unique games like Catherine being published and doing well, and hopefully the creative minds at Atlus will keep up the good work.

I'm not even a straight guy but this game was awesome. Gorgeous visuals, interesting characters and gameplay that is pretty addicting. You play as the attractive main character, Vincent who is confused about his life and where his relationship is headed with his girlfriend, Katherine. He often goes to the bar to meet up with his friends to talk about guy things and catch up on what is happening around town. I felt that the male characters' bond was one of the most intriguing aspects of the game. The main gameplay however is puzzle-related and happens in Vincent's dreams. You find yourself in a nightmare and having to tower and maneuver yourself around these different blocks. At first it is pretty easy and straightforward to manage your way to the top. But after a few stages it gets increasingly difficult. Now I haven't played this game since like April but I'm a bit more than halfway through the game and think it's worth it. The controls take some getting used to but can be mastered within a half hour or so. I think it'd be weird to make a review of this game and forget the main attraction though: The other Catherine. She is the sexy blond girl who is alluring yet has a short temper. She knows how to get her way too! Catherine is the girl who helps Vincent cheat on his girlfriend Katherine and Vincent eventually starts feeling really bad about it. Another one of the cool things about this game though happens after you climb the mountain of blocks in a level and get to the end. You wander around a large, floating rock where there are sheep men and eventually you have to go into the confession booth. The booth presents you with a question of morality and such and you have to give your opinion on what you think is right for you or what you believe. Then after that's over it goes to a screen that shows the percentage of what men and women said online. It's really neat. There are more things about this game that are pleasing and I could go on and on but I'm gonna end the review here. It's definitely different from any puzzle game I've ever played and I really like the story and characters that go along with it. I think most people who like video games and are 17 or older should try this game at least once. 4.25 stars.

Ich habe mir dieses Spiel nach längerer Überlegung gekauft. Ich wusste erst nicht so recht, ob das Spiel denn so gut ist, dann noch auf Englisch, aber ich wurde nicht enttäuscht. Das Spiel CATHERINE ist ein sehr tolles Spiel, vor allem für Erwachsene und Manga-Fans. Die Story ist ganz interessant, da es darum geht, dass ein 32 jähriger Mann namens Vincent anfangs Gespräche mit seiner Freundin Katherine führt, die ihn nicht unbedingt erfreuen, da sie heiraten möchte (Gespräche zwischen den beiden werden in Zwischensequenzen immer wieder geführt). Am Abend geht er dann in eine Bar und trifft sich mit Freunden. Dort ertrinkt er seinen Kummer in Alkohol, denn er möchte noch nicht heiraten. Nach dieser Szene wird man im Prinzip in das eigentliche Spiel hinein geführt. Man steht an einer "Mauer", die aus verschiedenen Blöcken besteht. Diese muss man dann so verschieben, drehen, ziehen etc., dass man aus der "Mauer" eine Treppe formt, welche man erklimmen muss. Am nächsten Morgen wacht er in seinem Bett mit einer anderen Frau auf, wo es sich um die 22 jährige Catherine handelt, und so geht die Story dann weiter... Im Verlauf des Spiels werden diese immer schwieriger und pro Nacht muss man je 3 verschiedene Flure erklimmen, wobei der Letzte immer der schwierigste ist, da man dort auf Zeit und gegen "Monster" Treppen stapeln muss. Während dieses "Puzzelns" hat man auch Checkpoints, an denen man immer wieder beginnen kann, falls man stirbt. Vorausgeetzt man erreicht diese auch, ansonten kann man von vorn anfangen. Wenn man ganz oben angekommen ist, kann man mit anderen reden und so verschiedene Möglichkeiten erfahren, wie man die Steine schneller verschiebt und so auch schneller voran kommt. Außerdem muss man in einer Art Beichtkammer Fragen beantworten, die einen gestellt werden. Diese haben Einfluss auf einen Stimmungsbarometer, der wiederum Einfluss auf das Spielende hat! Also, es gibt nicht nur ein Ende! Aufgrund der Mischung von Story und Puzzeln, die immer eng miteinander verknüpft sind, macht das Spiel richtig Spaß. Es handelt sich halt nicht um ein Standard-Spiel, wie man sie kennt, sondern man muss auch mal sein Köpfchen dabei anstrengen, darf aber auch nicht zu lange überlegen. Die Erotik, die in diesem Spiel ja ein wesentlichen Teil der Story ausmacht, macht das Spiel ebenfalls sehr interessant, da man solche Spiele auf dem Markt kaum zu Gesicht bekommt. Aber auch Blut wird nicht wenig vergossen, vor allem, wenn Vincent abstürzt etc. Dass das Spiel auf englisch ist, sollte auch für Schulenglisch-Sprecher kein Problem darstellen, da man das wirklich gut verstehen und übersetzen kann, bis auf das ein oder andere Wort vielleicht. Zu dem Spiel wird auch ein Art-Book geliefert, in dem sich auch eine CD befindet. Auf dieser CD sind einmal Songs drauf, die im Spiel vorkommen und einmal ein Programm, mit dem man sich selbst einen Desktophintergrund erstellen kann (Catherine). Das Artbook an sich ist auch schön gemacht. Da sind dann Beschreibungen der einzelnen Personen drin und dann findet man noch viele Bilder von Catherine und Katherine!

My son loves it

Es un buen juego con puzzles entretenidos

Très bon produit.

لعبة من العاب بلايستيشن ثري الأسطورية وجزء ضروري من اي كولكشن لألعاب ال PS3