Catherine is a psychographic horror game, with puzzles for those who deign affection towards Rubik’s Cubes. Catherine is perhaps one of the first games I’ve played in years that was genuinely too difficult for me on the hardest difficulty, and because of this, I have an infinite amount of respect for it. Many might expect such design to be unnecessary, but the intricacies of design necessary to create that difficulty are manifold. What’s more, the game is still conquerable, and the story feels rewarding through Vincent’s nightmares.
This game’s heart lies in its storytelling, which is probably a milestone for both how lewdly and how exceptionally well it handles the discourse of dealing with sex and sexuality. The characters are cliche and the influencing factors on progression are oblique at best, nonsensical at worst (why exactly is there a bar that determines our ending in this game? Obfuscation is a key to subtlety). Despite these seeming failings, the characters themselves still fit their roles, and Pavlov would be proud of how well the game judges what is an initially innocuous discursive.
Catherine and Katherine, the two main characters aside Vincent, are sexually charged, imaginary figures meant to fixate on the dichotomies between sexual proclivity and the desire for stability in one’s life. In this sense, they are not so much characters as exemplars of this dichotomy, this seeming separation between the supposed freedom of proclivity and the safety of stability. Neither is necessarily a right or wrong analysis, as is true of so many of Atlus’s games. They are intended instead to be examinations of the discourse through which we so often find ourselves muddling through in day to day life, sped up to suit a game’s pace.
The result is not a perfect representation, but a stark contrast between two ideologically male continuums that intend to show us the differences in process, to show us how we got from those rough patches, to our current state–which ironically enough, might be just as rough. Catherine asks us what we mean when we say sexual, and what that means, in a microcosm, to others. There is an intentionality and separation by males, often, of sex from the realities that are tied up with sex, many of which are often off the radar in the heat of the moment. Catherine seeks to not look so much at the heat of the moment as the moment after, and then the moment after that. Each time, Catherine asks us to analyze those moments in-between, the moments often missed at first glance, the moments which are so often just hindsight.
Catherine is about what’s tied up in sex; the emotion, the rancor, and the physical attributions. Addressing the subject at all has often been taboo in a fledgling medium such as videogames, due partially to a Victorian approach towards sex in America, and in the case of localization, due to the fact that games even relating to sex simply aren’t published in America. In many ways, Catherine is a good example of opening up the subject in, if not a mature way, at least a way that a predominantly male audience can understand. That’s condescending, but both from personal experiences and from the stories of others, males are quite bad at analyzing sex. Catherine’s ability to drive that conversation to the forefront is something to be lauded.
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I disagree. I think the subject matter was refreshingly mature, but the execution is embarrassing at best.
"why exactly is there a bar that determines our ending in this game? Obfuscation is a key to subtlety"
I think this game isn't going for subtlety. I mean, it even had this blatant speech about how people should be free, twice. It's just trying to sell its "moral lesson" too much, and comes off as pandering and smack-in-the-face insulting to my intelligence.
The puzzles are fantastic, and I'd recommend on that alone, but the accompanying story-telling is pretty shameful.
I think the game's attempting to address subtlety in a discrete manner that gets a bit too caught up in its director's previous design aphorisms to ultimately be powerful. I don't think that because Catherine issues a, if idiosyncratic, view of anarchy that it's immediately "insulting" to intelligence. The game has defined shades of grey within a data-ist mode of thinking that's just ascribed too much into the story itself (the moving Chaos/Law "bar," amongst other characters who represent rather rigid stereotypes). I found the story, for its faults, to be an interesting examination of, if nothing else, Vincent. And being an interesting examination of a character who can be described as such is far more progress than any game has made in recent memory (if Fei, the main character from Xenogears, was the previous leap in videogame character, I'd argue that Vincent is perhaps the next). There are still very real problems about the treatment of females in videogames that have not been addressed by any game that I can recall, but that's not what this article (nor this game) is about. The story is not mature, I don't think I addressed it as such, but some of the characters, or what those characters represent, are (there are plenty of games who have mature characters and immature stories, and vice versa – Chrono Trigger's story is incredibly cliche, but some of the characters are great – Demon's Souls has little character at all but an amazing, epic story).