Catherine remains a talented caricature of a hysterical, impossible man's moral frailty and romantic insecurity. Characters and complications introduced by Full Body, however, lack the connective tissue and social maturity to support its expanded ambition. A (now optional!) tower-climbing puzzle game fused with a supernatural infidelity meditation, even in its spiraling convolution, still survives as a provocative oddity.
In 2011 I had never played a game like Catherine. In 2019, with the release of Catherine: Full Body’s treasure chest of enhancements and additions, I have still never played a game like Catherine. I have played visual novels that use supernatural energy as a metaphor for recurrent vices. And puzzle games with a complicated variety of block pushing. And social simulations with the ambience of demonic anxiety. Few games, let alone an off-season title from a mid-major publisher, have tried all three of these things at once. Catherine loaded the bases with specialized players and, even though it ultimately struck out, left an impression with the feats it managed to accomplish.
Eight years after its first release, Catherine: Full Body benefits from significant additions in its content and cast. It also has the detriment of performing in an evolved more global social consciousness. The product is a game that conforms to the late-aughts insistence on measuring binary choices in a spectrum that now, in our present society and inside the fiction of Catherine, isn’t compatible with a binary system. The pathways Full Body tries to create—and a refined, we-did-our-best localization suggests it does try—aren’t suited to its creative ambition. Budgets exist and the world isn’t made of wishes but a brand new Catherine may have satisfied Full Body’s aspirations better than the chopped-and-screwed remix of the original game.
Vincent Brooks is a callow thirty-two year old man. His relationship with his girlfriend of five years, Katherine, idles along without Vincent’s interest in forward progress. This mirrors Vincent’s work-life balance, which consists of indiscriminate employment and an obligation to drink with friends every night at the local bar, the Stray Sheep. Catherine suggests that, at its opening, Vincent’s dull, meandering existence is absolutely fine with Vincent. Your early 30’s are a time when habits more or less solidify and it becomes extremely easy to secure a comfortable, safe lifestyle. Vincent’s malaise rings true for anyone who has subconsciously forgotten the thrill of seeking higher ground.
And then the titular Catherine comes into Vincent’s life. Blonde hair, blue eyes, bouncy curls and exaggerated features, Vincent winds up in bed with Catherine after another normal night with his friends at the Stray Sheep. This act is automatically repellent—how can we manage a protagonist with such a repulsive flaw—but the player, and Vincent, must always push forward. Every subsequent interaction with Catherine is consumed by chaos…and the charm of venturing into the unknown. Whether Vincent likes or acts on Catherine’s relentless pursuit is shaped by the will of the player. More than most games, Catherine seeks input from personal experience in order to influence its protagonist. Is cheating on a partner attractive or does it scare the shit out of you?
Catherine plays out over the course of nine days. By day we see Vincent meet with Katherine and evade an escalating series of major responsibilities and, generally, treat Katherine like garbage. In the evening Vincent meets up with friends and acquaintances at the Stray Sheep and responds to (or evades) text messages from Catherine, Katherine, and Full Body’s newcomer Qatherine. It’s implied Vincent is wasted by the time he leaves the Stray Sheep in the evening. At night Vincent is transformed into a sheep-man and engages in a sinister challenge of ascending nightmare blocks until he reaches the top of a large tower, none of which he remembers when he wakes up. None of this is normal, but it’s all part of Catherine’s routine.
Catherine and Catherine both exist in an unsustainable version of reality. Figuring out the logistics of Catherine’s presence and why Vincent is incapable of denying her will requires a higher than average ability to suspend disbelief. With an intent to draw an involuntary response from an amplified depiction of reality (not to mention Lindsay and Martha, the riddle-delivering twins at the Stray Sheep), Catherine takes some cues from David Lynch’s method of storytelling. How information resonates inside of your mind and the intangibles it turns into thoughts is more important than a linear rundown of plot beats. It is doubtful that Vincent’s dire circumstances are supposed to be interpreted literally.
Even when the problems fueling Vincent’s devastation are at their most irrational, it’s easy to identify with pieces of his life. When Catherine sends him revealing pictures, he can’t look at them on his phone until he’s alone in the Stray Sheep’s restroom. When reality appears to be a matter of interpretation, it called to mind intense teenage drama where minuscule interpersonal differences can shape an entire world. Catherine works for its target audience because it correctly assumes that, either presently or in the past, its player has directly dealt with embarrassing or otherwise unspoken aspects of Vincent’s life. It showcases a time many of us would like to forget.
The divisive core of Catherine remains ascending its nightmare tower of blocks. All Vincent has to do is make it to the top of any tower. The cubes that compose that tower are laid out in static levels. Vincent can hang alongside the edge of cubes, climb over one at a time, or push and pull cubes under a certain set of rules. Environmental hazards and hostile conditions complicate successive levels. To combat this, other stray sheep in the nightmare share strategies (the “Flying Bridge” creates a bridge of two cubes suspended by the edge rule, “Geronimo” teaches falling may be the way to get ahead) during breaks between levels. Each nightmare is a series of levels concluded with boss chasing Vincent up the tower, which inflicts an additional threat of time.
After I finished and reviewed Catherine in 2011, I didn’t care to ever play its tower-climbing sequences ever again. I got the challenge. I understood the point, but seeking out Catherine’s additional endings was a hard “No,” if I ever had to do those puzzles again. Full Body addresses this head-on. You can either automate the puzzles by pressing R1 or skip them entirely in under the Safety difficulty setting. You can bet I took the R1 option in the process of this review. Past-me already did this and I didn’t want to do it again. Present me wanted to survey pieces of Catherine’s story I had never seen and try and explore its new narrative content. This was the right choice for me.
You know people are going to whine over the option to bail out of Catherine’s puzzles. Never mind the remixed mode, which alters the core puzzles of Catherine’s campaign for experienced players. Or the addition of Babel and Colosseum modes, which house hundreds of brand new puzzles. Forget that Catherine’s two-player battles have been a sideshow of the competitive fighting game community for years. Divorcing Catherine of its puzzle DNA may feel incongruous, but any reasoned take will lead to players enjoying Catherine as they see fit. Accessibility, especially without compromising those who are looking for an original challenge, is never an actual problem. Full Body lets players engage Catherine however they like.
In its original release and Full Body, Catherine struggles to blend its disparate worlds together. The tower-climbing sequences are intended to represent or resist Vincent’s battle between order and chaos. It manifests mechanically with mid-level conversations he has with other sheep, most of whom are the same men Vincent meets at the Stray Sheep bar. Drawing connections between Vincent’s life and his waking nightmare is more complicated problem. Catherine measures the player’s choices (their text message responses to Kat/Cat/Rin and their answers to binary questions in the nightmare) and swings a meter toward a devil or an angel, obliging measurements of morality visible in contemporaries from Mass Effect to Infamous. The problem is it doesn’t ask questions that reflect the mood of an absolute mess of a man.
Full Body’s most present and significant addition to Catherine presents an additional set of complications. Qatherine, referred to as Rin, is a major addition to Catherine’s narrative. An amnesiac, Rin befriends Vincent and Erica, the Stray Sheep’s ever-positive server, and winds up with a job playing piano in the evenings. She also moves into the apartment next to Vincent. Rin interacts with Vincent and his friends frequently, with the entire voice crew recording new dialogue to erase the seams from Rin’s insertion in Catherine’s greater plot. From a production standpoint, it almost feels like Rin was there all along.
Rin’s presence, however, doesn’t do so well inside the rest of Catherine’s supporting infrastructure. As a potential third option as Vincent’s love interest, accessing Rin’s path is complicated by arcane measures of hyper-specific in game choices (I missed it completely on my first run through Full Body). Inside of the proper game, Rin doesn’t mesh with the binary inflicted by the angel and devil meter. There is also the matter and the mystery of Rin’s sexuality and Vincent’s subsequent treatment of Rin. It participates in player agency but I can’t imagine a world in which Catherine’s creators have any awareness of women beyond their own ego.
Both Rin and Erica are tough to address because their physical presence and sexuality are treated as plot points inside of Catherine’s story (and the rest of this paragraph could be considered a spoiler). Erica’s presentation a transgender woman, in particular, was abhorrent in the original Catherine, but relatively quiet in the social climate of 2011. Full Body’s localization treats Erica better, no longer dead-naming her in the credits, but certain endgame cut-scenes still can’t avoid a tone deaf depiction of Erica’s gender. Erica’s handling and Vincent’s choices with Rin (as it’s happening, and not later rationalized as a product supernatural meddling) are greater works of fantasy than any of Catherine’s preposterous takes on reality.
Catherine’s willingness to tackle unconventional psychological aspects of a man’s relationship and make it the focus of the entire game is unique in its field. More so when you consider it’s the only other game Atlus’ Persona team has created in the last decade. It feels important for a game so eagerly outside of conventional models gets the OK (and localization) from a major publisher. I can’t imagine a new game like Catherine gets funded in 2019. At the same time, Catherine doesn’t stick the landing with many of Full Body’s conclusions. It’s a mess, and while it can be seen as a player sorting out the frenzied id of its protagonist, its projection of social norms do not synchronize with reality. Catherine’s makes some outrageous leaps and stumbles over some relatively small challenges.
It’s difficult to separate Full Body’s execution from its intent. It’s my guess, after two play-throughs in the present and one in the past, that its designer wanted to relate the interpersonal trauma from a very specific and very challenging time in his life. I think Catherine captures that sentiment as it explores the dichotomy, however egotistical, between order and chaos. I don’t think Catherine treats its characters with respect, even if the Nero Glasses (which are downloadable content) allow Vincent to see every character, not only women, in their underwear. Harmonizing both of these choices is asking a lot from the player.
I can’t say I wasn’t entertained. Full Body’s new endings were options I couldn’t deny, either, and you can bet I looked up a guide to solve Rin’s arcade path. The trust I put behind Atlus’ Persona team was earned through imperfect connections Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5 made to my life. With Catherine’s precise focus on Vincent’s point-of-view and its questionable representation of its characters, it’s exhausting to imagine Catherine and Full Body as anything other than an eccentric experiment.
Catherine remains a talented caricature of a hysterical, impossible man’s moral frailty and romantic insecurity. Characters and complications introduced by Full Body, however, lack the connective tissue and social maturity to support its expanded ambition. A (now optional!) tower-climbing puzzle game fused with a supernatural infidelity meditation, even in its spiraling convolution, still survives as a provocative oddity.
