Catherine! …and a plea for a 36 hour day.
Last night – roughly around 3am or so – a friend sent me a message on Xbox Live about the game I was playing. I promised to type up a few comments here, and, so, here I am.
The game in question is Catherine from Atlus, and there you have the first problem in writing this post: I have to be extremely careful in my phrasing. I mean, I can’t just type “last night at 3am my friend asked me about Catherine.” Or “last night at 3am I was still up with Catherine.” Or “Catherine is phenomenal!” You get the picture.
I am not going to recommend the game here. I will say that I very much like it, but I suspect that there are people who might hate it, and for good reason. It seems to be quite divisive, with a generally good metacritic score but some spectacularly low scores in the mix. My guess is that if you’d like Catherine – I mean, if Catherine is the kind of game for you – you probably already know about it, and don’t need me to tell you. If not, pick up the demo and see what you think.
I am writing this mainly to talk to people who might be interested, or played the demo, and have questions. I’m here to provide a few specifics.
- The animation. It’s by Studio 4.C – the folks handling the new Thundercats show – and is solid throughout.
- Puzzles. The puzzle gameplay hits the right point on the difficulty curve for. It’s challenging enough to be compelling, without ever hitting a point that I wanted to quit. However, two caveats about this. I had to seek assistance on YouTube for two levels: Clock Tower stage 3 (where the opening area has a fiendishly difficult and opaque solution) and Spiral Staircase stage 4 (where I got all but the last block push, which had to be in a very specific sequence). These stages take place in the game’s 6th and 7th areas, respectively, and the first made me worry that the later stages would be maddening. They aren’t; for me difficulty spiked at stage 6. Second, the difficulty is high enough that I don’t see myself ever wanting to do this again. While the story has replay value and the puzzles have many solutions, they are hard and frantic enough for me to accept the completion as a victory and move on.
- Story sequences. The game is split into three distinct phases: there’s a puzzle section (the Nightmares), followed by cinematics (animated and in-game rendered, with the later looking a little better), finally followed by interactive sequences in a bar where you can talk to characters, play minigames, etc. After the bar sequence, you go to the next Nightmare and the pattern repeats. You can only save in the bar and between stages of the puzzle levels. Since the cinematic sequences get pretty long, this can mean that you can go a LONG time between save opportunities. Plan accordingly. (Also, with no autosave it’s possible to lose massive amounts of progress if you forget to save, and then lose all your chances in a puzzle.)
- Speaking of cinematics, if you hate long cinematic breaks between gameplay sections, don’t buy Catherine. I don’t mind at all, but I know some gamers do.
- While the main story dialogue is very well done, some other dialogue is completely skippable – akin to the idle chat in any RPG when you visit a village and talk to all the townsfolk. Luckily, there’s a skip button. So there you go.
As I said above, I quite like the game, and am enthused to see that it sold well. Hopefully that means more quirky projects will see the light of day.
Switching gears for a second, I don’t for a moment know how I’m going to find time to play all of the upcoming releases that I’ve already committed to pre-order. (By the way, I’ve taken my pre-order business to Amazon, as they have several offers for Amazon credit going at the moment, and as a result I ended up with $40 in credit – enough for a copy of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary – plus, with a trial of Amazon Prime, I got release date shipping for free.) I looked at my pre-orders & their release dates and it’s not humanly possible to play all of these to the extent they are entitled.
- Gears of War 3 – Sept. 20
- Rage – Oct. 4
- Dark Souls – Oct. 4
- Batman: Arkham City – Oct. 18
- Battlefield 3 – Oct. 25
- Uncharted 3 – Nov. 1
- Skyrim – Nov. 11
- Halo: CEA – Nov. 15
I think I’ll have to make a schedule. If I spend less time eating, sleeping, and such, then maybe…
