Gameitall Catherine from Atlus and Studio 4C is one of those games where you probably wouldn’t hear to much about it, but will probably be a cult classic like it’s predecessors, the Persona series. Being thrown into a strange nightmarish world where our choice have grave consequences.
When you load up the Catherine Demo, you would notice a few things right away, one, the creepy Atlus sign, two, sheep falling to their deaths. This is the set up to what kind of game your about to play, a very very messed up survival horror.
When the game starts your thrown immediately into a Nightmare sequence, walking out a door, armed with nothing but a pillow and your poka-dotted underwear, you look down and see never ending darkness, a fellow stray sheep calls out to you that if you fall, you will die!
Thus starts the action of the game, what feels like a cross between Q*bert and Donkey Kong as your climbing cubes to get to the top of the tower. While climbing you will have to move boxes to create stairways and pathways to keep yourself from falling, which if you do your treated to an animation of Vincent falling and breaking his back on the rubble of the broken tower, very violent.
After completing the tower stage, you wake up, in the middle of a conversation with your current girlfriend about getting married, waking periods are when your story and cut-scenes, usually these scenes would be quite dull if it wasn’t for a couple of points: Voice acting is actually believable (a rarity when it comes to Japanese games when dubbed over.) Animation and CG are well done, and the lastly the story is actually set up in a way that you actually start to care for the characters even though you meet them for a short amount of time.
After your meeting with Katherine (your current girlfriend) your brought to the Stray Sheep, Vincent’s favorite bar, here you meet with two of your friends, what you do in Stray Sheep mode will affect the outcome of all the events in the game, very similar to Heavy Rain. Replying to text messages or talking with the patrons of the bar will change how people react to you and your overall story. However the demo didn’t fully prove this and left us to be teased.
After Stray Sheep, your thrown into another nightmare, one that’s much more difficult then the first. Being chased by a monster who is crashing the tower and attempting to kill you with a giant fork… Yeah and I though Shadows of the Damned was messed up.
The demo is actually quite entertaining and will give you a taste of what’s to come in the full version, missing from the demo the effects of the choices you make, the multiplayer, and the ability to change your difficulty settings, you have only Easy mode available, but even that can prove to be quite the challenge.
Catherine is available on July 26th with the collectors edition featuring a pizza box from the game, a pillow case with Catherine drawn on it, a game over tee-shirt and boxers…
