Catherine is tantalisingly close to being a great game
Tantalus made a pretty bad mistake: he pissed off Zeus. To make amends, he chopped up his son Pelops, boiled him in a pot and served him as a sacrificial aperitif. Now, as you might have predicted, this only made things worse and Zeus, not the most forgiving of gods at the best of times, sentenced Tantalus, for all eternity, to a cruel and unusual punishment. He was made to stand knee deep in water amid trees bearing delicious looking, low-hanging fruit – except every time he reached for the fruit it would retreat from his grasp and every time he bent to drink, the water would drain below him. So it goes. You don’t mess with Zeus.
Playing Catherine feels similar. You can see the makings of a groundbreaking game but the joy of playing it remains just out of reach. The Japanese creation follows protagonist Vincent, whose relationship with his girlfriend Katherine is getting a bit more serious than he’d like. So, he goes out, gets drunk and wakes up next to a young hotty called Catherine. This incident – and his subsequent flirtations and encounters – coincide with the start of a series of horrendous Freudian nightmares in which he is chased by giant babies and fanged buttocks. This is where the game comes in – you have to solve block puzzles to escape from the nightmares. The problem is, while the puzzles are addictive, they look antiquated by modern standards – more like something you’d expect to find on a smartphone than a console. The rest of the adventure is dictated by a series of not-quite-interactive-enough cut scenes. You can wander around your local bar and chat to your mates but it never really feels like you have much of an impact on the action, despite the inclusion of a good/evil gauge that changes depending on your actions.
But somehow the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Catherine focuses on a subject most people who play games can relate to (the average age of gamers in the UK is 37 and the average age of people buying them 41, according to the Entertainment Software Association). Relationships are a dominant theme in almost every other form of popular culture but games have – probably wisely – shied away from looking at them too closely.
It might not be consistently entertaining but Catherine is tantalisingly close to being something pretty special – and it’s different enough to warrant a look.