Catherine

Much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, when fellow blogger Trev moved from L.A. to Chicago, he packed up a lot of the video games he owned (most of which were NOT posted here, mister!) and sent em off to a place where he knew they would all be treated right- to me! Seriously, thanks Trev. I've been hacking away at several games through October and even though this is the only one of yours I'll likely beat this month, the package has got me working on some older games so I can get to it soon. Either way, Catherine was game #1 from Trev. I had some slight interest before but likely wasn't going to purchase the game unless I found it very cheap, but I'm glad I eventually got to play it. Catherine is a bit of an odd one- technically a puzzle game, although I didn't even realize it until an hour in. You play as Vincent, a guy in his young thirties who is a bit of a slacker but managed to land himself a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, Katherine, who is putting the pressure on Vincent to propose already. Vincent thinks he loves Katherine, but is hesitant to make a serious commitment and fears the changes that could come with it. One drunken night Vincent meets another beautiful girl, Catherine (this time with a 'C'!) and before he realizes what's going on he wakes up with Catherine in his bed and must come to grips with the fact that he's now a cheater. For the next eight days Vincent struggles to keeps his lies straight as he tries to figure out whether he truly wants to be with Katherine. Gameplay during the days is merely in an 'overworld' that consists entirely of a bar- Vincent chats with his friends about what to do, sends texts Katherine and Catherine, and gets drunk. When you decide to call it a night, Vincent retreats back to his house to sleep. He has a series of recurring nightmares, and these make up the bulk of the gameplay- Vincent must continuously climb up a crumbling tower of blocks, pushing and pulling the boxes around him to create a path to the top. It kinda feels like Q*Bert on steroids. I can see how nothing but box puzzles sounds like it could get old, but the game controls well in a way that gets pretty addicting. There's a few small attempts at combat, but it really boils down to trying to scale the towers as fast as possible. Finally, along Vincent's journey there's tons of those moral choices that are so popular in games these days. I decided to play the asshole in this game and go full-on cheater, sending mean texts to Katherine and begging to meet up with Catherine. The problem was, even though I commited to playing the evil side in Catherine, some of the questions were so morally ambiguous that I had no idea which option was good or bad. Sometimes it even seemed the exact opposite. Really though, that's my only criticism here. Aside from accidentally keeping myself from attaining a level of pure evil, everything else in Catherine was pretty fun and worth the time spent.