Catherine: Full Body (2019)

Graphics are cohesively styled and nice to look at - somewhat typical ATLUS character designs. The colour schemes are pleasing to the eye and I overall enjoyed the aesthetics of the game a lot.

The protagonist, Vincent, is a 30-something year old socially awkward deadbeat who's going nowhere in particular in life and has to decide whether he's going to stay that way or start getting his act together. He's an objectively bad person at first, and so he might be hard to like for a lot of players, but I personally found his character development fun to guide along, and the comedy he brings with his constant anxiety and horrified reactions to everything had me endeared. Your potential love interests are Katherine, an ambitious and diligent career woman who wants Vincent to settle down and start taking things more seriously; Catherine, a playful and uncommitted seductress who doesn't believe in love; and Rin, a sweet and mysterious neighbour who doesn't seem to remember much of his past. I enjoyed all three characters and their different dynamics with Vincent (and who he can become as a result of those dynamics), but my personal favourite is probably Rin thanks to what he represents - I believe as a partner he is the biggest catalyst for Vincent to grow as a person and to find genuine happiness. The supporting characters, primarily Vincent's group of friends and Erica, the waitress at the bar they all hang out at, are likeable and funny.

I enjoyed all of the voice acting fine. Troy Baker as Vincent is on point and hits all of the comedic beats perfectly, and while my personal enjoyment can vary with the other characters' voices, none of them were bad.

A surprisingly mature and nuanced take on relationships for a game like this, Catherine: Full Body deals with infidelity, commitment, sexuality, gender identity, and personal growth. I found it genuinely enjoyable to play through, and your ending can vary pretty wildly depending on your choices and route (if I remember correctly, there are 16 or 17 different possibilities).

The game has two very different gameplay styles. During the day, it's a dating sim/visual novel; Vincent hangs out at the bar with his group of friends, answers texts on his phone and has conversations with his various romantic interests, and has cutscenes with other characters. At night, it turns into a genuinely challenging and fast-paced puzzle game, where you guide Vincent through a series of nightmares he finds himself cursed with where any death in his sleep means a death in reality. I was playing it more for the story and choices than I was for the puzzles, so I ended up utilising the new QoL/accessibility toggles in this edition to breeze past most of them.

I believe there is a competitive multiplayer mode to the puzzle gameplay, but I've never tried it.

To address the elephant in the room, I'm sure there's nothing I can say about the transphobia criticisms about this game that hasn't been said already. However, personally it all comes down to: I can look past it. For an ATLUS game in 2011, having a major and likeable trans woman character like Erica is progressive in itself, and while I completely stand by the fact that people's criticism of how her character is treated by other characters is valid, I do believe they genuinely improved with Full Body and showed growth in how they treat LGBT+ characters with the inclusion of Rin, the fact that sexuality and gender is directly addressed on Rin's route with Erica weighing in on it, and the toning-down of some of the more off-colour moments to do with Erica's gender from the original.

I do think the 'alien reveal' was pretty silly and tonally off from the rest of the game. As some others have said in their own reviews, I would find Rin as an angel much more consistent and easy to digest, and a nice rounding-out of the love interest roster with Rin as an angelic figure, Catherine as a demonic figure, and Katherine as a grounded regular human. Frankly, I tend to just pretend that part of the ending didn't happen.

I set out this year to play games that I normally would not play. Now, I didn't play a ton, but I'm glad I picked this one out as I had been meaning to play it for awhile. A combo VN and block pushing puzzle game with a wild anime story??? Haha sign me up lol, I've never played anything like this and I'm not familiar with Atlus at all. Even for Atlus, the premise seems pretty bizarre.

First off, the puzzles in the game are genuinely great. I played on normal difficulty which was just right. The puzzles were a lot to take in at first, but I quickly got the hang of it and started learning. The thing I appreciate the most about the puzzles is that it's a simple concept with increasing difficulty in level design. There are some gimmicks, but the challenge is mostly how well can you learn your way around the design of the puzzles. It just....gets much harder and more clever as you go on. You essentially have to learn the tricks and apply them through critical thinking and I LOVE that. Funny enough, that ties directly into the story behind the nightmares, which is that becoming a better man is not something you can do through fancy tricks or cheats, but by applying yourself and working hard to help the men around you become better men as well. You share techniques with the other men in the nightmare and everyone succeeds as a group effort. Beautiful stuff, video games are neat.

The story can be pretty wacky and off the wall. I will say that I do not appreciate Vincent as a lead. He is stupid, impulsive, and dishonest with everyone. My thoughts the whole time were "this man needs to be single and introspective for awhile" so I lead with that direction for the story. In the game's 13 endings I believe I arrived on the one I wanted the most(though I'd love to play again to see Rin's story to the end). I'll describe my ending at the end of this review. Regardless, I think the story did have some interesting things to say, though there is some dissonance with my own personal feelings on masculinity and relationships. Catherine: Full Body was definitely worthwhile and was a great genre exploration that I wouldn't be opposed to seeing Atlus do again. I'll have to sit with my thoughts on this for a little while longer, but I do intend to play through this game at least one more time to explore some other characters I did not get to see as much as I wanted to.

This is my first time with Catherine and I'm basing my thoughts on the ending I got. Here's how it ended based on my thoughts/choices: through much of my play through of this game I thought very poorly of Vincent. He lies, cheats, and hurts people around him, which is made worse by the fact he's pretty stupid haha. I did not think he deserved an ending where he found love. I suppose I got that. After rejecting Rin upon discovering she's trans, Vincent loses it all and decides he wants to dedicate himself to Katherine. He makes it through the nightmare and then breaks up with Catherine, which goes pretty bad. But Vincent is insistent that he wants to marry Katherine. The next day he's woken up by Katherine in his own apartment and he's surprised/relieved to see he didn't accidentally sleep with Catherine the night before. But this moron spills the beans to Katherine by accident anyway, so she confronts him on it. Says she knew he was cheating the whole time and wants to break up(yes, go you!!!). Vincent is a wreck, but I'm sure he'll recover. It's then revealed that.......ok, I was not expecting this one.....Catherine was not real the whole time and was instead some demon succubus brought by.......the BOSS?!?!? who has revealed through his evil godly form that he orchestrated this nightmare on local men(and the oil guy???) so he could torture and kill men who were not procreating, but Vincent is like the chosen one who passes all the puzzles and, before he can kill the boss right in the bar he agrees to a challenge from the Boss(aka Thomas Mutton hahahahaha)to climb the tower further and achieve....freedom? Whatever that means. I was ok with this ending as Vincent was finally put in his place and I believe he suffered enough to begin growing and become a better man. The epilogue showed him still simping over Katherine awhile after they broke up. I do not like this epilogue so I will pretend it did not happen.

Catherine: Full Body is a game that seeks to immerse you into the life of Vincent, a sweaty, nervous man who can't help but fail time and time again when it comes to practicing basic communication in his romantic relationships. It does this by having the player carve through a gauntlet of teeth-grindingly difficult action-puzzle-platforming stages, thus ensuring that they feel the weight of failure too as they restart time and time again.

In order to clear each stage, you need to move Vincent (stripped down to his underwear) to push and pull the blocks which make up the tower above him in order to make a path to the top. You don't have all the time in the world though. You need to think fast because the base of the tower below you is crumbling away. As you progress through the game, additional types of blocks are added. These are typically hazardous in one way or another. Some will break if you step on them too many times, some will explode, and some will move on their own. While quite challenging, the core puzzle gameplay is pretty addictive. I don't typically fiddle much with extra modes in story-focused games, but I did end up checking out the Babel mode in which you compete to see how high you can climb a randomized tower of blocks. It's a lot of fun and I could see myself returning to both it and the main story mode so I can check out some of the many other endings which are possible.

Very early on, Catherine made me strongly consider dropping from Normal difficulty down to Easy. It's a very hard game. I continued to consider lowering the difficulty throughout my playthrough but couldn't bring myself to do it. The brutal difficulty felt right, both because of the feeling of satisfaction that came with each stage I cleared and the role the puzzles play in the main plot of the game. Vincent is supposed to be suffering, so why shouldn't I as well?

The story itself was surprisingly good! The cover art kind of makes it look fanservicey and horny, and while there is a bit of that the story never felt like it took a backseat to it. Our main guy Vincent is awful at relationships and when a sexy blonde shows up at the bar he frequents and starts hitting on him, he's helpless, despite his longstanding relationship with his girlfriend, Katherine. It's hard to like Vincent, with how he makes just about every possible wrong choice he could in this situation, but I couldn't help but also relate to him a little. He's a guy who feels trapped-- unable to control the direction his life has been going. By the end I had put most of my frustrations with him aside and was rooting for him to figure this situation out.

What I really liked was that Catherine: Full Body often takes a philosophical angle, forcing me to think about how I approach romance in my own life. It does this by asking questions that initially feel kind of surface level but really got me thinking. You only have two options to answer these questions with and the options are usually very binary. This is almost definitely on purpose. I rarely felt like I fully agreed with the option I ended up choosing, but the fact that the game made me choose between them forced me to really stop and consider how I felt.

This was my first time playing Catherine, but before diving in I did my research and found that this version of the game has a new third romance option in the form of Rin. While at first Rin felt like a welcome addition, the further I got, the more their inclusion seemed to clash with the general tone of the original game. You can feel when the scene you're watching is something added in this version because it doesn't quite mesh. I can appreciate the attempt to expand on what the original game presented but Full Body does take away some of the "spice" of choosing a route by pretty clearly painting Rin as the best option. I'm honestly kind of surprised I didn't end up with one of Rin's endings because I felt like I didn't swing too strongly in the direction of either of the other two love interests and Rin was my fav of the three. This is still probably the better version to play but the changes are far from perfect.

I just finished my third playthrough of Catherine: Full Body and I gotta say, this game is amazing. While it does have its ups and downs, it's a really creative puzzle game that seems confusing at first, but quickly becomes super engaging and extremely addictive, with an equally as engaging story pulling you along for the ride.

Catherine, the original game, was released by Atlus in 2012. After the release of Persona 4, the team decided to to work on a new and unique game that would allow them to test the waters of HD consoles before committing to develop Persona 5. This low-stakes transitory game was the perfect opportunity to experiment with a lot of the ideas they couldn't use in their mainline RPGs, leading to a block puzzle/action platforming hybrid with very heavy mature themes. It's a really indie-feeling mix that you wouldn't expect from a big developer, and it only could've happened under these exact circumstances.

In this game you play as Vincent Brooks, a man cheating on his girlfriend that's been having nightmares where he has to climb a tower. The gameplay is split in two halves: During the day you play through the Atlus standard-issue "talk to the characters and progress the story" visual novel inside a bar, and during the night you're thrown into a puzzle platforming challenge in the main character's nightmares. In these challenges, your aim is to get to the top of a tower made out of giant blocks, and you're able to push and pull the blocks that make up the structure in order to build your own path to the top. While the game does introduce different kinds of blocks to spice up your playthrough, I think what truly makes the design good is the fact that every level's made with the same base, but they all have a distinct and unique layout, making the gameplay feel fresh at all times.

There's a lot of complexities and rules that govern how your character and the blocks function, and while everything might seem extremely complex and daunting at first, you get really used to it over time and it ends up becoming second nature. One of the best things the game does to accomplish this is have its NPCs talk about "techniques" between levels, which allows you to better understand how the games' physics work and how to best make use of them.

If I have one complaint about the gameplay is that the difficulty settings are way too annoying, Normal difficulty is alright and might start to feel simple towards the end, however changing to Hard difficulty not only swaps the layouts for each level to a harder variant, but also adds so many arbitrary changes and removes quality of life features, making the game feel flat out annoying. The game has over 15 endings, but trying to get them with a higher difficulty punishes the player for no reason and it's very discouraging.

When it comes to the presentation, it's above average. I love the character design and the music is phenomenal, however this was the first time Atlus tried this visual style and while it's not bad, it's very clear that the developers were not comfortable with it just yet. The animations feel stilted, the camera angles are weird and, at least on the switch version, some of the timing for the cutscenes felt really off.

Speaking of which, the game does have many performance issues on the Switch. While the main puzzle gameplay runs surprisingly smooth, it's the rest of the game that has problems. Walking around the bar makes the framerate drop horribly, you'll see models teleporting and lighting glitch out in front of your face, and even opening the menus will make the game struggle. The main gameplay is not affected, but it's still annoying.

The story in this game is incredible. There's this whole plot about men all over the city having nightmares and dying in their sleep, and while you end up solving that in the end, the game almost entirely focuses on Vincent and how the relationship with his girlfriend, Katherine, is being threatened by him meeting a new lover, Catherine. I personally love how the high-stakes generic JRPG plot takes a backseat to the character-driven writing for a while, and once both sides finally start to converge the story just goes crazier and crazier and I love it.

But that's just Catherine. The original Catherine. Let's talk a bit about Full Body.

The Full Body version of the game is a complete remake of it using a new engine. It has a few new gameplay features and some quality of life improvements, but most notably it introduces a whole new character that works as a third love interest for Vincent: Rin.

Rin's inclusion and story does make some the world feel more alive at times, however, it's very clear that these additions were not part of the original game. In fact, all new content in the game feels very different from what was in the original, going from small stuff like the models' animations being way better whenever Rin shows up, to the characters having entirely different personalities and opinions every once in a while. 2012's Catherine is a product of its time, and it's the remake's decision to only modernize some aspects of itself while keeping the original content intact that makes the two halves of the game feel so disconnected from each other. The Full Body version will both deadname a trans person and advocate for gay marriage, and it all depends on whether Rin is on screen or not.

But aside from that weird feeling you get from the new content, I think the additions are overall good. I don't think the new content is very intrusive to the game's main story. In fact, unless you do certain stuff, Rin will stop bothering you and you'll end up essentially playing the 2012 version of Catherine after a while. You get the option to engage in Rin's story, and if you don't wanna, then the rest of the game's still there for you.

IN CONCLUSION: Catherine is a great game. It's a very unique game that only exists because the stars aligned and allowed Atlus to develop a weird, experimental, mature puzzle game, and they did a good damn job at it. The story is engaging and never stops being interesting, and the gameplay is more addictive than you'd think. I really enjoyed my time with it, and you should definitely give it a try if you're interested in it. 8/10

It might not be entirely fair for the game to only get 3 stars, because VNs are just really not my jam. But I have several friends who are really into VNs and wanted me to play this one in particular.

Gameplay - I will never understand why you have to talk to every person twice in games to hear everything they have to say. Annoying. The puzzle aspect was entertaining enough, kept me engaged through to the end by adding new blocks, configurations, and other elements to keep changing it up. But I don't think I would have fun playing through the same levels a second time, and certainly not enough to unlock all 8 endings and get all the other trophies.

Story - I found this genuinely enjoyable, and for the most part found that my choices made a predictable and consistent impact on the story (the impact of my decisions was predictable; the story itself was not predictable). There was a fair variety of characters who were all quite interesting, enough that I genuinely wanted to find out more about each person and see how their story would go. Biggest drawback is that the last three questions the game asks are the primary determinant of which ending you get, and they can be interpreted several different ways. I was extremely disappointed in the ending I got - not because it was bad, but because it was extremely MEH and just made the whole thing feel like a waste of time. Then I googled and found out it's just because I answered one question incorrectly, otherwise I'd have gotten the ending I was aiming for. And unfortunately, being a n00b to this type of game, I had saved over my save file instead of saving in a different slot at each save point (my VN-playing friends scolded me hard for doing this incorrectly). Anyway, I watched the ending I was supposed to get on youtube and found it much more satisfying, both as a narrative and to round out my gaming experience.

I picked this game up specifically because of how much I loved Persona 5. I knew it was super different, but I figured why not give it a try.

I am really glad I did.

Catherine is a visual novel/romance simulator/puzzle game. The puzzles are legitimately hard, and I had to switch to Easy pretty quickly, but they were also fun to figure out.

The story takes a very unusual trajectory, with our protagonist making some very questionable choices, but still being framed sympathetically. The story takes a very nuanced look at choices for happiness, growth, and adulthood, in a way I don't think I have ever seen. It almost veers at times into questionable choices, but then manages to redeem itself.

The characters themselves, aren't quite as well fleshed out as Persona 5 characters (that game isn't even the tutorial of the P5, so some of it is just time spent). But the characters themselves are just a bit shallow at times. They aren't bad, but don't necessarily stand out.

What really sells the game is its stunning visuals, voice acting, and audio, this does SOOO much to make me invested.

With many endings, and a play time of roughly 8 hours, Catherine has a lot of replayability. Overall, I am really happy I went out of my comfort zone and gave the game a try. I plan on playing it at least once more, if not multiple times more. |

This game is well worth your time if you enjoy romance simulators, nuanced stories, or just well put together narratives.

Catherine is a puzzle/visual novel game unlike any other I've played. You go through daunting puzzles at night, pushing and pulling blocks, in order to find what your protagonist, Vincent, really wants out of life, while managing friendships and romances during the day.

I'm disappointed that I let the surface elements of this game put me off playing it for so long because I absolutely loved this. The puzzles were challenging but so rewarding and that damn "undo" sound is going to be burned into my memory forever. I could honestly be satisfied with just the puzzles here but then the "visual novel" part of the game comes in, which is actually what initially put me off along with what seemed like fan-service-y elements. The characters had texture in a way I wasn't expecting and while Vincent drove me insane as he seemingly made the wrong decision every single time, I still connected with him in a way that I don't normally with video game protagonists. Sure, there are elements in the story that I'm not a super big fan of (two trans characters who "trick" men???), and the game has all the subtlety of a slap in the face, but it still really connected for me. I liked just talking to the other patrons in the bar or the other sheep in the nightmare, as every conversation felt important to me. Answering the questions at the confessional taught me about myself and others around me as the poll results were revealed.

Overall, while it is flawed, it still finds its way among my favorite game experiences and one I'll happily do again, maybe next time doing the opposite of what I did this time around.

The last game I finished before the quarantine. Somehow I forgot to review it. I'll try to make it short.

Entertaining from start to finish, with a fun and VERY well done story, filled with great main and side characters, just oozing joy throughout the entire campaign. The pacing flows relatively fast, dialogues are clever, optional objectives feel natural, the soundtrack is amusing, anime cutscenes are beautiful, puzzles are challenging and the mysterious story keeps you gripped until the end. I was, surprisingly, emotionally involved with the decisions I was forced to make. Few games make me feel like this nowadays.

But although I did love the different outcomes that the story can reach, I was a bit disappointed with how they handled the repeat journey, on subsequent playthroughs. If each route had dedicated major varieties, puzzles and unique cutscenes, Catherine would've been an easy 10. Also, I loved the puzzles, but things can get pretty annoying, since the controls are quite messy and restarting a level is infuriating.

Despite the game's journey losing a bit of its novelty after you beat it on the first time, Catherine is a MUST! Even if you find the gameplay frustrating or don't care much for it, the charming design, cast and plot will DEFINITELY dominate you 'til the credits roll.

The main reason I played Catherine was for Shigenori Soejima's art direction, which I'm a huge fan of. That aspect of the game did not disappoint. Neither did the game's stellar voice acting or unique sound design.

As a game, my feelings are pretty mixed.

The puzzle segments are fine, I suppose. Maybe I'm just not the biggest fan of block puzzles (see my Soul Reaver review). Some levels seemed super easy, some seemed arbitrarily difficult due to imposed time limits (causing me to lower my selected difficulty), some required a one-off technique I'd never repeat which was kind of annoying. Absent the game's theming and other segments, I probably wouldn't play this.

The more narrative bar segments appealed to me more, but there's a sameness that permeates your fellow patrons' stories that dulls their impact a bit, especially in comparison to the varied social links of Persona 3 – 5.

Both styles of play do make sense in the context of the game's story. But that story is also a mixed bag. I never related to the game's protagonist, or even understood why his friends put up with him. The game presents itself as an opportunity for you, the player, to express your views on relationships honestly, but the choices you're given are too binary, and Vincent's hapless course is more or less set until the very end anyway.

Against all odds, all of these elements do combine to form something greater than the sum of its parts. I've never played anything quite like Catherine, and that uniqueness compelled me to play through several of the game's numerous endings. Like an odd art house film, it may not be wholeheartedly enjoyable end to end, but something about it sticks with you.

PROS

• Deep, challenging puzzle mechanics
• Mostly fantastic art and music
• Flexible plot gives players agency
• Creative integration of theme & mechanics speaks to untapped potential of games as a dramatic form
• Stylish structural and narrative devices invite you into the game's world

CONS

• New Rin subplot is rather forced
• Translation is a bit awkward at times
• Lots of long cutscenes unnecessarily bloat the plot