It’s been 10 years since the release of the original Catherine, a game that wowed me at the time with its unique blend of horror-tinged supernatural mystery, action-puzzle gameplay, and a story themed around “adult relationship issues.” I was still in high school back then, so I’ve been curious to revisit the game now that I’m a decade closer …
It’s been 10 years since the release of the original Catherine, a game that wowed me at the time with its unique blend of horror-tinged supernatural mystery, action-puzzle gameplay, and a story themed around “adult relationship issues.” I was still in high school back then, so I’ve been curious to revisit the game now that I’m a decade closer to its protagonist’s age, and see how differently it all comes across. The game certainly has “issues,” which have been covered at length when this version came out. As articles like that acknowledge though, it has its strengths too.
I think it does a good job specifically at using exaggerated scenarios and characters to prompt the player to reflect on social norms and pressures. Like during the nightmares between each puzzle segment, the game asks you to answer a question like, “Does life begin or end at marriage?” and then grades you on a morality meter and shows you how your choice compares against other players. It can certainly prompt you to step outside of these kinds of questions and think about why you give a certain answer, what influenced you to get to that point, and so on, but also why it even needs to be a question in the first place. I interpret these questions as intentionally false dichotomies, extensions of that nightmare that do a good job getting you to think about how well-meaning people such as some of the game’s characters parrot black-and-white ideas about relationships and life in general that can cause people undue stress.
The people in the game talk about these kinds of issues in stereotypical ways, but never actually properly communicate or think about them. Part of what stifles the communication is the protagonist being fed these black-and-white expectations about marriage, commitment, and gender relations that prevent him from actually airing his anxieties and encourage him to erect defense mechanisms and lie instead of actually being honest with his partner(s). The original game never to my memory really offered that kind of “break free from the dichotomy” perspective, and as a result almost felt like it was endorsing some of the stereotypical ideas, but the new version kinda does to a degree in its opening hours. I’m not expecting too much, but still curious to see exactly how it plays out after the first third of the game that I’ve completed here if you directly pursue that route.
