Catherine Classic

Earning every achievement on Steam has solidified the opinion I already had that Catherine is my bar-none favorite Atlus game (I adore Persona and ReFantazio too, please don't kill me) and a hugely nostalgic puzzle game that has climbed into my top ten of all time as I've grown older and better understood it. It's brutally hard and requires an insane amount of focus and quick thinking, making for uniquely immersive gameplay that really instills the same stress and terror that Vincent experiences firsthand. While I have also played the remake of this game, Catherine: Full Body, and think it's easily the superior Catherine experience, make no mistake that Catherine Classic is still fantastic and has aged like a fine wine. As you can see, I have way too much to say about this game. As this is primarily a narrative title, I'll be staying away from spoilers for this review, but as a brief but thorough plot synopsis: In an American space colony on an unknown planet, you play as Vincent, a financially insecure coder for a tech company, who through a series of unfortunate events is entangled between two women; Katherine, his loyal and long-term girlfriend, and Catherine, who he unknowingly has an affair with after incidentally meeting her at the bar he spends most days in with his friends. In this universe, unfaithful men develop extremely vivid nightmares turning them into anthropomorphic sheep and requiring them to climb up elaborate block structures that crumble beneath them. If they cannot push the blocks around to climb to the top fast enough and fall to their death in the dream, they die in real life. If they survive, they'll continue to get the same dreams night after night, and this begins to pile yet more stress and exhaustion onto Vincent. Catherine is a choice-based game, so the decisions you'll periodically make and the conversations you'll choose to have slightly alter your story and pushes you towards 8 possible endings. The endings can generally be grouped into who you lean towards pursuing a relationship with (Katherine, Catherine, or neither) but all 8 endings remain distinct and compelling, and I think it's 100% worth replaying the game a bunch of times to see how they all pan out. The themes of commitment, relationships, and sacrificing a part of yourself for another are all wonderfully integrated into gameplay and how your choices can affect the ending you end up getting. The story is the main draw of Catherine, but its gameplay is still really beefy and novel despite how much gameplay design has saturated in the decade and a half since Catherine's release. In the span of nine in-game days, there exists two main gameplay loops: The bar sections during the day, and the nightmares at the Great Trials. In the former, Vincent can freely explore the Stray Sheep bar, interact with a slew of other characters in person or over the phone, read emails and potentially get useful gameplay or story insights, drink (which affects his movement speed during nightmares), play a Rapunzel arcade game that provides some extra climbing practice, and learn more about Vincent's headspace as he navigates his "situation." In the nightmare scenarios, Vincent races against the clock to escape a variable number of stages depending on the night. Between stages, Vincent can speak to other cheaters in the same predicament to share climbing strategies or learn of their personal lives, manually save progress, and answer questions about relationships/commitment that will ultimately play a part in the ending of your playthrough. Each night introduces new block types or gimmicks to further augment the gameplay loop, and there's lies a boss in the final stage of every night (with the exception of the first level), that all present special offensive abilities to spice up the climb. While I love the gameplay, I will admit this game gets unbelievably difficult if you're someone who isn't amazing at puzzle games; It's one of the hardest games I've ever fully completed. It demands absolute mastery of the climbing and the strategies it teaches you, and nothing less; You can't get by through sheer luck. The flexible two-hour refund window Steam has is a pretty good span of time to gauge how difficult and/or enjoyable the climbing is for you, and you'll likely have a good idea of whether this is the right game for you or not before that window ends. The game stays pretty diverse from start to end considering the consistent day/night system and is one of those games that gives you a glorious feeling of fulfillment when you beat stages just by how punishing it can get. There's quite a bit of secondary content in addition to the replayability of the main story, including a split-screen multiplayer mode and the brutal, pseudo-randomized Babel's Tower stages, unlocked from beating portions of the game on the hard difficulty and acting as the ultimate challenge of the game. I platinumed the game in a pretty quick amount of time by already playing it a few times on other platforms and planning out my repeat playthroughs, so the 41 hours I have total is definitely a lowball; You could certainly stretch this game to a good 80-100 hours without getting bored, with story playthroughs typically being in the rough ballpark of 6-8 hours. I edged tens of thousands of times without it ever losing its fun, and I don't mean that in a perverted way. Catherine has the typical striking, captivating visual/artistic style most of Atlus' other games have and still looks amazing for being as old as it is. Characters are well-designed, with distinct visual traits that set them apart in clever ways. The 3D animated cutscenes are solid, albeit a bit stilted due to the rigidity of the 3D models, and the 2D animated ones are stellar, genuinely TV show-caliber. Environments do a good job evoking a certain feeling in the player, whether it be the claustrophobic nature of Vincent's tiny apartment, the normalcy and comfort of the Stray Sheep, and the surreal vibe of the Great Trials, with the random, fittingly dream-like assortment of objects/blocks and the sheer scale of the location. Bosses are masterfully designed, most being body-horror manifestations of Vincent's active fears and worries. Other stylistic aspects like voice acting and UI design were well-done and fitting. I quite liked the pink and black aesthetic of the UI and how the UI is integrated into the game by being Vincent's phone while in the bar. Many reviews note performance and crashing problems with this game, that likely won't be patched out due to the age of the game and the port. I didn't have significant performance issues, maybe one crash ever, and thus can't pitch in with anything insightful here, but I do recommend scouring some of the more performance-focused reviews since it may well be very relevant to you. The size of this review probably says enough about how passionate I am about this game. It's a gem that feels a bit forgotten in recent years, though that's not surprising as this game didn't necessarily innovate to the same effect some of Atlus' other titles have. There's a lot of merit to games that don't try to innovate, but instead just focus on being a really damn good video game, and I feel this is a masterclass in that design formula. Catherine is a beautiful, melodramatic, difficult, stressful, rage-inducing, depressing masterpiece loaded with twists and turns that I'd recommend to anyone.

OBRA MAESTRA INFRAVALORADA 1000 / 10 CAMBIO MI VIDA PEAK GOD TEAM KATHERINE

Aged very well, great story, soundtrack and art design. The actual gameplay of the puzzles never get old as they get very very tricky with each stage lol, frustrating but almost always your fault if you fail. Minor complaint is peeking around corners camera controls and hanging off a ledge controls are awful, for the latter, it inverts your controls seemingly at whim, probably been 'fixed' by full body release idk. Atlus for the love of God, release more games like this. Their mainline JRPGs are padded slogs at times, refreshing playing an Atlus game that respects your time, as well as being a different genre to their norm.

Misogynist game for incels.

I miss Tartarus

Crashes on launch. I tried every version of windows running in compatibility mode and none of them worked& they didn't even include full body with the pc port. Girl bye.

nice feet

This is a very strange game but I love it. The characters are all very interesting, the story is well written and unique, and I love the gameplay, both the social management aspect and the puzzles.

如果按照对前任的亏欠来算的话，我有罪 我也将会被送入噩梦审判。

A wonderful game design/idea. Hilarious writing, well done animation. Great themes and art style. Ruined by a bad port. I got two hours deep before this thing reliably crashed. I tried compatibility mode. I tried running some other compatibility fix using a guide on Steam. The game just doesn't work. It's actually incredible that SEGA and Atlus screwed this up so badly and have no interest in fixing it. There are ancient games on Steam less broken than this. Do not buy this game unless the developer gets serious about making it available for PC. Note: you can seemingly get a workable solution going with Dxvk and running compatibility with win7 on one core. That's too many steps, IMO, to really justify a recommendation to your average gamer who may have played other Atlus games on Steam and want to give it a try. Atlus and SEGA - patch this please. This is a great game that can be easily fixed.