Most of Catherine’s story progression happens through cutscenes and light adventure elements that take place over a period of eight nights at Stray Sheep, the bar where Vincent and his friends hang out after work, drowning their sorrows in whiskey as they talk dispassionately about the lack of any passion in their lives. Bars tend to be places of gloom, and Stray Sheep isn’t any different, with Shoji Meguro’s somber jazz tunes providing the perfect mood for it. You can interact with the patrons of the bar, help them out with their own issues, or leave them alone with their empty glass of alcohol. You can also respond to text messages that you will occasionally receive from either Katherine or Catherine in any manner you wish to, which will have a subsequent effect on your relationship with them. You can also get drunk and earn trivia related to various alcoholic drinks.
What’s also interesting about this part of Catherine is that every major action takes time, and NPCs will enter and leave the bar as that time progresses. Instead of putting players in a closed room where they can talk to every NPC at their own comfort before moving on, the Stray Sheep section subconsciously forces players to talk to those NPCs they care about more, as it soon turns out that reality and dream may not be so different after all. The “cause and effect” element between the two halves plays out interestingly. Drinking results in the passage of time, meaning it is one less chance to interact with a NPC, but it makes you faster in the “nightmare section.”
The other part of Catherine is the afore-mentioned “Nightmare” section that takes place whenever Vincent goes to sleep at night. All the familiar tropes of surreal horror are used to great effect here: incredibly tall towers made up of blocks? Check. climbing the tower for survival as they slowly crumble from the bottom? Check. Any slip-up can lead to Vincent’s death, literally. Something as simple as this might sound underwhelming or even boring, but trust me, it isn’t. Because of the manner in which Atlus uses it, it can make anyone eat their words.
Catherine’s gameplay is no pushover; it doesn’t arrive on the scene with the intention to serve as a second fiddle to its unique and absorbing story. Its gameplay is every bit as fantastic and important as its story. It’s as vital to the jigsaw the game delicately constructs as its cutscenes are. That’s partly because Atlus uses every possible trick in the book in designing fiendish block puzzles and then adding further ideas to them—blocks with multiple properties, towers designed so smartly that both precision and observation are required to overcome them.
This is even before you reach the boss battles.
Besides the crumbling tower, you now have a giant-sized boss, often modeled after Vincent’s own insecurities in his life, be it an enormous vagina trying to confuse him or a creepy-looking infant with a chainsaw. Catherine’s boss battles are both over-the-top and intense. They take the very best parts of the normal levels, which are observation and precision in arranging blocks to the top, and add the challenge of dodging the insane attacks of the boss that alter specific blocks’ properties or even reverse your controls. Shoji Meguro’s remixes of classical symphonies from the likes of Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin provide the perfect atmosphere for the intensity that such tower-climbing can result in.
It isn’t without its own issues, though. Limited camera control detracts from some of the fun, especially during the more intense levels. That flaw is perhaps the only element of Catherine’s gameplay that can lead to frustration. You also have the ability to “Undo” a specific number of moves, which provides some relief from the daunting challenge you’re tasked with night after night.
