This week marks the release of the long-awaited demo for the game Catherine on Playstation Network and XBox Live Marketplace. Pegged as one of the first truly mature and adult games out there, dealing with grownup relationships and commitment as its central theme, coupled together with some sort of challenging block tower puzzle climbing game. The premise of the game is weird enough, but the real game mechanics are simple enough.
[Screens via Destructoid and Amazon]
Learn more about this game's adultness by clicking "Read more" below!
Catherine is developed by ATLUS, from the same team that brought you the latest Persona games, which is quite obvious once you start up the demo. The font, the music and sound, the aesthetics, and the character designs are spot-on with the Shin Megami Tensei style you find in games such as Persona. This game just excites me with the possibility of new Persona games for today's high definition consoles.
The meat of the game is basically like a block-tower-climbing puzzle game that takes place in some sort of twisted dream world, its hard to describe since there hasn't been a game quite like it. The puzzle element of the game consists of manipulating boxes around a tower of boxes to get higher, as you can only climb up one box at a time.
As you're trying to climb a tower made of blocks and you find out that the laws of gravity don't apply as long as those blocks connect to each other by their edges. As you're moving blocks around to scale the tower, you are chased by a giant demonic representation of something in Vincent's life and you have to quickly work to climb up to the exit at the top tower or its game over.
Sounds absolutely insane, right? You're absolutely right. The demo didn't give much details as why or where this block tower climbing trial takes place.
Controls are simple and take getting used to, while they may seem imprecise at first, once you know how to get around and get used to the monster woman chasing you with a giant fork, you'll do fine. I found myself dying a few times because of my unfamiliarity with the rules and controls, but I got through the second tower easily once I got comfortable with the game.
It is worth noting that I played the Playstation 3 demo of this game and the PS3 controller has a superior directional pad over the XBox 360 controller, which I think made a great difference in this game. Seeing as the puzzle box tower part of the game is very grid-like, the imprecision of the XBox 360 controller may affect controls to a certain degree.
The demo didn't really give me much of the story of Catherine. I got a few anime cutscenes that were not that good, then I got some in-engine cutscenes that look fantastic. We get a scene with the protagonist, Vincent with his girlfriend, Katherine, then we get a scene with Vincent and his buddies.
The scenes didn't really provide anything new, I just kinda thought the transitions between the "okay" anime cutscenes with the pretty in-engine pretty cutscenes does a disservice to the already good-looking in-engine bits. Oh and the game's engine is the notoriously fugly Gamebryo engine that powers the games Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3/Fallout: New Vegas.
I had a fun time with the demo and I am buying it. ATLUS is amazing with making stuff that just runs up to me and punches me in the face with pure awesomeness and takes the entire contents of my wallet. If buying this means that I will get the next Persona games on my HD game console, by gosh I will buy this game so hard that my PS3 won't be able to walk for weeks.
[Screens via Destructoid]
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