Catherine's the story of a guy in his early 30s named Vincent, who works at a low-level IT type job. He's got an ambitious, stern girlfriend named Katherine, and she's pushing him to clean up his act and think about marriage, but Vincent's commitment-and-responsibility-phobic, and just wants to hang out and drink with his buddies in the bar and not think about anything too much.
AtlusUSA - Catherine: An Introduction to Vincent Brooks
Then, drunk in the bar by himself late at night, he meets this free-wheeling, mysterious, seductive younger woman named Catherine (with a "C"), promptly cheats on Katherine with this new girl, and starts getting these strange nightmares (that he doesn't quite remember after he wakes up) about climbing these block puzzles and getting chased by grotesque monsters that look like mutated babies and brides, and he sees these news reports about men his age all getting their souls sucked out of them during the night.
While Emily is Away tried to present a broad, non-specific story and set of characters, Catherine goes the opposite route, providing details, and names, and personalities to everyone. This isn't your story, like Emily is Away tried to be; it's Vincent's.
During the day, Vincent's life plays out in cutscenes. You see him wake up groggily in the morning, find Catherine in his bed, and have to deal with that, you'll see him squirming under an intensely scrutinous lunch with Katherine, or spilling out his thoughts and fears with one of his friends during dinner.
It's only late at night when the player is granted control over his actions. In the bar, you can talk to his friends and other patrons, and choose what you want to say. They're almost all conversations about relationships, and, unlike in Emily is Away, a lot of the choices are philosophical, about doubt and guilt and power balance between the sexes, and the game encourages you to answer whatever way you want to.
Then, once Vincent falls asleep, you get the puzzle stages. You start at the bottom of a stage of blocks that you have to push and pull to navigate, and you have to make your way to the top before the stage gives way from under you, or, on the boss stages, before the boss catches up. There are power-ups scattered throughout.
Between stages there are these sheep that are other men also sharing the same nightmare, which you can talk to (and some of them you'll recognize from the bar), and then there's a confessional booth where you'll be asked a question of some sort ("Does life begin or end at marriage?" "Can money buy you love?") before you're whisked off to the next stage (the booth also doubles as an elevator).
The game isn't particularly subtle about any of its imagery -- men are sheep, Vincent is being chased by monsters that looking like crying babies and women in wedding gowns, and you've got a little metre after every decision you make that either moves towards Law or Chaos, represented by an angel and a demon on both ends, and that metre affects the decisions Vincent makes during the day. But it is operating a lot of the time on dream symbolism, so that isn't too bothersome.
At the beginning, it was pretty obvious that Vincent was leaning towards Chaos on that metre. He was scared of commitment, didn't want to think about children or marriage, and he really wasn't putting in the effort to sustain the relationship with Katherine. So that's how I answered all the questions, at first. In the confessional booth, when asked "is it ok to live with your partner without ever intending to marry them?" I answered yes. And I thought as the game went on, for any choice I got, I would slowly move Vincent over, and push him to mature as a person and by the end I'd be choosing Lawful answers.
That didn't happen exactly like that, because, especially with the confessional questions, some of the choices are downright perplexing, and don't really fit onto a Law/Chaos spectrum. They were also randomized, and they didn't really seem to match up with what was happening within the story that takes place during the day; it was as if the developers just grabbed a random relationship personality/compatibility online quiz and dropped it into their game. As a means to express where I wanted Vincent's mindset to be within the story, the questions were pretty useless; as a way to get me to consider these questions, to get into Vincent's head a bit and consider what he'd think about these questions, and what I thought about those questions as well, it was alright.
The other thing you can do in the bar at night is, you'll get these texts from Katherine and Catherine, and you can choose to text back. And the best thing about this interface is that the game has you construct your replies line by line, choosing between different things to say back. You begin by picking the first sentence, but maybe you think you're too confrontational so you reconsider, you delete it, then you get another sentence, but that one's too meek, so you try a third time and you don't like that too much either, so you weigh your options, think about what you really want to say, and pick the first one, or maybe you just say the hell with it, put down your phone, and you sit down and drink some more. It's a system that Emily Short and Liza Daly also use in their game First Draft of the Revolution (website), where you're drafting a letter to your husband during the French Revolution. It's a system that really gets you to consider what you want to say, better than if you're just presented with multiple choices 1 2 3, because there's a sense of revision built into the fact that you have to physically choose to reject your current choice and go to the next option you have.
These texts messages are the most direct control you have (or feel you have) over Vincent's relationships and the story. It's through a smartphone, through virtual text, in the bar where Vincent is basically hiding out from his girlfriend and his shitty apartment and his job. The text conversations get that last part across abundantly clear; Katherine will ask you where you are, or she'll say she wants to talk to you face to face, and you can choose to lie to her and say you're staying late for work, or you're feeling sick, or a bunch of other excuses. But it's harder to hide, from those conversations you don't want to have now, with an always-connected device always in your pocket. In Emily is Away, the AIM chat window popping up and Emily wanting to talk to you is something that brightens up your day, but in Catherine, the blinking indicator on your phone is a burden.
Catherine does also make it more immediately clear what these choices represent than Emily is Away did. The system communicates how jumbled and contradictory the thoughts going through Vincent's brain are, the lines switching between bravado and conciliation and cowardice. You know when Vincent's lying, because you've seen the scenes in between, and you know what's going on in his life.
But really, in terms of what actually changes Vincent's actions later on, the confessional questions and the chats with other sheep and other patrons does more to move the metre than the texts will. The story starts off energetically and with seeming purpose, but it doesn't stick the landing (for the route I took, at least). Vincent can choose to change, but the cause and effect of the choices you make are off, and the character arcs don't really make sense. Katherine, unfortunately, really needed some bigger moments to make her character more convincing: something vulnerable, some sort of agency, something she does or decides that knocks the story off axis a bit more. The same thing goes for Catherine. And from either's point of view, the story becomes absurd because the game never demonstrates why Vincent would be the type of guy that either woman would go for, either. We can sort of sympathize with him, but the story just pushes him around a lot in a sitcom-y sort of way, and then we're shifting gears into a final act, one that suddenly dumps a bunch of exposition on you and which climaxes with an external conflict in a game all about Vincent's internal ones. The other bosses all made sense narratively but the final one doesn't, and so it ends up feeling 3/4s of a story and 1/4 of another. Emily is Away didn't want to tell much of a story, but it still ended up feeling like more of one; without the need to structure itself as such, it could communicate what it wanted to in a less jumbled manner than what Catherine accomplishes. I wonder if the need to support all the different endings you can get and the decision to have those branch so late in the game is partly what made Catherine's story feel so incomplete.
Oh, as for the puzzles: they're great! Catherine refuses to tutorialize, so the learning curve is steep -- like, sliding off the edge of an ice block into a dark abyss steep. Between stages, you can talk to other sheep and they'll show you various techniques you can use to arrange blocks, but you're thrown a bunch of new techniques to learn at a time, and it didn't really seem like the techniques you were being taught would immediately be usable on the next stage either, so there were times where I had to think back to what the game had shown me a while before, to figure out how to get past a part of the stage. It did take a while for my brain to really get how Catherine's puzzles worked, and the randomness of some of the bosses doesn't help, either (they're not as fun as the normal stages). The rewind feature which lets you take back a maneuver or two helps a lot. These aren't puzzles in search of the Single Solution like a game like Portal had; there's more freedom in how you navigate the stages, and even in the more contained sections the game might cordon off two sides for you to choose between to tackle. You might get stuck, but you don't often get to a point where you literally don't have any idea what else you can try to proceed. There's always another block to pull, right up until the floor falls out from under you (if you don't, if you've stranded yourself, then you have time to contemplate your own failings for a bit)
There's also a little arcade game in the bar which is pretty close to the same block-climbing game as the ones in Vincent's nightmares, but its limited by the amount of moves you can do instead of the bottom of the stage dropping out over time, and that variation makes things less stressful. It very well might've made a better main game, even, but it wouldn't have fit with the story. In the arcade game, you're a knight trying to climb up to the castle window to save the princess. But in Vincent's nightmares, he's a sheep, running from his fears, trying only to save himself. I suppose, if there is an arc there during his nightmares, it's that Vincent can choose to help the other sheep as well, along the way. His arc wasn't ever about storybook heroism, about running off to vanquish evil or save damsels; it was about turning around, and facing his own insecurities head on. In an earlier time, in an earlier age, bravery might've been to pick up the phone and call that girl you liked. But in Catherine, the real choice, the real confrontation for Vincent would've been to stop blowing Katherine off via text, and to really express his feelings face to face, whichever way his feelings swing in the end.
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