"Catherine" Demo Impressions

For those who don't know what Catherine is, I'll give you a quick run down. The game is being developed by Atlus, the same people who created and developed the Persona games. Catherine is a very different game though. It's marketed as an action-adventure puzzle game with horror elements.

What we know of the story is this: Vincent (the player) is being pressured by his girlfriend of five years - Katherine - to get married. Vincent, wanting to remain single and free, finds himself drinking his sorrows away. This is when he meets Catherine, a young pretty girl who seems drawn to Vincent. The two end up spending the night at Vincent's house. At the same time all of these bodies have been turning up in Vincent's neighborhood. All appear to have died in their sleep. There's a rumor going around that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life as well.

The going theory here is that Catherine is linked to all of these murders and is somehow inciting the nightmares. None of this can be confirmed though based on what Atlus has shown of the game.

The demo doesn't shed much light on things either, at least not for me, someone who only speaks and reads English. Despite that it was surprising how much of the menu system was in English. This made it a little easier to navigate the game, but everything else from voices to subtitles was in Japanese.

The majority of the demo took place in the nightmare sections of the game. Despite there being playable sections during the day (such as in the bar and whatnot) the demo seemed to skip over these.

In the nightmare sections you're forced to race to the top of tower before whatever monster is chasing you catches up and kills you. The trick is rearranging parts of the tower to continue climbing. This seemed easy enough at first, but the end of the last section gave me a lot of trouble. I can only imagine what the later parts of the game will be like. It's very tense when the creature is nearly on top of you and can't figure out what combination of movements will get the blocks aligned just right. 

You earn points as you go along that contribute to awards you receive at the end of each tower. Points are gathered by continually climbing (sort of like a combo meter), gathering cash, and not dying. I'm assuming these will play into earning trophies/achievements when the game comes out.

That's all I could really grasp from the demo. The rest of it, unfortunately, was in completely unintelligible to me. The cutscenes themselves are beautifully drawn, I simply wish I could understand them.

At this time there is no word on whether or not the game will be released in the US, but I'm certainly hoping Atlus will bring it over to the States.

Catherine is set to be released on February 17 in Japan. A trailer for Catherine can be viewed below: