You may feel this is a late review but this game has only just been published in the UK so I’ve only just been able to recently try out infidelity and all the pain it eventually brings. You play as Vincent, a 32 year old guy who feels like things are coming to a head with his current girlfriend Katherine. She wants to get married and settle down but he still likes hanging out in the local bar with his pals. One evening he gets a little tipsy and wakes up next to a hot, if not a little insane, blond girl who’s also called Catherine but with a C. Cue a tale of guilt, passion and intrigue and lots of nightmares which you have to fight through that involve sheep and pushing blocks about.
Yup, it’s a little crazy but that’s what the Japanese are best at. You must make your way to the goal at the top without falling off the tower. Sometimes they’re just falling from the bottom and during boss battles you’re being chased by hellish beasties.
It takes a while to get your head around the puzzle mechanic because as long as a block is touching at least one edge of another it won’t fall. You can then slide, push and fell blocks in order to make a staircase and climb your way out of the nightmare. Variations on the theme include trap blocks that spike you if you linger on them, ice blocks that make you slide to your doom if you’re not careful and other guilty guys who take the form of sheep. Get to the top and you get more tips from them about how to play and also answer questions about the type of person you are that gets posted online and affects your good/bad meter and ultimately the game’s ending of which there are supposedly seven.
Other things that affect this are your replies to text messages and decision you make when you’re awake in the bar. It’s here where the majority of the interactive narrative takes place, the rest of which you watch in other locations including, of course, the bedroom.
There’s no denying it’s a fiendishly tough puzzle game but it’s also a very compelling tale of love, lust and honesty. I do recommend you play it on easy to begin with though because it’s rock hard (pardon the pun). There may not be that much to the Catherine game but at least it’s got more story than Tetris or Q*Bert so it gets a very good 7 out of 10.
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