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Genre: Dating Sim/Puzzle
Platforms: Playstation3, Xbox360 (with a different boxart)
Release date: July 27th (NA), TBA at the time of writing (EU)
Developer/Publisher: Atlus

Presentation

Welcome to Catherine, a game that puts you in the shoes of Vincent, your average early 30s salaryman in one of the weirdest weeks of his life.

Vincent leads a moderately normal life. He just switched jobs, enjoys getting drunk with his friends in the local bar, “Stray sheep”, and spend some time with his girlfriend Katherine. His life seems to be going well for the most part until another woman named Catherine comes into his life. Catherine manages to seduce Vincent and after having a terrifying nightmare, he wakes up the next morning with Catherine by his side, naked, and making sexy commentary about last night.

Vincent tries to go on with this circumstance of events, and tries to convince himself that it was a mistake. Katherine starts pushing in the direction of commitment in their relationship and Vincent is left clueless and at the mercy of the supporting cast that includes his friends, a waitress, two old women, the bar’s boss and random bar-goers.

As you take control of Vincent and navigate your way through this week, you will find a diverse set of characters, each with their own background and character that will provide you with exposition and ways to change your fate. Most of the characters will fall under realistic archetypes of people in real life situations and will either offer advice or ask for help as  they pour their heart out at you. The story progression and the dialogue makes “Catherine” a very “Real” type of adventure that is even conveyed in the supernatural elements of the game. The predicament that befalls on Vincent may not be completely feasible, but it does manage to show itself in a way that will you make you relate to the characters you meet, no matter what their background or fate might be.

Gameplay

“Catherine“‘s gameplay is divided into two main segments:

The bar scenes will allow you to raise your intoxication levels that will in turn award you with better speed for the nightmare stage, alcohol related trivia (For gamers over 18/21, of course.) and inner monologues by Vincent that add a little character.

One of the most pivotal parts of the bar scenes is the option to interact with your drinking buddies, ask them about their day, their woes and for their help regarding Vincent’s situation. After you’re done at your table, you have the option of getting up from your booth, walking around the bar and interacting with the rest of the supporting cast. When you do that, some of them will tell you about their life philosophies, what they’ve been through and will even ask for your advice. All of your actions have weight, and your response will have great impact on their fate and Vincent’s outcome in turn.


Almost every action you do in this segment will cost you time, so there is always a chance you will miss out on a patron, a piece of dialogue or even trivia, encouraging the player to replay the game more than once.

Should you feel a little discouraged or challenged by the nightmare level, you have the option to play “Rapunzel” a mini-game that will train your puzzle skills in a similar fashion to the other main portion of the game, and an option to use your cellphone to change the difficulty of the nightmare stages. Changing the difficulty does not change the story of the game, but instead allows players to get through the story without being frustrated or hindered by the nightmare stages, at the cost of some trophies/achievements.

After closing time and the last call, Vincent goes home to sleep. However, his nights are plagued with nightmares, which he must scale and overcome should he want to live and wake up to see the next day.


The nightmare stages represent the second main segment of the game and will test your coordination and memorization skills, as you are tasked with the objective of climbing to the top of the tower, while avoiding the crumbling tower of blocks, other climbers who will try to push you away, and various hazards. Vincent has the ability to climb one block at a time, push/pull blocks out of his path and cling to the sides of hanging blocks. All of those provide different ideas of maneuverability to help you reach the rope or door at the end of the tower.


 As you progress through the levels you will be met with a time limit that will hinder your backtracking and a somewhat uneven difficulty curve that will spike up as soon as you hit the 3rd day. Not all is lost though, as mentioned above, switching to easy difficulty has no effect on the story, you have the option to undo your actions up to a certain point which will give you some more time and space to rethink your moves, and at the end of each mid-level scale, a shopkeeper will sell you items that can make the difference between life and death while climbing.

At those mid level checkpoints, you can also save your game, gather more story elements and some techniques that you may or may have not discovered on your own, and buy items from the shopkeeper using coins you can collect along the climb. It’s important to note that you cannot change the difficulty at these points. Between each stage, you are instructed to go inside a confession booth that will challenge players’ morality and ideals with a relationship/personality questions. These questions have the biggest effect of the outcome of the story and a simple answer can change your ending to any of the available 8 endings of the game, adding even more the replay value. The final stages of each day’s climb feature bosses and longer levels, each boss will have a different attack pattern that will affect the blocks and your path, providing players with the greatest challenge for that night.

Graphics

Shigenori Soejima of Persona’s fame is the lead character designer for this game. He manages to bring his style of realism to these characters, but leaves some of the style from the Persona games behind. The characters have been designed to look and feel like their implied personalities in a convincing manner, which really helps sell them out as a believable varied cast.

In game models and environments have a cel-shaded look to them with the use of overall dark tones, amplifying and emphasizing the eerie feeling of the game. The levels themselves feature a good variety of backgrounds and enemy designs, but there are times when it will feel like they fall short and become the victim of visual repetition.




The cutscene animations are made by Studio 4C, who had worked on Transformers Animated and Thundercats 2011. The animated cutscenes are well done and the animators have done a very good job expressing the the different characters with their actions and facial expressions, to the point of them being more eye pleasing than the in-game visuals.


While the overall visual style of this game wouldn’t strike out to be entirely original for the most part, there is enough variety within the levels and the characters to sell the ideas and motifs of the game.

Sound

Shoji Meguro, another member of the Persona team, manages to deliver yet another fitting soundtrack while still experimenting with different styles. The nightmare stages are accompanied by remixed versions of classical music by famous composers such as Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin that have a soothing Jazz overtone to them. The same Jazz overtone is being played at the bar scene with its own tempo and beat, more reminiscent of a typical bar scene.

The voice acting in the game is nothing short of spectacular, with all the different voice actors portraying their roles, reactions and expressions in a way that will help the player relate even more to the character. The main actors, the supporting cast and even the enemies offer the same quality voice acting.

As an added bonus to fans of Shoji Meguro’s works, unlocking trophies/achievements in the game provides you with a selection of his previous works at the bar’s jukebox.

Overall

With 8 different endings, challenging and somewhat unforgiving puzzles, Catherine manages to combine elements of a puzzle game and a dating sim in a very interesting way. The story that’s being told by the cast is carried well and players will have little to no hard time to relate to the characters found throughout the game and enjoy its story. The moral dilemmas brought in the game are sure to keep players questioning themselves and try a different answer at every playthrough  just to see the different results you may have missed the first time around.

The nightmare levels may have an uneven difficulty and some bizarre control issues, but with a little practice and patience they can become bearable and playable to the point of enduring the puzzles

8.0 BUY IT!

Genre: First person/Puzzle
Platforms: Mac, PC, Playstation3, Xbox360
Release date: April 19th (NA), April 21st (EU)
Developer/Publisher: Valve

In 2007, The most interesting and eyecatching addition to Valve’s Orange Box was “Portal”, a 1st person puzzle game that employed physics and thinking outside of the box. 4 years later after being well received, Valve released its standalone sequel, Portal 2. Can they outdo themselves?

Presentation:

Portal 2’s story begins after the ending events of the previous game. Our heroine, Chell, has defeated GLaDOS and finds herself in a motel room where she falls asleep. She wakes up only to find out that the motel room was in fact a sophisticated cryostatis chamber that kept her asleep for centuries.

She is then greeted by Wheatly, an on-rails core that informs her of her situation and mentions “Her” in his already comical dialogue. The room is then taken apart and starts moving towards a new location,we get our first look at how degradation and rusty Aperture science has become, a look that will follow the player for the vast majority of the game, regardless of what test chamber you might find yourself in.

The newest feature to the game is addition of Co-op multiplayer, which is highly recommended to be played with a friend or anybody who can communicate with you. This mode is seperate from the main campaign and focuses on two new robot characters: P-body and Atlas. Although these characters are incapable of speech, they manage to convey a lot of character via their expressions and cutscenes. Like the Portal gun Chell carries, their orbs use the complimentary colors orange and blue to show the players that they are companions. Unlike the Portal gun Chell carries, they use their own portal guns that use 2 sets of adjacent colors, Red/Yellow and Blue/Purple in order to help players differentiate between their companion’s colors.

Valve’s unique sense of humor can be seen and heard from the first moment of Wheatly’s introduction, the visuals that can be seen in various parts of the environment and well written dialogue by the different characters, old and new, and announcers of the game helps to set the game’s rather comical mood and allows the player to have a laugh and relax while he’s brain is busy at work.

Gameplay:

Portal 2 keeps the same control scheme used in the first installment in the series that is extremely easy to pick up for both veterans and newcomers to the series, Although for the most part you will be creating Portals and manipulate your way around them without the use of extra actions.The reliance on physics and split second portal warping is integral if one wants to succeed, as the game relies mostly on these 2 elements. If you can see it and feel it, there is a very good chance you can shoot a portal at it.

Portal 2 adds some new gameplay mechanics to the old formula of switching your place or another object’s place by adding a few gameplay elements that will allow give you new abilities and movement options. Combined with the already existing elements, these elements will provide you with other means of solving your puzzle and progressing in your adventures in Aperture Science and may lead to some interesting results.

Unfortunately, like the first game, both campaigns are still on the short side. But
Valve has not put a difficulty option in this game, instead allowing the game’s own pace and perplexing puzzles to set the tone for the challenge. As you move through the chapters one will find that the puzzles will get harder under very tight control, so that the player may never feel that the puzzle is too hard or too easy for the player at any point of the game. The metal bracers that are attached to Chell’s legs and P-body and Atlas being robots also help the player by not dying from falling into a great height and not discourage players to try new ideas in physics. With the puzzles’ unique structure the game suggests that you think outside the box and look for the solution in what may seem like an unconventional, yet logical way.

Make no mistake, whether it is hard or not, the game will keep you hooked and make your brain go in a twister over trying to think of the next move, gratifying you when you do reach the solution.

On the Co-op campaign, cooperation and teamwork is not required, but almost demanded by the game. Players are able to use each other’s portals and will have to work together with the same split second decisions and use of physics found in the single player campaign. Although voice communication is highly recommended, text chat, gestures and objective pointers are also available to the players to ensure that they use their brains together, With the gestures being a very effective way to make GLaDOS hate you.

For the Playstation3 version Valve has implemented a feature called “Steamworks” that has some of the pivotal components of the full version of Steam, sans the option to download games. Cross platform multiplayer is made possible with this toolset which allows Playstation3, PC and Mac users to play together in the Co-op mode. Steamworks works seamlessly with the full version of Steam and allows multiplayer to be shared by even more players.

Graphics:

Aperture Science has been deserted for centuries and it shows. The once shiny chrome walls now stand next to old rusty metal walls, the transfer tunnels between test chambers are cluttered with broken pieces of what used to be a state of the art testing facility and the place has not seen a cleaning lady for years. The Source engine has not seen significant improvements over the years, but even though it starts to show its age slowly, there is enough visual variety in the environments, chambers and gameplay elements to overcome this issue and still make the game look good and surprise you with each chapter.

Due to Chell’s prolonged sleep, she has not changed and remained practically the same, although now she sports a more athletic look with the top of the orange jumpsuit, implying that she’s no longer part of the bizarre science experiment that took place all those years ago and just wishes to escape, again.

P-Body and Atlas, on the other hand, are two new characters made specifically for the multiplayer portion of the game. They are a core and a turret that have gained full sentience, legs and arms and are ordered by GLaDOS to participate in tests as well. Although they lack almost any personality, their gestures and facial expressions can be considered a personality equivalent. Their different body structure and colors sets them apart from each other and gives them a strong Double act feel which can be emphasized by players doing some of the two player gestures such as hugging, high fiving each other or playing rock paper scissors. 

Sound:

Good dialogue and good writing need good voice actors. With Chell being silent and the robots only being able to output various sounds and grunts, it’s up to Ellen McLain to step into the familiar shoes of GLaDOS accompanied by newcomers J.K Simmons, Stephen Merchant, and a few more. All of the voice actors do a fantastic job portraying their roles, expressing the different phases that all the characters go through during both campaigns and making the dialogues/monologues truly come to life, from the first word spoken until the very last.

Although the game is almost devoid of any background music, Sound cues and the little music that game has start to play in when you are using the new gameplay elements and during the pivotal parts of the test chamber, letting you know that you are on the right track.

Overall:

Despite it being a little on the short side, with 2 brand new campaigns, funny and interesting story, and new gameplay ideas, Portal 2 fails to disappoint. It builds on the core formula of the first game and does little to change it while still adding to it, which proves itself once again as a simple-yet-it-just-works concept that is easy to pick up and will be very hard to put down,

In an ocean of games that use the first person perspective to kill whatever stands in front of you, Portal 2 stands not alone, but almost at the very top of the games that try to think differently, with the keyword here being “Think”. It’s a breath of fresh air on an old perspective. It’s fun, addictive, advocates creative thinking and teamwork.

9.0 BUY IT!