As a spiritual member of the Shin Megami line I’ve been meaning to give Catherine a go for a while now. So I decided to record my impressions of the first hour or so of the game as I went.
The opening menu is nice and a little bit cryptic featuring all three of your lead characters, Katherine and Catherine both being free, while Vincent is bound by barb wire. Both girls are ignoring his calls for help.
Upon selecting a new play, the game offers you a quote from Shakespeare “All the World is a Stage and All the Men and Women are Merely Players.” From As you like it. It’s a nice opening line, and between that and the menu it already leaves you just a little curious about what your going to be playing.
The hostess of the Golden Playhouse Trish is scaring the hell out of me, but she takes on the role of story teller, explaining that if you fall in a dream you die in real life and that’s tonite’s story is about a kind and earnest man named Vincent.
The actual story opens with Vincent’s concerned girlfriend Katherine Mcbride questioning wether or not he’s really doing okay. This is followed by the same type of annoying J-rap opening song we’ve begun to expect from Atlus. As soon as we get past that though we are in our first nightmare….which means our first puzzle!
From the very get go Vincent is warned that if he falls he will die, interesting. Also I had no idea the pieces of the stage would fall from underneath you. This could be really neat. BTW Mystic pillows as items is straight up hilarious. So the boxes in the puzzle only need to connect at the edges, making it fairly easy to create stairs. Also I like that your tutorial voice is someone else trapped in this mess.
As soon as you do actually make it to the exit you find yourself waking up from this horrible nightmare. So far Vinnie doesn’t seem that bad. However Katherine is just a little bit creepy, she jumps from “I usually kill people in my dreams” to “hey how long have we been together cause you know my mom’s been asking” Do you know what a segway is lady?
And then we cut scenes again over to the corpses from the ring….I mean a dried out husk of a body. Our poor narrator perhaps? I love it when this kind of stuff is deemed accidental btw. It’s shortly following all that we get to meet Vincent’s two friends Toby and Johnny. In spite of looking like a knock off Lindou I’m not too very fond of Johnny he’s kind of a dick, but Toby seems alright.
Texting is amazing. You get to choose pieces and parts of your messages and it drops you further into your chosen path depending on how you text! It’s also from your phone that you get to save your game and retry previous stages.
It’s the first night of the game in the bar that we first see Catherine, you know aside from the menu and are actually introduced to the Prison of Despair by name. The second puzzle didn’t seem to terribly different from the first but I am confident that as the game progresses it will get more difficult.
Story so far: 8 there isn’t a lot to go on right now, but it is interesting.
Music 6: I do not like the opening song but the haunting melody playing in the chapel and during the puzzles is very nice indeed.
Characters 7: I’m kind of split right down the middle on this, I llke Vincent and Toby, and don’t really care for Katherine or other friend guy. I also like sheep with glasses and sheep with hair.
Design 9: This game does have some major style points going on though from the menus and the phone designs and all. I love the barbwire menu boxes.
Difficulty 6: On normal mode I wouldn’t really register this one as being very tough starting out. I guess we’ll see where it goes
Somewhere In The Midst Of Nowhere 