Catherine import review
Every man has been there. You go drinking with friends, have a jar too many, and wake up beside a mysterious blonde the next day with no recollection of how you got there – except for hazy memories of talking sheep, monster babies, mysterious deaths and an infernal tower full of lethal traps. We all know the feeling, right? Oh.
Catherine is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, sewn inside an enigma. In this case, that riddle is a sliding block puzzle featuring babies with chainsaws poking out of their eyes, the mystery is a surreal RPG starring a hapless hero who seems to be accidentally two-timing his fiancée, and the enigma is exactly what the developers were spiking their saki with when they made it.
It’s like David Lynch meets Tetris, and the type of game that, for better or worse, only seems to come out of Japan these days – brimming with originality, strangeness, brilliance and imperfection all in equal measure.
Packed with craziness right from the start – as a big-haired lounge-queen narrates and a Yellow Submarine-style animation sets the scene – Catherine tells the story of Vincent, a man on the verge of a particularly surreal mid-life crisis. His girlfriend, Katherine (note the K), may or may not be pregnant, she’s just made it clear she wants to marry him, and she doesn’t seem the type to take any messing about.
Meanwhile, a scantily clad strumpet called Catherine (told you it was important) somehow sashays into Vincent’s life, complicating his previously untroubled existence. And as Vincent’s fellow patrons at the Stray Sheep bar start to disappear and a couple of mysterious grannies begin dropping hints about some sort of Donnie Darko-esque event scheduled to take place in several days, Vincent is afflicted by some unusually vivid nightmares…
This story is such a core part of the Catherine experience that you’ll have to wait for the translation if you don’t understand Japanese – and here’s hoping they do a decent job with the localisation, because the script is genuinely interesting, funny and well-acted. But the main action boils down to a series of block puzzles, which Vincent must solve to get through his night terrors.
Every evening after going to bed, he finds himself at the bottom of an imposing, freestanding spire of blocks, clad only in underpants and a pair of curly horns, and forced to endure a race to rearrange the cubes and reach the top before they collapse.
