How ‘Catherine’ Became the First Puzzle Game I Ever Loved
Readers of Epilogue will be familiar with my general distaste towards puzzles in games. Puzzles usually serve as pacing mechanisms that pad out extra runtime for games that are not otherwise puzzle-oriented. They often feel like an annoying barrier to a story or game world that I am preoccupied immersing myself within, so I resent their existence the vast majority of the time I encounter them. Scale up my annoyance with puzzles in games to the genre of puzzle games themselves – games that are purely about their brain-stumping mechanics – and I can’t be bothered to even approach these games. Even games like The Witness with its welcoming color palette just strike me as games I would hate because they can entirely be boiled down to their puzzles.
When I think of games that funk up their otherwise stellar game design, I typically look to the AAA landscape where no game is considered “complete” without a million different things to occupy the player’s time. As much as I loved the 2018 release of Marvel’s Spider-Man for the Playstation 4, for example, I have yet to meet a player who thinks the game’s mediocre Lab Spectographs or Lab Circuit Projects enhanced the experience. (Luckily, these puzzles are optional.) Another 2018 release that received endless critical acclaim, God of War, has some of the tightest and most satisfying combat mechanics of recent memory, but the game feels an insufferable need to halt that action for puzzles. Whether Kratos is pushing around a mine cart or scoping out an area surrounding a nearby runic-locked chest, every puzzle in God of War kills the pacing of the game. These puzzles do not need to be there, as they add nothing to what makes those games great, and yet they persist across so many contemporary games.
There are games where puzzles can feel satisfying, but I have only ever noticed myself enjoying them when the puzzle is baked into the pre-existing gameplay loop that I have found satisfying throughout the entire experience. To this end, I think fondly of the middle entry in the Batman Arkham series, Arkham City. Not only is Arkham City an excellent expansion on the already-great mechanics of its prequel, Arkham Asylum, but one of its most memorable boss fight encounters is almost entirely a puzzle. The fight in question is Batman’s battle against Mr. Freeze.
What makes the Mr. Freeze boss fight memorable is that the encounter ratchets up the difficulty the more you play it. Like a puzzle, you are given constraints as Batman that you haven’t had throughout the games so far. Each time you take down Mr. Freeze in this boss fight, he adapts and learns your combat tactics, rendering the method with which you just took him down obsolete. Once you have used the stealth takedown from beneath a floor grate, for instance, you will not be able to take him down that way again. Thus, unlike the hundreds of thugs and goons that Batman will wallop throughout the few dozen hours in the game, Mr. Freeze’s fight takes careful planning and spatial reasoning. You have to use tools that are outside of your comfort zone – an amount of tools that is increasingly dwindled with each successful takedown – in order to overcome this fight. This is not a fight of endurance or skill; it is a fight of mental organization and strategy: a puzzle.
More than any encounter in the Arkham series, I remember this encounter with Mr. Freeze fondly because it made me think in a different way than games in this genre ever have. If every encounter was as intricate as the fight with Mr. Freeze, I don’t think the game would be nearly as fun or interesting, nor would this encounter be memorable. But it works because the goal is clearly defined, even if you struggle to execute the necessary tasks to complete it.
When Puzzles are Clearly Defined
This idea of a puzzle’s objective being “clearly defined” is what brings us to Catherine, the first puzzle game that I’ve ever truly loved. While the initial appeal of Catherine for me took its roots as a lecherous adolescent, glancing at the titillating box art in my local GameStop, I had no idea what I was in for when I launched Catherine last year. I was dimly aware that the game was developed by Atlus, the same team behind the beloved Persona series, but I knew absolutely nothing about Catherine’s story. From a few GDQ speedruns, I had a vague sense that Catherine would feature some puzzles in between story beats. I had no idea, however, that almost the entirety of the gameplay would take place while puzzle solving.
The story of Catherine is easy enough to understand. Vincent, the game’s burnout protagonist, is locked down in a long-term relationship. Though Vincent isn’t written to be likeable, I couldn’t help but notice a degree of overlap between him and myself with regards to his ambivalence about commitment. Sometimes you may find yourself in a relationship that is stable but unexciting, fine but not fantastic, comfortable but not stimulating. That’s how the longest relationship I’ve been in fell apart, and that’s how Vincent’s relationship begins to crumble at the beginning of Catherine. Thus, out of nothing else but for pitiful camaraderie, I found the central narrative hook of Catherine to be deeply compelling.
Though our situations are similar, I admittedly did not face relationship turmoil due to a succubus sabotaging my sex life. Vincent’s relationship with Katherine, the straight-laced partner whose authoritative presence has been leading up to the events in the game, makes him feel trapped and unsure of himself. Vincent has so little going for him, as evidenced by his routine deadbeat nights drinking at a bar with his high school buddies, that it’s no wonder that he finds himself waking up in bed with a much younger, more sexually enticing woman, Catherine. Vincent’s feelings are so on-the-rocks that it initially appears that his subconscious has steered his drunken self into infidelity, and thus the hook of the game begins.
Cheating on a romantic partner is one of the most morally heinous (albeit not illegal) things you can do to another person, and I have never met someone who – after some reflection – has cheated on their partner and not regretted it. From the discussions I have had with people who have cheated, the guilt that eats you from the inside out is unparalleled, especially if you don’t have the heart to end the relationship with that person, forcing yourself instead to live with that secret of infidelity. Vincent’s character is no exception to this soul-eating guilt.
Because Vincent is so psychologically torn between the stable partner that he’s been with for some time and the flirty young woman who is new and exciting, Vincent starts to have horribly vivid nightmares. These nightmares are recurring sequences that take the form of block puzzles. These block puzzles are a vertical series of movable platforms that Vincent must navigate in order to ascend to the top, escaping the nightmare and regaining consciousness. The gimmick of these puzzles changes over the course of the game, but the common thread linking all these nightmares together is the basic premise that Vincent must climb to the top – and quickly.
How Puzzles Work in Catherine
In all of the block puzzles, the platforms at the very bottom slowly fall away into the abyss below. If Vincent makes a mistake, slipping off the edge, he will fall to his doom – dead in his sleep. Many of the nightmare sequences take the form of boss battles, which feature a horrifying creature climbing up behind Vincent and chasing him to the top. Some of these bosses are crude and ridiculous, like the Immoral Beast who you fight early on. Others are more literal incarnations of the demons that are plaguing Vincent’s psyche, like a demonic version of Catherine accusing Vincent of not caring for her. These bosses add complexity and tension to the block puzzles, many of which need this added tension to properly succeed as a compelling gameplay loop throughout the game’s modest runtime.
It might be easy to assume that, because the puzzles are all very similar in nature, they become easier the more you play them. To some extent, this is true, hence the developer’s decision to include speedrunning modes like Babel to the game. To another extent, however, the block puzzles gain a gradual sense of complexity and intricacy as various elements are introduced, interrupting the simplicity of the earlier stages. Some such blocks include ice blocks that cause Vincent to slide off of them – something that led to many deaths for me early on – while others are simple spike traps that will be triggered if Vincent lingers on a block for too long.
What makes the puzzles in Catherine work so well is that each variation on the block-moving formula of each level is gradually introduced. There is never a moment in Catherine where you suddenly have to learn how multiple new elements work. Whether it’s a boss fight that chases you up the ascending blocks while on a time limit or a new style of block that suddenly interrupts your sense of flow and automaticity, the gradual evolution of puzzles in Catherine made each level feel within the scope of my abilities. Whereas many puzzle games can overwhelm the player with too many elements at once, I never questioned the pace at which the puzzles were changing over time.
What Makes Catherine‘s Puzzles Successful
Catherine does an excellent job of grounding each puzzle with narrative importance, creating implications both for the scenes leading up to the nightmare climbing sequence as well as the subsequent scenes displaying the resolution of Vincent’s inner conflict. It does an even better job of grounding the player with a clear objective. Because the primary goal of each puzzle never wavers, even as the superficial elements continue to shift and evolve with complexity, Catherine never falls into the trap of leaving the player wondering what to do. At every possible moment throughout the gameplay, it is abundantly obvious what Vincent should be doing: climbing up to escape the vicissitudes below.
The simplicity of Vincent’s goals in Catherine are so refreshing in the face of games that present a myriad of puzzle varieties to the player. Many games choose to offer their puzzles non-verbally, expecting the player to be intrinsically interested enough to experiment and discover the solution. Others will overload the player with thirty screens of explanation for the puzzle such that, by the time the player regains control and can apply the lessons from the puzzle tutorial, they are overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin. Whereas so many games lean too far in either direction of explanation or lack thereof, Catherine incrementally tweaks its puzzles while maintaining a steadfast and consistent presentation of their objectives.
While I began Catherine with the hope of experiencing a compelling narrative with an endearing cast of anime-styled characters, I stuck around for these compelling gameplay loops. Not only were the puzzles interesting and intuitive, they always felt like there were multiple workarounds towards the same destination – something that many puzzle games lack in their linearity. Because the puzzles in Catherine weren’t strict and rigid, I felt a degree of freedom that is absent in many puzzle games – notably the examples of Spider-Man and God of War mentioned above. That feeling of freedom increased as I would reach the next platform and be granted a moments respite as I spoke to sheep (people Vincent knows in real life who have transformed in this nightmare dreamscape), making choices for what I thought my character should value in a relationship.
Comparing Catherine to Other Puzzle Games
Several months after finishing Catherine, I couldn’t help but compare it to other games. Most recently, I played The Pathless, a game that prides itself on the fluidity of movement throughout an open world. While The Pathless has puzzles to break up the movement and exploration, they are all of a similar incarnation, involving torches, mirrors, and hoops through which you shoot your arrows. Sometimes I would get stumped in The Pathless but the objective was so streamlined and clear that I was never lost or perplexed on what the game was trying to communicate to me through the puzzle itself. Thus, The Pathless succeeded for me even though the puzzles were clearly not the focus that the developers had when making the game.
Catherine does something very similar to The Pathless in the sense that each puzzle variation added but a modicum of difference that was just out-of-reach of what I knew about the game’s mechanics thus far. With the puzzles in The Pathless, the game taught me early on that I needed to shoot arrows through hoops in order to activate and retrieve various symbolic keys that unlocked the next part of the world. With the puzzles in Catherine, the game taught me that I needed to maneuver blocks in order to climb up and escape the nightmare sequence. While The Pathless gradually introduced the idea of sending a flaming arrow into a frozen hoop to defrost it, for instance, Catherine gradually introduced the idea of adding in blocks that crumble under repeated weight and blocks that could not be pushed at all. Both games succeed in directing the player’s attention towards the desired end state because the initial premise of the puzzles in each game is consistent. It’s a lesson that I wish more developers implemented in their games.
When Are Puzzle Games Compelling?
Puzzles for puzzles’ sake are not a welcome addition in the games that I play. But when a puzzle unfolds over the course of a game like a stop-motion video of a flower bud opening petal by petal, I can’t help but become enamored. I found the gameplay loop of Catherine so compelling throughout my experience that, when the credits rolled, I ended up awarding the game with a perfect score. Using the classic Epilogue Gaming scale to evaluate the game, I realized that the game was fun the whole way through, I never ran into a performance issue, the art style was superb, the story and premise were masterfully executed, and this game even has lasting power that extends to this day. There’s a reason Full Body came out several years later, and I would suggest that it isn’t just story that the developers wanted to expand upon. Considering people still actively play Catherine years after its release – for its gameplay alone – there is no doubt in my mind that Catherine is one of the most important puzzle games ever made.
Catherine taught me that I don’t, in fact, hate puzzle games. I just hate feeling like I don’t know what the game wants me to do and, often times, why it wants me to do it. When a game delivers on a singular objective that allows me to narrow my focus within the gameplay, I feel like I can succeed at the task in front of me, and so I am engaged. When a game flops a puzzle in front of me like a snack to carry me over between meals, I am fundamentally disinterested. Catherine was never satisfied to be anything but the main course, and that confidence shines through every aspect of the game’s design. Catherine is the first puzzle game I have truly loved and is perhaps the only puzzle game I fully intend to play again.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
