At the time, I had recently transferred colleges and was luckily assigned a gaming roommate. New puzzles and choices to reckon with build on the original’s foundation in ways that aren’t particularly new, and Full Body’s adherence to the original means it carries with it a lot of the same narrative problems as its source.Six long years have passed since I was first introduced to Catherine. It is very steeped in its own aesthetics and is constantly poking fun at itself.ĭespite its flaws, Catherine was a solid game, and Full Body is similarly solid.
Full Body’s mechanical changes will provide a little extra fun for diehard fans of Catherine’s puzzle aspect.Ĭatherine is a game that insists upon itself, full of campily purring narration, wink-and-nudges, and playful narrative pauses atop the fourth wall. It was a nice change of pace from the more frantic main game in the original Catherine, and it’s even more fun with the Remix gameplay turned on - the new blocks figure very directly into your strategies. Rapunzel gives you limited moves to reach a rope made of the titular character’s hair and progress to the next level. The Rapunzel minigame, accessible via an arcade cabinet at the bar that Vincent frequents, returns with new twists as well. There are also a couple challenging new levels to tackle in the main game. Despite its attempts to grapple with questions of gender head-on, some of Catherine’s more sexist and gender essentialist ideas are still given far too much breathing room in Full Body, and the way Vincent is positioned as a white knight for Rin feels gross. It’s also a testament to how convoluted and trope-driven the original story was. That’s partly skill and deliberation on the part of the developers - the new Rin cutscenes and dialogue fit naturally with the existing story of Katherine and Catherine and show a new side of Vincent. She’s seamlessly woven in, to the point where she could have been in the original. Unlike the pragmatic Katherine and the coquettish Catherine, Rin is bubbly and innocent, relentlessly positive as she tries to regain her memories. Qatherine, an amnesiac who more palatably goes by Rin in the game, turns Vincent’s love triangle into a love square after he rescues her from a stalker in the night. Vincent similarly beings to have nightmares about climbing gigantic towers of blocks - which form the crux of the game’s puzzle element - where it appears a death will cause his death in the real world.Ĭatherine: Full Body brings all of this back with the addition of new puzzles, new scenes for Katherine and Catherine, and an entirely new character: Qatherine. The men also reported having strange nightmares before their deaths. One morning, he wakes up with Catherine with no idea what happened the previous night.ĭuring this time, reports of men dying sudden, gruesome deaths surface, with the apparent running thread being infidelity. Vincent then meets Catherine, a suspiciously named blonde bombshell. In the original Catherine, 32-year-old Vincent Brooks faces a life crisis when his longtime girlfriend Katherine McBride brings up the subject of marriage. For now, Full Body’s addition of a new character and some slight changes to the game’s puzzle sections don’t drastically alter the heart of the game, but they do provide more of what people liked about the original. We’ll discuss the narrative changes more in-depth next week. Full Body makes some additions to the original’s narrative and gameplay.
Catherine: Full Body is a remix of sorts of Catherine, a 2011 puzzle game by Atlus that had strong visual novel elements.
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