Catherine Chokes On Its Own Aspirations 5

I remem­ber first hear­ing about Catherine in a short Escapist arti­cle which most­ly focused on how the game looked to be sexy and weird. Clips of bipedal sheep being evis­cer­at­ed inter­spersed with shots of a not-overdressed blonde made up most of the trail­er, and as the nar­ra­tion was in Japanese, I had absolute­ly no idea what was going on. I would prob­a­bly have com­plete­ly for­got­ten about it, but once the game came out, some months later, games crit­ics I respect and admire began to wax rhap­sod­ic about its many virtues. Catherine deals with sex, mar­riage, and rela­tion­ships, they said, and does so in a mature and inter­est­ing way, all the while using the game’s puz­zle sec­tions as metaphor­i­cal com­men­tary on the protagonist’s predica­ment.

My inter­est was piqued, and while my gen­er­al, lurk­ing (and almost cer­tain­ly unjus­ti­fied) dis­trust of all things anime-related stopped my hopes from ris­ing too high, I resolved to play this strange sheep-game myself. After all, if Tom Bissell and Leigh Alexander both think it’s inter­est­ing, it has to be worth play­ing.

Circumstances and a gen­er­al lack of funds con­spired to push my own expe­ri­ences with Catherine back until late December of 2011, six or seven months after the game arrived on American shores. By the time I placed the game in my disc tray, I had read dozens of arti­cles about how fas­ci­nat­ing it was. This may have cre­at­ed unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions: noth­ing can ruin one’s enjoy­ment of a mediocre expe­ri­ence quite like being repeat­ed­ly told how bril­liant it is.

Even its staunchest defend­ers agree that Catherine is a strange game, if, indeed, it real­ly ought to be called a “game” at all. (That’s a point­less dis­cus­sion, and not one I real­ly wish to engage in at this time. Consider the con­ver­sa­tion about the prob­lem­at­ic def­i­n­i­tion of the word “game” invoked, and let’s move on). It’s two parts anime to one part puz­zle game, and long cutscenes com­prise at least half the game’s play­time.

Catherine is divid­ed between pro­tag­o­nist Vincent Brooks’ wak­ing hours, spent drink­ing at the pub with his pon­cey friends or in con­ver­sa­tion with his long-term girl­friend, the no-nonsense Katherine, or the one-night stand he can’t seem to shake, the volup­tuous and tit­u­lar (heh, “tit­u­lar”) Catherine.  At night, Vincent descends into the night­mar­ish puz­zle sec­tions which make up most of the game part of the game, a sort of hor­ri­ble bas­tard cross­breed between Q*Bert and Intelligent Qube, sprin­kled with gen­er­ous quan­ti­ties of LSD. In between puz­zle sec­tions, Vincent is placed in a con­fes­sion­al booth, where­in the play­er is con­front­ed with osten­si­bly yes/no ques­tions.  These vary from the mere­ly strange (“Have you ever got­ten a nose­bleed from being too excit­ed?”) to the inher­ent­ly absurd (“Do you pre­fer to date older or younger part­ners?”).

When it’s not about push­ing blocks around or look­ing at dirty pic­tures, Catherine is, fun­da­men­tal­ly, a game about a per­son­’s choice, so I found it a bit sur­pris­ing that the game rarely gives you any agency in Vincent’s actions. The game’s end­ing is deter­mined by the player’s con­fes­sions and the dis­cor­dant moral­i­ty meter those con­fes­sions affect, but most of the game is firm­ly script­ed, save for a few more or less irrel­e­vant lines of inter­nal mono­logue which change depend­ing on the posi­tion of the moral­i­ty meter.

That said, games do not nec­es­sar­i­ly have to involve mas­sive quan­ti­ties of play­er agency in order to be inter­est­ing, and if the play­er was allowed to remove Vincent from the sit­u­a­tion in the first few min­utes of the game, there would­n’t be much of a game to play at all.  But most games that do not allow a play­er much agency try instead to fea­ture inter­est­ing and engag­ing char­ac­ters and choic­es, such that if the play­er is spend­ing time watch­ing cutscenes instead of play­ing the game, the cutscenes are at least worth watch­ing.

Catherine, how­ev­er, focus­es on the three least com­pelling and relat­able human beings in the world, and fills its sup­port­ing roles with bland clichés or the spon­ta­neous­ly bizarre.  Each char­ac­ter is paint­ed only in the broad­est strokes.  After thir­teen hours of play, the char­ac­ters can still be summed up in two or three words each: Katherine is over­bear­ing and dis­ap­prov­ing­ly mater­nal, Catherine is a squeaky sex kit­ten, and Vincent is the Least Interesting Man in the World, gullible, bland and thick, thick, so very thick.  When exam­ined fur­ther, these char­ac­ters become active­ly wor­ri­some: are all men just hap­less, cheating-prone pup­pets being pulled around by their women?  Must all women fall into the cat­e­gories of skank or shrew?  How much gender-essentialism can you pack into a game this size?

This lack of detail is the first of the real prob­lems with Catherine.  It pur­ports to inves­ti­gate rela­tion­ships and adult life, but never gives us any rea­son to care about the rela­tion­ships or peo­ple in ques­tion. Vincent and Katherine have osten­si­bly been dat­ing for a very long time, yet we never see any indi­ca­tion that they know any­thing about each other.  We only ever see them togeth­er at lunch in some pink bistro, hav­ing vapid con­ver­sa­tion, show­ing no signs of chem­istry or inti­ma­cy, whether emo­tion­al or phys­i­cal.  What do they do togeth­er?  Why did they get togeth­er, and why do they stay?  Where are the lit­tle in-jokes that all long-term cou­ples have?  Katherine’s preg­nan­cy scare com­plete­ly failed to move me because I could­n’t believe these peo­ple had ever even kissed each other.

In short, the game does no more than sketch out the barest hints of char­ac­ter or rela­tion­ship, leav­ing out any poten­tial­ly inter­est­ing details until all that is left is a bland­ly arche­typ­al sce­nario, with­out even the sav­ing grace of inter­est­ing arche­types.  Only teenagers and sit­com char­ac­ters view rela­tion­ships in such abstract ways.  Real, mature rela­tion­ships are messy and embod­ied and heav­i­ly root­ed in con­tin­gency.  Real-life rela­tion­ships are all about specifics and details.

I’ve never been in Vincent’s exact sit­u­a­tion, not just because I’ve never cheat­ed on my girl­friend, but because I’ve never been an early thir­ties unmar­ried man try­ing to decide if he should com­mit.  But when I was try­ing to decide if I should get mar­ried, the ques­tions I asked myself were much more spe­cif­ic. I didn’t think about “mar­riage” or “com­mit­ment” or “chil­dren” in some sort of abstract sense – I won­dered if my Christianity and my now-wife’s agnos­tic­ness (not a word) would prove big­ger bar­ri­ers once we were mar­ried, wor­ried about mov­ing across the coun­try with­out a secure job to sup­port her get­ting an MFA. I wor­ried about try­ing to bal­ance what­ev­er the heck I want­ed to do with her aca­d­e­m­ic career. Whatever “big ques­tions” about mar­riage I asked myself were all root­ed in con­tin­gent cir­cum­stance and real-life con­text.  I did­n’t ask “Should I get mar­ried,” as some sort of abstract, for­mal con­cept, because that’s absurd.  I asked “Do I, Bill Coberly, want to marry Erin McNeil, before I can legal­ly drink, and then move across the coun­try with her to some­where I’ve never been?”

Maybe Catherine left its char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions bland so as to be able to say huge things about Relationships in gen­er­al, Relationships as a for­mal con­struct, to ask ques­tions about Marriage and Commitment and Freedom and Sex, to keep its sit­u­a­tions so broad that they might be able to appeal to any per­son in any rela­tion­ship.  But ster­il­iz­ing the sit­u­a­tion with such enthu­si­asm has the oppo­site effect: it ren­ders the char­ac­ters com­plete­ly unre­lat­able.  These peo­ple don’t seem to be real human beings whose tribu­la­tions and ques­tions relate to my own expe­ri­ences, they seem like automa­ta engaged in a hol­low fac­sim­i­le of human life.  As rela­tion­ships are inher­ent­ly unique and full of specifics, any dis­cus­sion of Relationships or Marriage must be root­ed in the spe­cif­ic and the con­vinc­ing.  

But, mov­ing beyond my own existentialist/feminist dis­trust of all things uncon­tex­tu­al­ized, the game still fails because it cuts its own legs off.  Three-quarters of the way through the game, it is revealed that Catherine is a suc­cubus sent by Dumuzid, the Babylonian shepherd-god (I am not embar­rassed to say I did­n’t know who Dumuzid was until I looked it up later.  Perhaps Atlus over­es­ti­mat­ed their audi­ence’s famil­iar­i­ty with obscure Mesopotamian deities?) to tempt Vincent for… some arcane rea­son.  I don’t real­ly know why, as at this point, my brain was refus­ing to pay too much atten­tion to the plot, as I was too busy yelling at the screen.  What lit­tle respect I had for the game vapor­ized with that reveal, because turn­ing Catherine from an actu­al human being with agency into some sort of lust-demon com­plete­ly inval­i­dates the cen­tral ques­tions of the game.

The ques­tion “Should I stay with this sta­ble, bor­ing rela­tion­ship or pur­sue some­thing wild and crazy and spon­ta­neous” is, poten­tial­ly, a valid one.  The ques­tion “Should I stay with this human being or try to chase after this crazy demon-lady who has only shown inter­est in me so as to lure me to a bloody death” is not.  Turning the temptress into a lit­er­al demon makes the game skirt its own cen­tral ques­tion.  It’s a cow­ard’s way out, both for the sto­ry­tellers and Vincent.  The sto­ry­tellers don’t have to real­ly engage with the mess they’ve made, and Vincent does­n’t have to deal with a real ques­tion.

If Catherine is a suc­cubus, Vincent’s dilem­ma isn’t a dilem­ma at all.  If he choos­es the sex kit­ten, he never has to worry about whether she will quit being sexy and hot, or if she will bore him.  The thrills of the pure­ly sex­u­al will always be his, because if she does­n’t just pull out his heart and eat it, then she’s a @#$%ing suc­cubus, and can thus prob­a­bly make his sex life inter­est­ing more or less indef­i­nite­ly.  If he choos­es to stay with Katherine, how­ev­er, then he has only reject­ed an ide­al­ized fan­ta­sy of free­dom, and not a real per­son at all.  He has­n’t made a real, mature choice either way, and thus what­ev­er real things the game might have to say are drowned out by the pre­pos­ter­ous­ness of its premise.

Not every story needs to be an accu­rate por­tray­al of how rela­tion­ships work, and there’s absolute­ly noth­ing wrong with inject­ing fan­tas­ti­cal ele­ments into an every­day sit­u­a­tion in order to exam­ine it in more detail.  That is, in fact, half the point of worth­while sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, but for a game which is sup­posed to be all about matu­ri­ty and adult rela­tion­ships, Catherine is shal­low, cow­ard­ly, self-defeating, and unre­flec­tive.

In my post-Catherine grum­bling haze, I reread the arti­cles which first direct­ed me into play­ing the damn thing, try­ing to glean some rea­son for why these game crit­ics, who are far smarter and better-read than I, could speak so high­ly of what seemed such an obvi­ous­ly mediocre expe­ri­ence.  All jok­ing about whether or not we had played the same game aside, I wor­ried I had missed some­thing, won­dered if I should play it again, if per­haps my answers to the game’s few choic­es had blind­ed me its bet­ter parts.  I fur­ther wor­ried that my own life expe­ri­ences had ren­dered me unable to “get it,” wor­ried that maybe it con­tained some secret chord through­out which only those who have dated as post-college adults could hear.

But as I reread Bissell & Alexander, I real­ized some­thing about the way they both speak about Catherine.  Both tend to praise its courage, its nov­el­ty, and cite its matu­ri­ty in com­par­i­son to other games.  In other words, they call it mature because it is not sim­ply puerile Soul Calibur soft­core pornog­ra­phy, and, how­ev­er bland and silly its rela­tion­ships are, it does engage with them as some­thing other than a series of clum­sy con­ver­sa­tions even­tu­al­ly result­ing in a stilt­ed sex scene.  It’s mature in com­par­i­son to other games, a breath of fresh (or at least dif­fer­ent) air.

For Bissell, “Catherine became less a game than a much-needed fox­hole in which to hide from that stuff for a lit­tle while. Above all, it serves as a brac­ing reminder of how much there remains to be done and said and explored in the video-game medi­um.” Alexander’s arti­cle is titled “Catherine Poses Questions About Mature Relationships Most Games are Afraid to Ask.”  Catherine is mature in com­par­i­son to the rest of gam­ing, they say, and when I take a long, hard look at some of the non­sense that is thrown around this medi­um, I might be forced to agree.

It is infu­ri­at­ing to con­stant­ly talk about the poten­tial for great­ness in this medi­um and play game after game after game which retries the same bro­ken for­mu­lae and wal­lows in the same muck.  I can thus under­stand the desire to seize on any­thing that seems at all dif­fer­ent, any­thing which tries even a lit­tle bit to engage with mature themes.  I know I’m guilty of this sort of behav­ior.  While I’m sure Bastion is good, I’m equal­ly sure I like it more than it prob­a­bly deserves, because I played it imme­di­ate­ly after play­ing a series of dis­ap­point­ing and half-baked games which left me hun­gry for any­thing which felt fin­ished.

Games are still an ado­les­cent medi­um, and I under­stand and appre­ci­ate the need to nur­ture those artists who try to bring it into matu­ri­ty.  But we should not allow our­selves to be so caught up in a game’s nov­el­ty that we turn a blind eye to its prob­lems.  It wor­ries me to label Catherine mature because it sets the bar for matu­ri­ty very, very low.  Catherine isn’t just “not mature,” it does­n’t just fail to live up to high stan­dards, it’s active­ly lousy.  By the end of the game, the things it says about rela­tion­ships and men and women are not just unin­ter­est­ing, they are essen­tial­ist and crass.

If pressed, I sup­pose I will admit to being glad that Catherine exists, but only because of its instru­men­tal value. I am glad that games about rela­tion­ships are being made, and glad that they can appar­ent­ly suc­ceed.  Catherine sold 200,000 units in its first week in North America alone, and if its suc­cess allows other, bet­ter games to come into exis­tence and reach an audi­ence, I’ll call it a net gain.  But Catherine is not worth­while as an end-in-itself.  Novelty is not enough to redeem shal­low tripe, and ulti­mate­ly, dif­fer­ent crap is still crap.