Wake Up, Sheeple

Cheat On Your Partner And Pay The Price In Catherine Classic’s Offbeat Mix Of Puzzle Game And Life Sim.

- Samuel Roberts

What next, Persona 5 on PC? It’s hard not to believe that’ll happen someday soon, now that I have got Catherine in my Steam library. It’s been an exciting few years for previously console-only cult classics coming to PC, especially from the likes of SEGA. Catherine is a real oddity: Part-relationship and life simulator, and part-pretty good block-climbing puzzle game.

What’s appealing is its unusual subject matter. You’re Vincent, a 30-something in a long-term relationship with Katherine, who wants to settle down, and for Vincent to find a better-paying job. Vincent, though, wakes up next to another girl called Catherine. After cheating, he begins to experience nightmares where he’s in his underwear, climbing towers of collapsing blocks. The men who fall to their deaths in this hellscape are dying in real life.

The main part of the game is climbing and pushing the blocks in order to ascend these towers, dealing with occasional modifiers like slippy blocks made of ice, or blocks that are traps. It’s about figuring out your next few moves in advance: Building a staircase to reach the next rung of the column, or pushing out a few base blocks to make the entire tower drop down by one.