Catherine, finally on the PC. It is a surprisingly mature game with a love triangle, corpses and a herd of rams

This game is different. This is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you play Catherine classic. At first glance, it looks like a slightly erotic game with comedy elements and a typical love triangle, but Catherine does not fall into cliché, is not afraid of difficult subjects and does not get stuck in the moralizing mud. It's a game for adults, and it's not because the heroine suddenly gets a nipple from a bra size 80E.

Men die in mysterious circumstances. They fall asleep, but they do not wake up. They are found dead in their own (or someone else's) beds with faces contorted with terror. In the city, fear is growing, people are repeating rumors about a witch who curses unfaithful partners, brings them nightmares in which, if they die, they really die.

And that's when Vincent Brooks, our hero, decides to betray his long-time fiancée. Great timing is just one of its many advantages.

The game has a surprisingly serious theme for the number of rams in it.

When Katherine starts talking about the wedding, Vincent panics. In the end he has only 30 years with a wrap, and the girl meets only from 7. At the local bar begins to frighten fear of commitment (yes, our hero is a jerk, but it's easy to feel with him the thread of empathy). This is where he meets Catherine - a beautiful, long-legged, scantily clad blonde, who immediately declares that all these marriages are some senseless invention of people who do not value freedom. The next morning, Vincent wakes up next to her.

Part of the game involves direct navigation of difficult relations with Catherine and Katherine. We can, by texting them, win the favor or the liking of the other, but although the choice between the ladies is at the center of the story, he is not his essence. More important is how Vincent comes to him and how he develops as a human and a potential partner. The main daily location is the Stray Sheep bar, where we can talk with its regulars and learn about their stories. And these are one of the better elements of the game. The authors do not shy away from difficult topics, showing the emotional entanglement of the characters, but they do not show any cruelty or cheap sensation. Each story develops slowly, as if woven by a sultan's wife for a thousand and one night, and slowly shows that it is more complex than one would expect at first glance.

Our conversations with them affect the end of the nightmare in which the protagonist himself got himself.

The second part of the game is a fight for life in the nightmares of Vincent.

As soon as tired of drunkenness closes his eyes, he lands in a world where, if he perishes, he ... will die - do not ask. And death is not difficult in him. The player literally runs away from the ground. He must climb a tower of moving blocks whose lowest parts steadily fall into the abyss. To get to the top, you have to push, move or draw cubic elements, which is not so easy and gets harder with each level. With time, more types of blocks come - ice blocks, trampolines, voracious stones that lick at the sight of our skinny body defended only by the meager pillow. The crowning of the night is the fight with the boss - and depending on what currently frightens our hero the most, it can be both a slightly decaying bride and the eager closeness of the baby with a chainsaw instead of a hand.

It is true that the game itself trains us, suggesting different techniques and ways of climbing, but the task is not easy anyway and requires reflexes and logical thinking. Fortunately, the game's authors decided to let us manipulate their level of difficulty between individual days. The task is quite repeatable, fortunately the emergence of systematically new elements, effectively breaks the routine. In addition to the bar we visit during the day, we can practice our skills at the Rapunzel slot machine. There, however, is not limited by time, and the number of movements needed to make it to reach the top.

It's a great game, but it's not for everyone.

And it's not just about the subject matter. Some people will certainly reject the style typical of anime. Fans of the genre should, however, be delighted. Drawings are really good, in places funny, sometimes absurd, but mostly coherent and pleasing to the eye. Music is also well chosen, which will surprise our sometimes classic threads, which perfectly fit into the atmosphere of the game. It's also worth praising really good English dubbing, but scolding the weak subtitles. My attempts to play in the Japanese original with English subtitles were frustrating, a lot of issues are not translated, and although I guess that they are not simply key to the plot, it irritated me in an unbelievable way.

Catherine neatly avoids simple moralizing and does not force you into the usual path of paladin and scholasticism. Her heroes are changing under the words of Vincent as if by magic, but it is an element of fairy tale that can be forgiven. There is no reward here only for good choices, there are many endings, and most of them are positive, the authors care more about us that we would be consistently consistent in our choices than to stick to the well-worn path of one right decision. There is something extremely honest about this idea.

Catherine, who until now could only be known to the owners of consoles, finally came to the computers. The game is available on Steam and has undergone a surprisingly good transformation.

Pros

• Barany, because who does not like rams?
• Graphics and sound
• A lot of interesting symbols
• Well-written heroes of the second and third grade
• A lot of endings
• A climate that deftly overcomes serious and difficult subject matter with absurdity and wit

Minuses

• Annoying main character
• Mechanics that can get boring (although it did not happen to me)

Catherine, finally on the PC. It is a surprisingly mature game with a love triangle, corpses and a herd of rams