Catherine: Full Body

My first reaction to Catherine: Full Body was confusion about what shelf it belongs on, which is exactly the point. The day-cycle drops you into a dive bar where Vincent Brooks - a commitment-phobic thirty-something - drinks with friends, texts two women named Katherine and Catherine (yes, really), and makes moral choices that shift a meter between order and chaos. Then night falls, and the game transforms into something else entirely: a block-climbing puzzle where towers of stone slowly crumble beneath your feet and dying means restarting the floor. Two wildly different experiences stitched together by one fraying man's anxiety. It should not work. It absolutely works. The puzzle side is the engine that powers everything, and it earns its difficulty. Each nightmare stage tasks Vincent with pulling, pushing, and stacking blocks to build a climbable path upward before the floor collapses. The learning curve is steep and sometimes punishing, with later stages introducing trap blocks, spring blocks, and ice surfaces that demand quick spatial reasoning under pressure. Full Body adds a Remix mode that groups blocks by color so pulling one yanks the whole cluster - a genuine mechanical twist that veterans will appreciate. For players who just want the story, a Safety difficulty lets you skip puzzle sections outright, and there is even an Autoplay option. At the other extreme, the Babel mode outside the campaign is a semi-roguelike gauntlet that supports two-player co-op, while Colosseum pits two players head-to-head on the same stage. The range of difficulty options is genuinely impressive and makes the game accessible in a way the original never was. The story holds up as the stronger half, for better and worse. Vincent is caught between long-term girlfriend Katherine - who wants commitment and a future - and the mysterious Catherine, who showed up in his bed one morning. Full Body adds a third route through Rin, a soft-spoken amnesiac pianist whose storyline drifts into territory that divided players at launch. The narrative handles adult themes with more sincerity than the anime art style initially suggests, though the writing does stumble in places and some of the older material has aged unevenly. There are 14 possible endings across the routes, and the branching is genuine enough that replays feel worthwhile rather than cosmetic. Between nightmare stages, the bar sequences - drinking, talking to regulars, checking your phone, playing the in-game Rapunzel arcade cabinet - function as a slow decompression that makes the horror segments hit harder by contrast. The Switch version arrived in July 2020 and is, by most accounts, the most complete release. It includes all previously released DLC from launch, among which the standout is Joker from Persona 5 as a playable character in the puzzle-only modes - a crossover that makes more tonal sense than it should. Resolution takes a minor hit compared to the PS4 build, but the trade-off is handheld portability, which suits the game's bar-at-midnight atmosphere oddly well. A note of caution for Joy-Con players: the analog sticks can struggle with the precision the harder stages demand, so a Pro Controller or handheld grip is worth considering. Catherine: Full Body is not for everyone. The content is adult, the puzzles can be brutal on Normal difficulty, and the narrative asks you to spend significant time with a protagonist who is frequently his own worst enemy. But if you want something that plays unlike anything else in your library and rewards multiple playthroughs, this remains one of the more genuinely original packages Atlus has put out.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Catherine: Full Body.