LogFAQs > #932441219

#51





Years of release: 2011 (PS3/360), 2019 (PC/PS4 remake)
Beaten?: Yes

This is the one PS3 game on my list! In most cases, not owning a PS3 or PS4, I haven't really played too many games on either console, but in this one case, my friends and I did a full playthrough of Catherine while I was staying at their house for a few weeks, so this is kind of a weird outlier. But it's both a story game AND a puzzle game! So it's like, right up my alley, even though I hilariously have precious little experience with other Atlus games.

Playing this one with a friends probably elevated it way higher in my mind than it would have been if I just played it alone. The story segments were really entertaining to play with friends, debating over what texts we should send out and what choices we should select as we climbed the tower; my one female friend in the group wanted us to go 'good', but the men in the group all decided, almost as a joke, to go full neutral; we eventually succeeded in getting the neutral ending, and we all fucking marked out when it resulted in VINCENT GOING TO SPACE. We all high fived and yelled TRUE NEUTRAL!!! I don't know if my other friend has forgiven us for this.

Passing the controller around among 5 people was a fun way to play the game too - every time someone LOVE IS OVERed, the controller would go around and someone else would take a shot at it. The puzzle gameplay here felt surprisingly deep and engaging considering I expected this to mostly be a little visual novelly story adventure. I like box-pushing puzzles, and figuring out the most efficient way to climb each tower was really satisfying, and our group of friends cheering each other on made it extra fun. Some of the later levels are really hard and puzzle like, which made solving them as a group great. Plus, this way I never got burnt out on actually playing the game, since most of the time someone else would be having a go at it. I really like playing through games pass-the-controller style like this for this reason.

I haven't played the remake yet, which I've heard added some interesting content. There's been some controversy swirling around the game which has made me a bit hesitant - the original game wasn't great about handling a trans character, and the remake kind of fixed some issues but might have introduced some others? I'll have to play it for myself to judge I guess, but I'm willing to hear it out. I don't really want to get into all of that here, I just thought it was worth mentioning.