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Games often serve as a wonderful source of escapism, affording the opportunity to glide across the surface of a distant planet, pick through the threads of another age or don the mantle of a different species entirely. Occasionally, though, they let you hang out in a bar with a regular group of guys getting tanked. Guys who talk about things that you talk about over drinks that you drink; who experience the same existential angst as you do, and dread the same potentially fatal nightmares filled with anthropomorphised sheep and a behemoth mewing baby that's trying to squash you dead. OK, maybe not so much that last bit - but the point is that there are some games to which you can relate very strongly indeed.Catherine is one of those games for me. When Atlus released its puzzler-cum-mirror-to-my-soul a couple of years ago there was something about both it and the bar that it depicts - the aptly named Stray Sheep - that reached into me and plucked a very personal chord. I recognised the unwillingness of Vincent Brooks and his friends to wholly embrace adulthood and get on with the serious business of being a grown-up just as keenly as I longed to nab a slice of their pepperoni pizza; I marvel still at how hearing the tinkle of ice cubes in Vincent's Cuba Libre makes me crave a rum and cola of my own.
For me, this is the crux of Catherine; that it has power to speak to people on any number of levels. Ostensibly, it is the story of loveable loser Vincent Brooks (voiced by the ubiquitous Troy Baker) and his inability to commit to his girlfriend, Katherine, while at the same time becoming haplessly embroiled in misadventure with blonde succubus, Catherine. More than that, though, it encapsulates one of those moments in life that we all experience: where we choose, either through determined action or apathetic indecision, what direction we're going to head in.
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