Catherine: Full Body releases for the PS4 this week, and if you’ve read my review, you already know how I feel about the game. By no means is Full Body a ‘bad’ game; in fact, there are so many cool additions and little improvements that I’m 100% sure Catherine veterans will enjoy.
But there’s also some inclusions that just drag down the original premise.
To answer the question of whether longtime fans of the original Catherine should pick up this game, yes. Just from a gameplay perspective, there’s easily another 10 to 20 hours worth of new content to dive into here, starting with the new puzzle mechanics and stages.
I’ve talked about the Remix mode puzzles at length at this point, but to summarize, this mode introduces the new linked blocks which move together. They come in different shapes and formations, which makes it much harder for you to create stable footing or a predictable path when climbing a tower.
This is a very fundamental change to the way we used to approach and understand how the block towers worked in Catherine, and it’s already enough to shake things up and really make matters more interesting for players who think they know Catherine.
And then, there are the new Babel stages, new Rapunzel stages, and even online competitive play in Babel itself. Over the years, Catherine has accrued quite the passionate online community with the procedurally-generated Babel stages, with a small competitive scene behind it as well.
The online play and rankings in Full Body allow players to fully lean into that competitive scene, and also serves as a nice platform for newer players to get into it as well.
Catherine: Full Body also features lots of new story content to sink your teeth into. We’ll get to Rin in just a little bit, but Catherine and Katherine both get new endings, new animated cutscenes, and some new dialogue to flesh them out even further. These scenes are great, and help to enhance the original story.
And then there’s Rin. The single, biggest new addition to the world of Catherine. She introduces a whole new storyline and narrative branch to follow, which means even more new content, which is great… right?
Well, it depends. Again, if you’ve read my review, you already know my thoughts on Rin. Her story feels superfluous at best, doesn’t add anything meaningful to the story’s core conflict of order versus freedom, and she’s so in your face for the first half of the story that the other two leading ladies are forced to take a backseat.
It gets to the point where Rin’s inclusion feels like it actively hurts the original story rather than enhance it, and only served to make me wish there was some way to just play the original game with all the gameplay improvements, but without her.
Catherine: Full Body takes many steps forwards in terms of improving the story and gameplay experience, and just as many steps back narratively because of Rin’s story arc, which completely overshadows everything else that’s going on.
It’s still a great game that’s very much worth playing, but it could’ve been so much better.
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