![]() A spate of mysterious sleep-related deaths has broken out, and there are rumours of curses and creatures prowling for unfaithful men. Meanwhile, tune your ear to the conversation bleating through the bar and you find a sinister undercurrent lurking beneath the crust. ‘I don’t want to sleep around,’ he says, right before cheating on his longtime girlfriend, Katherine (note the ‘K’ in the spelling). And yet, Vincent's knack for not making decisions and moving forwards in life – the very thing so pleasurable about playing Catherine: Full Body – is what gets him into deep water. What a place for the whiling away of idle hours. The bar is the place to be, plainly decorated but peppered with plush details – an old-school vinyl jukebox, polished brass railings, and a blinking arcade cabinet – and it’s filled with a cozy fug of booze and smoke. Also marooned are his childhood friends Orlando, Jonny, Toby, and Erica, who works there as a waitress. The evenings see Vincent washed up at his local bar, The Stray Sheep. ![]() Second are the nervous themes that thrum through every scene. First, Vincent’s nights are spent in the feverish grip of a nightmare, in which he climbs an ever-crumbling babel by moving blocks of stone to and fro to forge an upwards path – thus breaking a mechanical sweat and readying us for bouts of relaxation. Strange that such a lack of action would be so thrilling, in a medium built for the opposite, and I chalk it up to two things. The game has perfected, like no other, the art of inactivity. But the best thing about Catherine: Full Body is nothing. It has been ported into the Persona 5 engine, glossing its colours with a brighter glow there are an extra 20 lavish anime cutscenes lighter difficulty levels, for those who wish to watch the story without steep spikes of challenge and there is a new character, Rin, a naïf with a bob of bubblegum hair who sticks to the story, after a desperate chance encounter with Vincent, and adds further tangles to the love triangle at its heart. ![]() The game is poised between a remake, a remaster, and a definitive redux of Catherine, which released back in 2012, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. You’ve got an excellent chance to join him, in all his shambolic glory, with the recent release of Catherine: Full Body. He’s the embodiment of the expression ‘go with the flow,’ only the flow has swept him out to sea. His expression is hapless – eyes peeled and panicky – but it’s tinged with the hangdog, as if, on some deep level, he suspects he might deserve whatever calamity should befall him. And look at the way he walks: a perpetual, slow-motion slouch, hands in pockets, elbows stuck out as though he were wearing armbands, trying to stay afloat. He’s a 32-year-old boy, wearing a candy-pink T-shirt, a cream leather jacket, and a curly clump of hair on his head. Everything about him seems an expression of that sentiment. ‘I just want life to stay the same!’ he says to a friend. Though if anyone would shirk off the weight of that role, it would be him. How comforting it is to hang out with Vincent Brooks, the hero of Catherine.
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