Choice in Catherine

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers…”

Choice is perhaps the most overrated aspects of interactive storytelling. Sid Meier defined a game as a series of interesting choices after all. So in order to hammer in the idea of choice, many game developers focus a few, very prominent decisions. What inevitably happens is that little decisions are being left behind and the game becomes less interesting in the process. Catherine is a good example.

Funny enough, there are lots of choices in the game. At some times, it feels like you are filling out a fracking psycho test straight from Cosmopolitan. “Does life end with marriage?” “How would you react if you were naked in public?”. But as always, all the decisions neatly collapse into a 1-dimensional good vs. evil meter. And as always, the actual consequences of the decisions are being back-loaded so the developers don’t have to invest the extra-effort of dealing with alternate story branches.

Good/Evil Meters – Where choices go to die.

Of course, good vs. evil is pretty shallow so in a desperate attempt to add variety and depth the developers managed to split the hairline plot into 8 endings in the very last minutes of the game. So which ending you get isn’t decided in the hours of conversations and questions during the game. The real important decisions are being settled in the very last level of the game by yet another series of questions. No reason given why they are important and the others not. They don’t seem different and they CERTAINLY don’t even closely relate to the actual ending you get.

But that’s not even the disappointing part. The disappointing part comes as you finally get to your ending. What happens when you dilute an already paper-thin plot even more? You get meaningless filler. You get a game where a character constantly struggles with the choice between two very different women for 10 hours, only to completely ignore and drop the issue altogether in the end. The ending I got was the so-called “Freedom Good” ending. It actually features neither Catherine nor Katherine. And from what I heard in the Experience Points Podcast, there are worse. I could have been hit by a car.

Over the years, games like Catherine made me weary about the concept of choice in games. For example, I rarely find alternate endings effective. The mostly end up being less interesting and they often just muddle the game’s themes. Here are some of my observations on how to treat choice in games.

• Show consequences – decisions are only meaningful if you can actually witness the consequences. There are even more interesting if you can react upon the consequences. The consequences don’t have to be big. Sometimes, a single line spoken by a character can be incredibly effective.

• Small and often – many, small decisions often work better than one, simple, big one. Big decisions are mechanically thin and often summon expectations the actual consequences can never live up to. Better to aim low and surprise than to aim high and disappoint.

• Nuances instead of broad strokes – for some reason, game developers are obsessed with having the most diverging options in a choice: stroke the puppy or KILL IT. It seems like want to cover the widest spectrum of choices possible. But what the win with breadth, they lose in resolution. The choices and consequences end up feeling plump and cartoony. They fail to address the sophistication of the issues at hand. Plus, they make the characters seem like bi-polar sociopaths. What many don’t realize is that it’s the details that draw our attention. Having essentially the same option but with subtle differences can be much more meaningful. As a positive side-effect, it creates less headaches caused by significantly diverging plot lines.

• Don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answer to – this is perhaps the most important observation. If your story doesn’t work when the main character choses not to save the world, don’t ask them about that (I look at you, Golden Sun). If you can’t write even one meaningful ending to your story, what makes you think that having 8 of them would be a good idea?

Catherine is guilty of having made each of those mistakes at least once. Which is a pity because it’s not that bad of a game. There are actually some very interesting side-characters. There are intriguing details to the story. And the way of interacting with characters by socializing with them in a bar or text messaging is actually innovating and promising. It just a shame it has been ruined be focusing so much on one singular choice that can’t even begin to hold it’s promise.