Catherine Full Body and Adulthood
Turns out being 32 isn't all beer and babes
When I was young, I thought being a regular at a bar seemed glamorous. My dad would stop after work almost every night for a while at the only bar in our suburb, the Prime Time Sports Bar, where we’d sometimes join him for food. On occasion, he’d take just me and I’d get to sit at the bar and charm the pretty bartender with requests for pineapple juice.
So it was only natural to assume that when I returned from my upstate college, and real life began, I would be a regular at an impossibly cool downtown bar. I would walk into the place and everyone would smile like Cheers, fresh from a job that was hard but literary, creativity-based sweat on my brow. I’d set down my leather work bag on the upscale seat, and my hair would finally curl all across my hair instead of just in some places at random, and I’d ask the bartender for a Manhattan with a world-weary look in my eye. She’d smile knowingly, and I’d know the day was easier now.
When the lease was signed on my first apartment, but I still lived at home, I picked out the bar across from the 9th-floor old hotel room as the perfect second home, a place I’d go to when I inevitably straightened out, quit being a barista, and Found Myself.
Instead, I slept with a bartender, played bad punk music, and just generally made a mess of my 20s.
So at 32, I find myself realizing that I have become the adult I imagined. Not in her flatness, her enviable career, and her good hair days, but in all the mess and misery of trying to make it in an art in 2024.
This has mostly been thanks to finally picking up Atlus’ puzzler Catherine. This game tells the tale of a generic 32-year-old programmer who is torn between his demanding beautiful long-term girlfriend, Catherine, who wants to settle down, and a sexy succubus named, well, Katherine, who just wants sex and freedom. In Full-body, the rerelease I am playing on Switch, you also can romance Qatherine, a trans alien who is perfect.
I will hear no Rinn hate.
However, what I find interesting about Catherine is how much time you spend just hanging out as regulars at a bar. You meet friends. You flirt with your waitress. You talk to slightly (very) evil policemen having a brew. You vibe, a safe place away from the absolute mess you’re making of the rest of your life.
There are also evil dreams that can kill you and are full of puzzles and surrealist horror, but in sticking with the themes of my life, we don’t need to talk about the dreams or the horrors right now.
Which, I realize, is very relatable. The Lost Sheep even looks like my regular haunt. While across town and normally not visited more than once a week, my favorite bar is still just as dimly lit and wood-finished as the Lost Sheep. There isn’t food, but there is good beer and mostly good music if played a little too loud. There’s a bartender who will ask about your problems and pour you extra shots as he deems needed.
While Persona, which is set in the same universe, is focused on high school students, this focuses on a character going through things much closer to my own life. This drags me into the central themes without the distance provided by the charming and beautiful teens of, say, Persona 3. While I loved Persona 3, and its themes of living in the face of death are universal, I can keep my distance from it. I am not a teenager in 2009 anymore, and I certainly don’t have tons of girls vying for my romantic sad boy charms.
Vincent, however, is a failure you can see yourself in. He can’t communicate for shit. He doesn’t know what he wants. He fears change, fears growing up, and lives in a dump of a studio apartment. He spends all his money on going out instead of furniture or decent food.
He is so me.
Vincent is like watching myself at a distance if I was still with my ex, stopped going to therapy, and devoted myself entirely to terrible decisions So…me at the end of the pandemic, slowly realizing that my passive decisions were about to ruin my life.
So there’s something fun about getting to navigate the adulthood stage I recently passed through as an omnipotent narrator god.
This is to say that while Catherine is a flawed game, one I am not even consistently enjoying, it can still trigger introspection and my ongoing identity crisis. Maybe that’s all I need from art these days.