The story follows Vincent Brooks, a man who is beset by supernatural nightmares while torn between his feelings for his longtime girlfriend Katherine and the similarly named beauty Catherine.

The gameplay is divided between the daytime, where Vincent interacts with the characters in a social simulation, and his dreams where he must navigate three-dimensional towers through combined platforming and puzzle-solving.

Catherine was developed by the same studio behind the Persona series, including producer and director Katsura Hashino, character designer Shigenori Soejima, and music composer Shoji Meguro.

Catherine is a cross-genre video game in which players control Vincent Brooks, a man who is tormented by deadly nightmares after becoming involved with multiple women.

There are also several items which can be found or purchased in between stages, such as spare blocks, lightning which removes enemies, and energy drinks that allow Vincent to climb more steps at a time.

[19][20] The game focuses on four main characters:[21] The supporting cast includes Vincent's regular drinking partners at the Stray Sheep: Orlando Haddick (Hiroaki Hirata/Liam O'Brien[26]), an old friend and divorcee who holds cynical views on marriage; Johnny Ariga (Takehito Koyasu/Travis Willingham)[26] an idealist searching for a soulmate; and Toby Nebbins (Kishō Taniyama/Yuri Lowenthal[26]), Johnny's co-worker who has a crush on Erica Anderson, (Junko Minagawa/Erin Fitzgerald[20][23]) a waitress at the Stray Sheep.

One night at the Stray Sheep Bar, a despondent drunken Vincent meets an enigmatic young woman named Catherine; they have a one-night stand which turns into an affair.

Simultaneously, Vincent begins experiencing surreal nightmares where he and other men must ascend a tower while outrunning terrifying demons; if they fail in the dream, they die in real life.

Struggling with the stress of his double life and his delusional paranoia due to the growing intensity of his nightmares eventually compel Vincent to end the affair with Catherine.

The next day, Katherine — who retains no memory of the nightmare but grows furious after she guessed his infidelity — breaks off their relationship, refusing to believe that Vincent was unfaithful.

[35] Upon its announcement, Catherine proved unexpectedly popular, garnering as much public attention and fan expectation as recent releases in the Persona series.

[32] Beginning from October 2010, Atlus and its then-parent Index Media began an "aggressive" advertising campaign to promote the title in Japan.

The covers exemplified each character's contrasting appeal: Catherine's cleavage showed off her youthful beauty, while displaying Katherine's behind was meant to evoke her more motherly charms.

[46] While they had the option of developing the title for handheld consoles or mobile devices, Hashino felt that the game would lose its charm on less powerful hardware.

In order to make the love triangle between Vincent, Catherine and Katherine sound realistic, he asked other members of Atlus staff for their experiences.

[36] Vincent was initially a very unlikeable character who willingly chose to cheat on Katherine, but based on staff feedback, he was adjusted to appear more sympathetic.

[48] Soejima, who had mainly worked on the Persona series up to this point, was most focused on making the characters' expressions seem realistic within the context of the story.

Likewise, the younger "Catherine" was modeled after Gallo's co-star Christina Ricci and was designed to be beautiful and youthful when compared to "Katherine", who had an adult charm.

According to Chan, the main advantage of Catherine compared to other projects was that the situations and characters were ones he and other team members could understand rather than typical fantasy scenarios.

The title was published by Deep Silver across all PAL territories, and featured written language support for English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian.

This meant that the voice actors had more freedom to adlib parts of their performance: a cited example was the fight between Katherine and Catherine, where the two actresses ad-libbed the majority of the characters' argument.

[75][77][78] In an interview, Baker described the Atlus USA staff as giving him and the other English actors a great deal of freedom when it came to delivering lines and portraying their characters.

He noted that the themes in Catherine were far more controversial compared to earlier titles he and Atlus had worked on, and that it was a unique voice acting opportunity.

Having already heard of the project in the press, Bailey accepted the offer; during her time recording lines, she found the experience strange as she considered Baker to be a brotherly figure, starkly contrasting the relationship between Vincent and Catherine.

Arem described each main actor's strengths during recording: Baker had good timing when it came to delivering his lines, Bailey required few retakes, while Ruff was able to realistically convey a variety of emotions.

[46] Rin was included in Full Body as part of Hashino's wish to update the game's sensibilities and subject matter based on current trends.

The Japanese DLC actresses were Mamiko Noto, Ami Koshimizu, Aoi Yūki, Yui Horie, Kana Asumi, Haruka Tomatsu, Megumi Toyoguchi, Rie Kugimiya, Rina Satō, and Nana Mizuki.

[91] Meguro did not have much freedom with the project, as Hashino was specific about what he wanted the music to be like, giving him the key words of "classic", "adult oriented" and "erotic".

[94] For Full Body, in addition to Meguro's original work on the score, music company Inspion Izene was brought on to both arrange and add to the soundtrack.

"[110] In 2014, David Auerbach of Slate claimed Catherine to be sexist, writing that its treatment of relationships and sex exemplified a misogynous tendency in video game culture that became a topic of media discussion over the next several years.