On one hand, Catana: Red Flowers is a violent, fast-paced action game in the mold of Joy Way’s STRIDE, complete with rooftop parkour and katana combat. On the other, it’s a low-stakes restaurant management sandbox in which you cook meals and serve drinks to anthropomorphic aquatic weirdos. Each game mode will appeal to a specific audience. For me, neither quite landed.
The VR world caught its first glimpse of Joy Way’s Red Flowers during the 2022 UploadVR Winter Showcase, where it presented as a new take on the studio’s successful parkour action game STRIDE. In the original trailer (and subsequently released demo), Red Flowers allowed players to dash, jump, and scramble their way along the rooftops of an Asia-inspired cityscape, slashing endless Yakuza-like bad guys with a razor-sharp katana. It was dark, violent, and visceral.
As released this past January, Catana: Red Flowers does include some of what we saw in that demo. But it comes with something else, too. In fact, Catana: Red Flowers, as it has eventually arrived, is two games in one.
The fast-paced, violent, parkour action of the original Red Flowers demo is still here, we simply hold our katana with paws instead of hands. That’s because Catana: Red Flowers’ player character is a cat, complete with retractable claws and a penchant for meowing.
This unexpected tonal shift slightly softens the edges of the original Red Flowers demo (though there’s still an extreme amount of gore unless toggled off in the options menu), but the real departure comes later. When we’ve finished our rooftop scramble, the game reveals its second half. Catana: Red Flowers is also a restaurant management, physics sandbox game.
Between combat runs, players will return to a hub world populated by funny-looking anthropomorphic fish and frogs, who also happen to be customers of the player’s grandfather’s restaurant (weird). Grampa’s sick, or drunk, and it’s up to the player to man (or cat?) the shop in his absence. Here you prep food, cook meals, serve drinks, and fulfill orders under extremely light time constraints. Completing orders earns money, which can be spent on upgrading the restaurant or unlocking cosmetic items.
The hub world also offers a number of optional diversions; a fishing hole, secret areas to explore, special drinks which alter the inhabitants therein (think, low gravity, inflating their heads, forcing them to move in slow motion, etc.), and more. These all provide some much-needed levity to the game’s darker action stages.
On its own, the restaurant mode is solid. The hub world is gorgeous, the music is great, the physics interactions are silly and fun, and running the restaurant is functionally adequate, too. Orders are easy to understand, mechanics work as expected, and the roadmap of progression is clearly articulated. For players who enjoy “chore games,” Catana: Red Flowers’ hub area will be appealing, as there’s always something demanding your attention, always another order to fill.
But this mode never really lands. There’s nothing particularly challenging about the restaurant management portion of the game, nor am I too motivated to grow the business, since the whole thing boils down to simple, endless repetition. They want a fish, cook a fish, serve a fish, repeat forever.
Developer comments in places where the game has been reviewed have indicated that the low-stakes, low difficulty of the game’s restaurant management hub is intentional. It’s designed to be a place to unwind after a few frantic runs through the game’s violent, high-stakes, reflex-fraying parkour kill-a-thons. And I appreciate that. The problem is that I don’t find the action stages of the game particularly appealing either.
While the frantic runs through the visually interesting cityscapes are fast-paced and initially exciting and slicing up Yakuza on the fly can be fun, the novelty quickly wears thin. The controls, while mechanically sound, are tedious. To run, we must pump our hands up and down, which is imprecise, and tiring. Launching to grapple-able objects requires a combination of button presses and physical movements which, while not difficult, is annoying. Dashing is oddly linked to slashing with our katana, which is fine, but just doesn’t feel particularly fun.
For a game mode which essentially hangs its whole identity on speed-runs and timing, the controls just don’t hold up. Call it a skill issue, but there were too many instances of plummeting to my death or failing to medal due to janky controls. Practice makes perfect, but I’m not really motivated to practice.
My criticisms noted, it’s easy to imagine a different response from players who enjoy the speed, action, and violence of Joy Way’s other parkour action games, like the extremely successful STRIDE. And of course, players who enjoy simply being silly in a sandbox or managing a virtual shop will consider the hub world the heart of Catana’s gameplay. Naturally, for players who enjoy both types of games in VR, Catana: Red Flowers is an obvious grand slam.
Catana: Red Flowers is available now on the Meta Horizon Store for $14.99.
