Catherna's Destiny

Hello!
Catherna's Destiny is a short rpgmaker game made by Yodak with RPG Maker MV.
This apparently is a sister game to the upcoming Piero's Pilgrimage, but it features a different protagonist (Piero appears briefly in the game and just a little but unimportant interaction is possible).

In this game we play as Catherna, a cat born from the head of a fallen sea goddess. Her only knowledge is that dogs (like Piero) are bad and frogs are good, and her mission is in fact to find a frog after a (not very) long and (very) dangerous journey. After a very brief introduction (1 screen with some lines that you may skip immediately) that just sums what I wrote above, we start controlling Catherna, a black cat. The path towards her destiny is practically linear but not without some challenges, some are dangerous and some are just time wasters.


While not obligatory to proceed, some axes will be useful!

The game in fact features some random encounters in a couple of maps, whose battles are just a matter of luck: Catherna can oneshot e-nemies, but she has exactly 1 hitpoint, and while I noticed that she has the 80-90% chance to hit, and enemies instead have a 10% to hit her, this doesn't mean that you cannot be defeated, if you are unlucky! On one map you may find a giant cat that will give you a magical axe, that is automatically equipped and lets you strike all enemies with the same attack, on the other hand you may still miss, and they may still hit pur protagonist despite the reduced chances. I wonder if there is a way to find some means of protection, since it happened to be defeated in one of these random encounters more than once, and that's a bit unfair I think. The good thing is that these battles never took more that 2-3 rounds at most, still restarting the game due to my bad luck is really awful, considering that there is NO option to save or load the game (I know that it can be completed in 5 minutes, still it's frustrating being defeated after the first half again and again!). The only other obstacle is a sort of "teleport maze", where you have to select the right teleports to find the exit, that's of course harmless and once memorized the path it will be a breeze to complete.

What else? The path is linear but rather suggestive: the scenarios are hand drawn and most resources are custom made, even if I recognized some edits for the facesets of some creatures that were taken from the rpgmaker bestiary (the blue slimes with a single eye in the middle, you probably have already seen it before in some RPG Maker MV classic RTP games).
In the end the environments are really evocative, surreal and mysterious, even if there is a total of just five maps (and two weapons, two monsters and two battle backgrounds... anyway I like how defeated fishes turn into sushi once defeated! Funny!).


The environment is really cool. Once you reach is area thankfully you have every menace behind you and you can proceed towards one of the endings!

Final Verdict
Catherna's Destiny is an ok short game, I'd not mind at all a longer adventure... there are no problems or issues or bugs, BUT that randomness in combat and the 1-hit death was sometimes really annoying since I had at least six-seven playthrough that ended with an undeserved defeat and death. And once against the very first enemy! But maybe that was for the best, since there is nothing more annoying that coming one step from the final safe area and losing. Sigh. Maybe I missed something that could help, anyway it's a pretty good and well made game for the rest, and visuals are pretty nice and unique.
The game is rather cryptic and the ending consists in a simple black and white slide (like a drawing made with chalk on a black board) followed by the game over screen (!) but I guess it's all done on purpouse, including the random battles that I hated so much (but it may be a feature done on purpouse).

Worth playing? Well give it a try, you may be lucky and complete it on your first try... or not!