It was a chilly November evening in 2019 when I wandered into my local GameStop, half-distracted by plans for a trip to the Netherlands and Belgium and half-determined to pick up something new to play. The cover of Catherine: Full Body—all glossy provocation—did the rest. The same clerk who later steered me toward Persona 5 Royal urged me to try it, and that night I did. I liked it immediately. Then the pandemic arrived, and Catherine: Full Body, alongside Persona 5 Royal and Ghost of Tsushima, became one of my go-to refuges—first as a lark, then as a Muslim revert.

That shift changed how I saw the game. Beneath its M-rating, nods to Sumerian myth, and thirteen branching endings, I began to read Catherine: Full Body as a sharp, if disguised, critique of contemporary American dating—and, unexpectedly, a powerful brief for halal courtship.

Our antihero is Vincent Brooks, a 32-year-old systems engineer who has been with his peer and partner, Katherine McBride, for five years. He fears marriage, subsists in a messy studio, and burns his free time at a neighborhood bar, the Stray Sheep, playing an arcade title called Super Rapunzel. One night, Vincent tumbles into a nightmare: a frantic climb up a crumbling tower of blocks, surrounded by bleating figures he perceives as sheep. He wakes with only fragments—and a terrifying rule: fall to your death in the dream, and you die in life.

At the Stray Sheep the next evening, his old high-school crew—Orlando Haddick and Jonny Ariga—deliver grim news: their classmate Paul has been found dead, wasted away after nights of similar terrors. Then comes a twist. After last call, a luminous 22-year-old blonde, Catherine, slides into Vincent’s booth and asks to join him. The dream returns. So does she.

Morning. Catherine is in Vincent’s bed, nearly naked, and the affair begins. Vincent starts double-tracking between Katherine and Catherine, even as a third figure enters his orbit: Rin, a gentle pianist with amnesia after an attack, who moves in next door and soon plays at the Stray Sheep. Vincent keeps meeting familiar patrons inside the nightmares—he sees them as sheep—who whisper about a curse, the “Woman’s Wrath,” punishing infidelity.

Midway through, Vincent accidentally sees Rin undressed and discovers that Rin is an otokonoko—a cross-dressing man—unlocking a new path of endings should the player pursue Rin romantically. The plot tightens. A man calling himself Steve Delhomme phones Vincent, claiming to be Catherine’s boyfriend and demanding a breakup; neither Catherine nor Katherine recognizes the name. Steve later dies in the dream. Catherine, meanwhile, vanishes, erasing all traces—including messages—from Vincent’s phone. At the bar, Vincent realizes only one other person ever interacted with Catherine: the proprietor, Thomas Mutton. When Katherine, suspecting a week of deceit, breaks things off, Vincent confronts Mutton—and the mask drops. Thomas Mutton reveals himself as Dumuzid, a demon lord orchestrating the lethal nightmares.

The demon’s rationale is chillingly tidy: the nightmares cull the noncommittal and “redistribute” their girlfriends to men who will honor the “natural order.” Catherine is his succubus, tailored to each target by shape-shifting into an idealized woman—an efficient way to detonate a relationship that was already wobbling. Vincent demands that Dumuzid free the survivors. The demon agrees, on one condition: face him in one last gauntlet of dreams. Vincent prevails. The ending, as ever, depends on the player’s choices.

Read through an Islamic lens, the game’s moral coordinates snap into focus. Katherine McBride stands for responsibility, tradition, and stability—the durable rhythms of adult life—while Vincent staggers under the dread of commitment. He imagines marriage as the loss of basic freedoms: late nights out, drinking with friends, and betting on women’s wrestling. In Islamic law, casual romantic entanglements are not simply discouraged; they are prohibited. Intimate relations are confined to marriage, and courtship is structured and explicit: clear marital intent, a father’s or guardian’s approval, and a mahr (dowry) given to the bride. In a halal courtship, Katherine would not need to “pressure” Vincent into marriage; intent would have guided the relationship from the start, with accountability—familial and communal—built in.

Catherine, by contrast, is the avatar of hookup culture: the thrill of novelty, the refusal of responsibility, the instant hit that dissolves promises made the day before. Her appeal is meant to be irresistible precisely because, in the ambient logic of modern dating, it so often is. But in halal practice, her allure has no purchase: sexual activity outside marriage is forbidden by the Qur’an and Sunnah. Had Vincent maintained unambiguous boundaries and practiced direct, honest communication, he would have spared himself the spiral of secrecy, betrayal, and guilt that powers the game’s dread.

Rin, the third node, functions as a narrative wild card and a cultural provocation. Thematically, Rin channels “new relationship energy”—identity, self-discovery, and the pursuit of novelty that destabilizes old commitments. Islamic doctrine, however, prohibits non-heterosexual relationships. In a halal courtship frame, the path forward would be unglamorous but clear: resolve one’s existing obligations—here, with Katherine—before even contemplating a new attachment. The point is not punitive; it is prophylactic. Order protects people from harm.

Even the supporting cast maps onto this critique. Orlando, Jonny, and Toby are less friends than co-conspirators in arrested development—men who normalize drift rather than nudge Vincent toward adulthood. And Thomas Mutton is the profit motive incarnate: a keeper of the bar and the nightmares, a beneficiary of confusion, chaos, and churn. In a halal context, the analogues to these figures would serve different roles. Friends would act as nasih—advisors who encourage intentional, honorable relationships. Elders and mentors would guard the couple’s path rather than sabotage it.

By the end, Vincent’s paralysis—and the dreams that literalize it—reads as an indictment of a broader ecosystem. Modern dating, as the game depicts it, is a machine that harvests ambiguity: it thrives on sabotage, weaponizes temptation, and monetizes instability. Each of Vincent’s options—Katherine, Catherine, Rin—embodies a common trap of the 2010s: the fear of settling down, the seduction of frictionless sex, the restless search for a self forever elsewhere. What halal courtship offers, in contrast, is not a romantic fantasy but a social technology: a set of norms that prioritize clarity of intent, responsibility to families and communities, and protective guardrails against the kinds of betrayals that curdle love into anxiety.

This is the quiet brilliance of Catherine: Full Body: a puzzle platformer dressed in nightclub neon becomes, almost despite itself, a meditation on commitment, consequence, and the costs of confusion. Strip away the succubi and demon lords, and the choice is disarmingly simple. Will Vincent keep drifting until the ground gives way—or step onto a path designed to hold?