Catharsis: The Last Atelier Sets December 1 Steam Release

Mana began self-teaching Unreal Engine after moving overseas gave them more free time, won Epic Games' Unreal Quest 5 development contest, and was accepted into the Kodansha Game Creators Lab in February 2024. The game is listed as a single-player title with Japanese, English, and Simplified Chinese language support.

The Photo Mode answers demo feedback directly. Players asked to "capture beautiful spaces from any angle" and to "take the same compositions as those famous paintings," and the full version adds the feature. Launching it pauses the game. The camera moves freely, the angle of view and brightness can be adjusted, and characters can be removed before the screenshot is taken. Some stages reveal fine details once the characters are gone. Every captured image saves to an album.

The demo covers three stages, not ten. Each clears in about 15 minutes, and Photo Mode is not included.

• The Starry Night (Van Gogh): the demo stage the press materials use for the album example, "find your very own The Starry Night."
• Cafe Terrace at Night (Van Gogh): described as faintly lit in the story section.
• Ophelia (Millais): the third demo stage.

The wolf and owl carry meaning beyond company. The wolf symbolizes instinct and the wild, the owl wisdom and reason. The wolf's sprint and the owl's flight both speed travel. In Monet's Woman with a Parasol, players run with the wolf to feel the wind, or use the owl to see the painting world more three-dimensionally. The stated aim is "walking inside" paintings rather than "appreciating paintings from the outside." Kodansha Game Lab sits inside Kodansha Creators Lab, an R&D department formed in June 2021 within the publisher's Fourth Business Division.