Catherine's gotten a bit of attention in the gaming world because of its unusual story and reputed difficulty, not to mention its unusually prominent (at least for a video game) sexual themes. Fortunately, Catherine succeeds both as a puzzle game and as a tale about adulthood, infidelity, and love. The actual game is nowhere near as sexual as its packaging or advertising makes it out to be (though you probably still don't want your 10 year old kid playing this game), so if you're looking for that, you'll probably be disappointed.There are three main characters in Catherine - Vincent Brooks, the protagonist, Katherine (yes, that's with a "K"), Vincent's longtime girlfriend who is starting to push Vincent towards marriage, and Catherine, a mysterious young woman who enters Vincent's life out of the blue. Catherine is unusually aggressive in pursuing Vincent, and before he knows it, he has a drunken one-night stand with her. Needless to say, this causes all sorts of complications in his relationship with Katherine. The fact that various men around town are dying strange deaths in their sleep only adds to Vincent's stress.There are two distinct modes of gameplay within Catherine, and the game keeps them more or less separate from each other. On the one hand, there's the story of the game, which occurs during the day. The story is told through anime cutscenes and an interactive environment in the local bar, the Stray Sheep, where Vincent can walk around, talk to other patrons, the staff, play an arcade game (which is a variation on the puzzle game which takes place during Vincent's nightmares), watch the TV news, and even get drunk. The gameplay here is surprisingly deep - your interactions with other customers early in the game can drastically alter their stories in the latter part of the game. Responses Vincent makes to other people (and there are lots of these decisions) also alter an "order/chaos" meter, which impacts the ending of the game. The story-driven part of the game probably occupies something like 1/3 or so of the total playtime of Catherine.The puzzle part of the game takes place during Vincent's nightmares. He needs to climb up massive block structures before the bottom part of the structure falls out from under him, thereby killing him. It's a bit hard to explain the gameplay in words, but you can watch lots of videos on game review sites or Youtube. Basically, you want to climb up this large vertical structure, and can climb onto blocks one level above you, so you need to push and pull blocks to arrange them in a pattern which makes it possible to keep moving up. The bottom of the structure gradually falls away, which acts as the timer for these puzzles. The game starts out relatively simple, but as you get further in the game tosses more and more types of blocks at you, like heavy blocks, spike blocks (which kill you if you don't immediately walk off them), bomb blocks, ice blocks, and monster blocks. There are also items which grant beneficial effects to Vincent. Each night concludes with a "boss fight" of sorts, where you don't actually fight a boss, but each boss has its own distinct mechanic it adds to the climbing puzzle.It's not immediately obvious from the description above that the game is hard, but as many people have already mentioned, the game is hard - definitely harder than the average game out there. Fortunately, Catherine comes with three (actually four, there's a "secret" Very Easy difficulty) difficulty levels, and "Easy" isn't prohibitively hard, although I don't think the average player would call describe it as "easy" either. The developers did a good job making death frustrating. There are checkpoints scattered throughout most levels so you don't have to restart at the very beginning if you die, and the levels aren't prohibitively long. As the story puzzles are designed in advance, if you repeatedly die on a level you will gradually get better at it as you learn to climb more efficiently. There was really only one level (out of more than twenty) which gave me any noticeable amount of frustration.A full initial playthrough of the game should take most people between ten and fifteen hours. Fortunately, Catherine has A TON of replayability. Replaying levels you have already completed (for higher scores or just for fun) is incredibly convenient. If you get gold medals on enough levels, you unlock bonus levels which are outside of the story. These levels are randomly generated, long, and incredibly difficult (substantially harder than any of the story levels), so if you're up for the challenge they will keep you occupied for many, many hours. (If you look at the online leaderboards for the random levels, only about 250-300 people in the entire world have posted a completion of the most difficult bonus level.) The arcade puzzle game, called "Rapunzel", has over a hundred (short) levels, and is a nice variant on the primary puzzle play in that it requires you to complete block puzzles not in a fixed amount of time, but in a fixed number of moves. The story also has immense replayability; the game has eight distinct endings, all of which are quite different from each other. The conclusion of the story can vary tremendously based on your actions during the story portion of the game. In perhaps one of the most pleasantly surprising design decisions in Catherine, once you get a gold medal on a story puzzle level in either normal or hard difficulty, you can skip that level entirely at that difficulty. What this means is that if you want to see all the different endings or just see how the story part of the game changes if you play differently, you can quickly do so by skipping the puzzle portions of the game.This game really does a lot of things right; to be honest I can't identify any major flaws. There are some frustrations with the controls and camera work when Vincent climbs behind the blocks, but this happens so infrequently that I can't really describe this as a "major" flaw. The game definitely is not for everyone; if you hate puzzle games you're probably not going to like Catherine. If you're aren't sure whether this game is your cup of tea, try downloading the demo from PSN or borrowing it from a friend. The story is surprisingly mature and grasps with issues that no other game really has addressed, like commitment and infidelity. The initial playthrough takes a comparable amount of time to most other non-RPG games, but the replayability can easily extend the amount of time you play this game by a factor of, say, five. It's good to see original, unique games like Catherine being published and doing well, and hopefully the creative minds at Atlus will keep up the good work.