“Love is over”, reads Catherine’s game over screen, once poor lead Vincent falls to his death from one of those bloody floating cubes.

Sometimes it’s the player’s fault; sometimes you can’t help but blame the awful camera and the awkward controls. It’s easy to get upset at the game, especially in the beginning, when rules are still obscure and it’s hard to admit that, in order to proceed, perhaps it would be better to smother your screaming ego and lower the difficulty setting to the easiest available.

You can’t compete with bad game balance, after all.

But after having mentally adjusted, what’s left is the shocking, bitter aftertaste of  repetitive, amateurish level design that doesn’t mind recycling block placement and boss fights just to prolong a game that starts limping way before halfway through.

Catherine is, for the most part, a puzzle game. A simple one, where you move blocks to create a path to an exit. Maybe it will remind you of Kurushi. 

Push and pull. Can you think of a better metaphor for a relationship?

And you can’t really help but congratulate Atlus for what it managed to do: when’s the last time you’ve actually seen a puzzle game on a home console shelf — and selling so much? A long time, indeed.

You will have to wait a bit more for a good one, though.

In Catherine, the player is never truly given freedom to express his or her understanding of the puzzle rules; although the game claims that freedom is one of its first objectives, it forces him or her to repeat the same actions routinely and, every now and then, abuse special items to work his or her way to a level’s exit.

Catherine suffers from a number of poor design choices, possibly caused by the developers’ inexperience with this kind of game. It is, after all, nothing but an experiment to get acquainted with alien hardware.

The puzzle portion of the game, despite the great production values, would be more suited to a cheap couple-of-dollars app or an RPG bonus game — remember Wild Arms 3? — than a stand-alone title.

The best parts — read: “only good parts” — of Catherine are a sort of air space between one nightmarish puzzle and the next, during which Vincent will be allowed to interact with other characters to flesh out a number of subplots.

Each night, guests hang out at the Stray Sheep Pub for a limited amount of time, and there Vincent will get involved in different activities, such as drinking, playing an arcade game, going to the bathroom, texting with his phone, or simply conversing. Interaction with most characters happens à-la Persona’s Social Link, with branching dialogue paths that can ultimately change the fate of some of the Pub’s regulars, while changing Vincent’s “alignment”, leading to different — and equally insignificant — in-game cutscenes and several endings, supposedly boosting replay value; too bad the game’s longevity does not really benefit from all these features, since the different paths can be experienced in just a couple of afternoons.  

Although most of the nighttime activities are pretty much useless, it’s hard to remain indifferent to how Atlus has come up with very nice ways to tie the player to Vincent’s fate, and keep him or her hooked to the story.

Replying to text messages, especially, becomes an exercise in realistic identification: how often have you found yourself writing and deleting the same lines over and over, trying to guess your partner’s feelings and reactions in real life? It’s a really nice touch.

And during the nightmare sections, online surveys at the end of each stage create the illusion of being trapped in the same nightmare with countless other players.

Unfortunately, this enchantment dies as soon as the novelty wears off.

We can’t forget guys such as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Brian De Palma — just a few of the talented directors who have tried to illustrate how rules of attraction work, and what the role of women in romance is, by abandoning any rational ties and often going as far to introduce supernatural elements into their movies.

That’s because, since the dawn of history — no matter how unfair it is to us poor gay guys — love and passion have been associated with men losing their sanity over seductive female curves.

Catherine was advertised as a game with a deep, mysterious story, on par with other great Atlus productions, and with more than a single point in common with the above-mentioned great directors’ works.

A man’s ordinary life is torn apart by the unexpected appearance of a mysterious, seductive girl, and recurring nightmares that seem to be the result of a curse that is slowly decimating the male population. The game starts hitting all the right notes with sensuality and surrealism, and will have your undivided attention for the first chapters, developing interesting themes and characters.

But after a while the cast starts falling flat or acting incoherently. One of the main protagonists (spoiler: the fair haired lass the game borrows its name from) is quickly dismissed with superficial explanation, and the whole script takes a childish turn towards a demonic-comic epilogue that I couldn’t enjoy at all — in fact, I even found it insulting.

It was an easy way out of a story that was getting boring before I could realize it.

The software retains several of the “Persona Team” trademarks: an enjoyable, though at times slightly generic soundtrack composed by the eclectic Shoji Meguro, and fantastic art direction and character design from the talented Shigenori Soejima.

Catherine is a carefully set up trap that will undoubtedly charm Megaten aficionados like a siren call. And yet, perhaps, its developers should have not strayed from the secure RPG path they have perfected, almost without fault, in the last decade.

So what are we left with after the six hours it takes to beat it?

Disappointing gameplay that is still kind of enjoyable if you forget about its plot holes, puzzle design shortcomings, and the fact that you threw sixty fucking bucks in the fire to get it.

Oh, and a great engine to direct the next big Persona game with — along with a sense of doubt. The screenplay could end up being as poor as Catherine’s.