Catherine

"This really isn't my kind of crowd."

So mumbles Catherine, out on the edges of Surround Sound, just before she appears at Vincent's table, a lingerie-clad embodiment of the young man's yearning to let go of the responsibilities and stresses of grownup life and return to living carefree. And many gamers may really feel that she's right - Atlus's bizarre romantic-horror-puzzle-action game already has a track record of disappointing or frustrating players who... well... just aren't into what it has. Nonetheless, it's a mistake to write Catherine... either the game OR the character... off as a slutty panderer or a shallow one night stand. Plenty of gamers may decide it's not worth digging for more, but for those of us who find something compelling and intriguing, Catherine's much more than just crazy and sexy.

What do you do in this game? Well, like so many of Atlus's best games, there are (at least) two games really running here. And while each affects the other in subtle ways, the truth is, they're quite separate - even more so than in the Persona games - and if you only care about one, the other will seem like a long and pointless interlude.

Vincent, your protagonist in the game, is incapable of steering his own life... he really very clearly doesn't know where he would steer it if he could. Rudderless and insecure, he is (depending on how you see it) either barely kept functional by the intervention of his smart, sexy, with-it girlfriend Katherine... or he's being crushed by her need to have somebody to dominate. He has no idea which answer is true, and spends his nights drinking away his despair in the local bar with his friends. And it's there, already pretty heavily pasted, that he meets with the titular Catherine, the perky blonde woman of his dreams, who seems to offer him everything he seems to be lacking. Their affair gets heavy... well, immediately... and now Vincent is torn apart by his own indecisiveness, guilt, and desire. And that's when the nightmares begin.

In the night, Vincent, clad in his polka-dot boxers and surrounded by anthropomorphic sheep (he's sporting his own set of sheep horns too), finds himself climbing up a mountain of blocks, which he has to push and pull in order to open a route to the top. There are a lot of levels, and like any puzzle game they introduce new mechanics for Vincent to deal with: ice blocks, bomb blocks, blocks with nasty spike traps, and so on. To make things even more difficult, you don't have forever to try out ideas and work out solutions- blocks are constantly falling from the bottom of some levels, while in others a giant monstrosity straight from Vincent's own worst fears is chasing him up the structure. The actual "rules" of the universe take a while to understand, and can get very frustrating, but an undo button and a huge store of extra lives help soften the difficulty. There's a definite art to it, and a points and rating structure give you reason to want to improve from "barely made it" to completely dominating a level.

During the days, and even between levels during the night, Vincent also interacts with the people who fill his world - responding to emails and phone calls from his girlfriends, chatting with friends, even deciding whether to encourage his fellow climbing sheep or not. These interactions, in total, define the way the story goes, as Vincent's reactions reveal his own heart - whether he's truly yearning for the commitment and order of life with Katherine, or the freedom that Catherine represents. Numerous subplots and character arcs are also dependent on your choices - and even on whether you bother to talk with other sheep or bar patrons. And of course, as you might have guessed given that the plot centers around nightmares where if you die in the nightmare you'll die for real, there's a double handful of supernatural questions that need to get answered, and in true Shin Megami Tensei fashion (though this game is not marketed as an SMT game), that supernatural side takes over and defines the last few chapters of the game - the point where both the plot and Vincent's character really justified the game for me in a big way.

Technically, there's very little to fault. The voice acting is superb and showcases a wonderfully localized script, and while a few controls are a little unintuitive, the block puzzles control very tightly most of the time. The graphics make me yearn... achingly... for a Persona game on this generation of consoles, and the staging of scenes is deliciously clever (with a specific tip of the cap to the conveyor-belt sushi restaurant).

There's no way to get around it - this game will work hard to give you reasons not to like it. It's ok to be turned off by the combination of its brutally forward sex appeal, the grotesqueness of some of the apparitions chasing Vincent, and the nearly-controller-throwing difficulty of some levels. But the game itself - both the moral journey and the metaphorical climb to True Freedom (which, to borrow a phrase from a certain somebody, only comes with self-awareness) - is full of challenges and delights and triumphs. If you're doubtful, it's still worth trying this game out just to see whether it captures your fancy... or if it's best left as an embarrassing one-night stand that you'd prefer never to tell your girlfriend about.