Catherine's puzzle stages are hair-raising challenges.
Image courtesy Atlus

Game critic Jason Killingsworth once talked about the love-hate relationship we often have with videogames, “the ambiguity of how frequently our feelings about a game see-saw between disgust and admiration.”

“Over the course of a review,” he wrote, “the critic needs to be able to say: I love this game, then I hate this game, then I love this game, and so on.”

I love Catherine. Then I hate it. Then I love it. And so on.

Japanese role-playing games tend to be chimeric in nature, splicing together grand narratives with incongruous combat systems that rarely make sense within the context of their worlds. Most people play these games to experience their sweeping stories and explore their vast, varied settings, not to fight monsters. Action takes a backseat, serving less as an enjoyable activity and more as an obstacle that we power through in order to see the next scene or explore the next city.

Catherine, to be released July 27 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, is not a role-playing game. But it’s made by people who make niche role-playing games, which becomes increasingly obvious as you play it. Like any Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game, Catherine is divided into two parts: The story, and the incongruous things you do while waiting to see the next part of the story.

That’s where the game goes off the rails. By giving you bits and pieces of its story at a time, using narrative as a reward for slogging through the rest of the game, Catherine feels bifurcated, not cohesive. This is a shame, because the plot is fantastic, offering the type of adult discourse about relationships with realistic characters that you don’t see very often in videogames.

Don’t be fooled by the provocative box art; Catherine is no porn game. You play as Vincent Brooks, a lanky, unambitious man in his early 30s who winds up in an uncomfortable situation when his longtime girlfriend, Katherine, starts laying on the pressure for marriage. Exacerbating this further is the fact that Vincent just slept with another girl, the bubbly and noncommittal Catherine. So Vincent is in a bit of a pickle, one that gets brinier and brinier as the game goes on.

That’s the story. Then, when Vincent goes to sleep, the action begins.

In the world of Catherine, adulterous men are punished for their sins. At night, they are transformed into sheep and transported into a nightmare world filled with towers constructed of blocks, a hellish Jenga of the tormented soul. The sheep-men must climb these towers before time runs out and the floor swallows them whole. The catch? If they die in the dream, they die in real life.

So when Vincent winds up in the nightmare, it’s your job to solve these timed puzzles and get him out. You do this by pushing and pulling the blocks of each tower to create climbable staircases that will let you keep moving upwards. If you fall, you die. You’ll have plenty of chances to retry the section you’re on, but you’ll also have to repeat much of your progress every time you do.

This can be both addictive and excruciating, depending how many times you have to do it. Perhaps that’s the point. If Vincent is being punished for his heinous actions, so are you the player. Before you get your reward of seeing where the fascinating storyline goes next, you have to move blocks around and suffer through the game’s increasingly difficult puzzles.

The game’s best moments take place before bedtime, when Vincent spends his time at the local bar, chatting with NPCs and sending text messages to his two lady friends. Some of the other characters are there to react to Vincent’s actions; others have their own story arcs and progressions. I was disappointed every time I realized I had run out of things to do at the bar and I would have to go back to the dream world for another night. I imagine Vincent felt similarly.