Here, you can read this. I wrote this for my best of 2011 topic, and I highly recommend buying the game.
Catherine is Atlus' first trip into the HD group of consoles, and it's a unique genre for Atlus: a puzzle game. Normally one would think Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei: Persona team making a puzzle game would be a bad idea, but instead it is an amazingly unique game. Like any Atlus game, you can expect crushing difficulty and a well-written story.
Catherine tells the story of Vincent Brooks. His longtime relationship with his girlfriend, Katherine, has prompted her to talk about marriage and commitment, which Vincent is unsure about. His concerns take another turn when he meets another girl, Catherine, who wakes up in his bed next to him one night. Unlike Katherine, Catherine is more carefree and is Vincent's type. Vincent has a big choice to make and his choices affect which ending of the game is received via a morality meter, which leans in a different direction every time a choice is made.
The day portion of the game consists of mainly story, which includes a bar section where Vincent can talk to the various characters in the game. Most of the other characters also have their own internal story, and failing to talk to some of them causes them to die. Vincent's phone will also receive text messages from Katherine and Catherine, which affect the morality meter if Vincent chooses to reply. There's also a mini-game in the bar, Rapunzel, which is a simplified version of the night part of the game. All of the voice acting in the game is done brilliantly and the voices all fit the characters extremely well, even if you have to sit through another game with Laura Bailey and Liam O' Brien providing their voice like in every game.
The main part of the game is in the night portion, and this is where the block puzzles come out. Every night Vincent is faced with a number of block puzzles where the objective is to reach the very top of the tower. While it seems simple enough, the game constantly throws various tricks to make the climbing tough, such as icy blocks (which cause Vincent to slide until he finds a non-icy block, or until he falls off) and bomb blocks (which weakens all blocks within a certain radius). Each night ends with a boss that causes other effects to happen depending on the night, such as reversing Vincent's movement should he be hit with the boss's attack. While there is an undo button for the easier difficulties, this handicap is removed in the hardest difficulty.
There's also an extra mode called Babel in the game. Each effort on the puzzles is given a score, and if Vincent receives enough gold prizes by doing extremely well on the puzzles, new levels of Babel will unlock. Babel has the crushing difficulty you would expect and is set to hard mode by default.
Catherine is truly an amazing mature game with the best console story of the year from the Persona creators, and is one of the greatest surprise releases in 2011. Maybe because of this game's success, we'll see Persona 5 with a more mature cast? Only time will tell on that, but Catherine is definitely one of Atlus's best works (but not the best this year, though!)
--
Congrats to 2011 Rivalry Rumble Guru winner, SuperNiceDog
http://backloggery.com/articuno2001/sig.gif