Japanese gamers have apparently been losing sleep over Catherine. According to Siliconera, the intense difficulty of the tower-climbing “Nightmare” sections of Atlus’s recent Japan-only outing is generating complaints from players – enough complaints to make the company take notice. The criticisms about the game’s difficulty being too harsh – even on the lowest difficulty setting – have been noted, and Catherine‘s director has announced that a patch is in the works to address the problem.
Having played the demo of Catherine, I can attest to the difficulty of these sequences. They are fast-paced, chaotic, puzzle-based sequences that have the game’s main character, Vincent, scaling a crumbling tower by pushing and pulling different types of blocks. The sequences are difficult to control at first, and they certainly provide the sense of panic that the director of the game was aiming for (according to the game’s official blog).
Though Catherine is currently unannounced for English-speaking territories, owners of the Japanese version of the game will no doubt be sleeping better soon.
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