Catherine is a very niche game. Most gamers are not going to be able to "get it". Basically Catherine borrows heavily from the visual novel genre. Visual novels originated in Japan and they are basically story-heavy videogames with still manga drawings in the background accompanied with a shitload of narrative (that's why they call it a novel), music, sound effects, a bit of animation and voice acting (not always). Usually these games feature branching paths with multiple endings based on the decisions you make in the game. The most well-known (in the west) examples I can think of are the Phoenix Wright/Ace Attorney games and Hotel Dusk. Though these two are far from "pure" visual novels (neither is Catherine though). They contain a lot of puzzles and investigation and fit more solidly into the "point-and-click adventure" genre (Broken Sword, Sam & Max, etc.)
Now Catherine is more like an interactive anime rather than a visual novel since the narrative is told through anime cutscenes. Much like Heavy Rain is like an interactive movie. The game is heavily narrative focused, there are multiple endings you can get depending on the decisions you make in the story, etc. The story in the game looks pretty interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing how things unravel and the different endings. Most videogame plots suck. I barely paid attention to the cutscenes in Final Fantasy XIII.
As for the Puzzle-Platformer gameplay, I'm really not that crazy about it. I never was a big puzzle gamer. I'm probably eventually going to end up setting it on"Super Easy" difficulty if I have to because apparently the puzzle-platforming nightmare stages are really, really hard. Gamers were complaining that even "easy" difficulty was too hard so Persona Team patched in "Super Easy" mode. lol. The puzzle-platforming gameplay seems tacked on since the narrative and the branching paths is pretty much the true focus of the game (it's not like Persona 3 and 4 where the meat of the game was good old dungeon crawling while the narrative and social simulation/dating sim stuff was a side thing). But if Atlus made a pure interactive anime game, you'd have a lot of gamers bitching that it's not a real game (that's the main reason why visual novels are so niche outside Japan and even games with some gameplay like Heavy Rain got a lot of shit from gamers for being one big glorifed cutscene).
Sean Malstrom would probably crucify me for thinking that visual novels and interactive movies/anime are acceptable videogame genres (he and I share some philosophilies on gaming but also have very differing viewpoints on certain points). I have said before that I usually hate the cutscene whoring trend in videogames. But that's because I'm uninterested in the stories being told in the vast majority of videogames. Game designers/scenario writers tend to suck at constructing narratives. Most of them should stick to the gameplay.
