Atlus made major modifications to Catherine via a balancing patch. The PlayStation 3 patch is live and it even adds a new difficulty level – super easy mode.

A major tweak in super easy difficulty is the drink assist feature. Hold down select on PS3 or the back button on Xbox 360 during nightmare mode to make a drink item appear. Chug it and Vincent will be able to climb three tiers of steps in one move. Since Vincent can fly up the tower with a power-up drink, the nightmare part’s difficulty should be cut significantly.

The patch also balances the number of retries a pillow grants Vincent. If you recall from the demo (which was set to easy mode), Vincent would earn one retry each time he picked up a pillow. Catherine’s update gives Vincent three retries per pillow in easy mode. A pillow is worth two retries in normal mode. Hard mode remains unchanged, a pillow gives Vincent one retry. The way the system has been configured its possible to stock up on retries by grabbing a pillow close to a checkpoint and deliberately killing Vincent to grab the same pillow when he respawns.

Atlus also fixed an issue with the online leaderboards where players not appearing in the rankings and modified text to reflect the balance changes. If you don’t like the changes you can reset Catherine back to its original state by pressing R3 and L3 (or both analog stick buttons on the Xbox 360 controller) at the same time.

Xbox 360 owners will be able to download the Catherine patch file too, but a release date was not announced. Atlus is working with the hardware manufacturer (Microsoft) to sort that out.