![]() ![]() Expect some disappointment with the promised Catherine Classic features, though, and bear in mind that the expanded remake is due out on PS4 later this year. Buyer beware, in short: if you’re planning on picking this up because of either of those two features, you will be sorely disappointed.įor me, it’s enough that I can play Catherine without having to plug in one of my older consoles – and for a rather low price. That said, the promises of an uncapped framerate and Japanese audio – neither of which are exactly met, or at least not in the way you’d hope and expect – leaves a rather bitter taste in the mouth. These problems don’t stop me recommending Catherine Classic as a Good Game and a perfectly playable port. But it hits all of those notes almost perfectly. A cult classic for sure, being that it’s a difficult puzzle game (occasionally absurdly so) with some minor life-sim elements and a whole heaping of horror. This is a shame because Catherine is a marvelous game. If someone’s speaking off-screen in the English audio, they may not be in the Japanese audio, so you might have subtitles appearing when nobody’s talking – or voices happening with no subtitles, or the wrong speaker. The bigger issue is that the subtitles are for the dubbed version, not the Japanese audio, which means that the subtitle timing can appear off. In-game, you’ll still hear the English voice acting – Vincent’s shouts as he picks up coins in the puzzle levels, for instance. If you look at the option for that carefully, you’ll see that it says “Cinematic Language.” This is precisely correct: it’s the language used in cinematics and cutscenes. The other major issue is with the Japanese audio. It may well be that, like so many other console games, the game engine works based around the framerate. It feels and looks like it’s running at 30 FPS, regardless of what the frame counter in the corner tells me. As such it’s either doubling up on frames or has serious issues with frame pacing. For what it’s worth, framerate counters claim it’s running at either 60 FPS (with Vsync on) or higher. Menus and cutscenes seem to run at 60 FPS, but once you get into the block-pushing and tower-climbing, it’s almost definitely capped out at 30 FPS. While it claims to be uncapped, I’m almost certain it’s not. ![]() Nothing that stops Catherine Classic from being playable, but things that will annoy many. High framerate, looks pretty good, and has workable mouse and keyboard controls? What could go wrong? Delving Into Nightmares And yes, there’s full mouse support in the menus, and it works well. Panning the view isn’t something you want to do 100% of the time. Looking around with the mouse requires you to hold down the right mouse button, but as you’re moving blocks with the left, I’m perfectly okay with this. They’re all sensibly bound, with pretty much everything you need clustered around WASD. I haven’t had issues with the keyboard/mouse controls in general, either. Do note that you have to specifically change the config to custom before you can actually customize them, however. I haven’t had issues binding controls, but I admit I haven’t gone too in-depth with them. As it’s a moving effect, it’s hard to spot in screenshots, unfortunately. Not because of motion blur or anything – praise the relevant deity – but because it adds a weird shifting, watery effect to the edges of the screen. None of these are more granular than simply “on/off.” The Reality Of The GraphicsĪs is tradition, have a few screenshots comparing everything on and everything off.īloom easily has the biggest effect outside of the puzzle sections (which, really, are the gameplay segments). Resolution and Vsync aside (and Windowed/Fullscreen/Borderless, which is pleasant) you have Depth of Field, Blur, Bloom, and Anti-Aliasing. So, to put it mildly, they’re very limited. Vsync locks it to a constant 60 FPS, and running it uncapped has most of the game at over 200 FPS… sort of. Incredibly low specs, all told, so it’s of little surprise that Catherine Classic runs flawlessly. Graphics: DirectX10 compliant card with 1 GB VRAM Dreamlike SpecsĬPU: Intel Core i3 (2.9 GHz) or AMD equivalent ![]() As it turns out, those claims are somewhat misleading. While the PC version isn’t the new-fangled Catherine: Full-Body coming to the PS4 later this year, it does have 4K resolution, Japanese voice-overs, and an uncapped framerate. While Catherine on PC isn’t too much of a shock given all of the hints over the past few weeks, the fact that it was officially announced at the exact same time as its launch was a little bit more startling. Surprise surprise: Catherine Classic is out on PC today. ![]()
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