I liked a lot about Catburglar but also disliked as much. The music and voice acting were great and really fit the noir vibe. The art was decent. Pixel art is always going to be tough as it is hard to show off good detail. I can say that I have seen far worse than this pixel art wise. The game play itself was in many ways good. I liked the hacking mini game as well as the general level layout. It was good that the game showed you where each elevator went. I liked how the game objectives were there but didn't get in the way of the screen. I think the indicator of whether you were in light or not was well done. I didn't like the roll mechanic. Whether it was me or the mechanic it got in my way as much as it worked. I would have preferred alternative options to get past guards. The game did this in some ways such as allowing me to hide behind furniture but this seemed sparsely used. I also liked how you can choose to skip the audio and if you have already heard it once the game auto skips it for you so you don't have to keep rehearing the same things if you have to replay a level a lot. 

I played Catburglar on Linux. It didn't crash on me at all and I didn't notice any spelling errors. The biggest issue for me of all was the complete lack of any save feature. I don't just mean having to restart a level if you're caught, which you do, but I mean that if you exit the game you lose all progress and start from the first level. That is a deal breaker for me. There are also no graphics options at all. There is robust audio menu where you can alter the volume of various types of sounds. One last thing I didn't like about the game was that the mouse doesn't work even on the main menu. I get the game being geared towards game pads but to have no mouse support at all is strange. My Logitech F310 did work perfectly though. The performance was fantastic which given it being a pixel art game isn't shocking but still worth noting. I also think the game supporting Vulkan is awesome.

Game Engine: Godot

Graphics API: Vulkan

Disk Space Used: 90 MB

Input Used: Logitech F-310

GPU Usage: 9-59 %

VRAM Usage: 760-915 MB

CPU Usage: 2-5 %

System RAM Usage: 2.9-3.0 GB

Frame Rate: 164-165 FPS

Overall I don't think that Cat Burglar is a bad game but at the same time it lacks a lot of things that end up making it a frustrating one and one I can't recommend and didn't enjoy as much as I could have. There are things I admire about it from a technical and artistic standpoint but also things I dislike just as much.

My Score: 5.5/10

My System: 

Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 | Gigabyte RX 7800 XT 16GB | Solus | Kernel 6.14.6 | Mesa 25.0.6 | Mate 1.28.2