The Evil Within is shaping out to be a very odd PC port. It’s a shame, really, as this “next generation” of consoles seemed poised to improve multiplatform releases thanks to greater parity between the platforms, but so far this has been far from the case.

Here’s the bad news: Bethesda had confirmed that the game will run at 30fps, and that’s all it will support. But much like Dead Rising 3, there is a way around this – it just isn’t recommended.

“Shinji Mikami and the team at Tango designed The Evil Within to be played at 30fps and to utilize an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 for all platforms,” Bethesda explains. “The team has worked the last four years perfecting the game experience with these settings in mind. For PC players, we’ll provide debug commands on how you can alter the framerate and aspect ratio, but these commands and changes are not recommended or supported and we suggest everyone play the game as it was designed and intended for the best experience.”

Now, in the case of Dead Rising 3, which was similarly limited, it made a bit more sense. The game was initially an Xbox One exclusive and so being restricted to 30fps was considerably more logical. The Evil Within is a multiplatform game, however. What this implies is that it’s either been quickly squeezed onto PC after already being developed for consoles, or the platform simply wasn’t really considered even if the game was always going to launch on it.

This is echoed by the bizarre VRAM requirements. “The PS4 and Xbox One both have 8 GB of unified RAM which can be used as both system and video memory. Because our PC version is functionally identical to those platforms, we recommend 4 GB of system memory, and 4 GB of VRAM for the best experience.”

Graphics options look to be on the slim side, too, even when compared to other ports and multiplatform games. This is what you’ll be able to tweak if you have the appropriate hardware:

Fullscreen or windowed support

Anti-aliasing – FXAA, MLAA, SMAA

Shadow Quality – High, Medium, Low

Motion Blur

SSAO

Reflections

The outlook is a little gloomy. With such steep requirements, one would hope for more than 30fps, and with such a disparity between the recommended and minimum requirements, one would expect a greater breadth of graphics options.