Pathologic is Genius, And Here's Why

[Music] ha great play mark it's a real killer pathologic is one of the best and smartest games that's ever been made and you know that's true because no one's played it okay that's not quite accurate a fair amount of people have tried to play it the steam release has achievements and there's an achievement for surviving the first of the 12 in game days a day lasts about two hours according to its global gameplay stats page just thirteen point two percent of all players made it that far the achievement for day one is called I'm not dead it's just that kind of game it occupies a certain kind of space in game criticism some game critics mostly the ones who are good will sing its praises day and night call it the best game you've never played argue it's a shining bastion of everything gaming could be but often isn't and labor very intensely to explain why games don't have to be fun to be good journalists board game critic and wizard Quintin Smith wrote three incredible articles about it in 2008 for Rock Paper Shotgun which are probably hugely responsible for a lot of Western awareness of the game but when someone reads articles like these they might make the horrendous mistake of actually trying to play it and we all know how that goes don't we the games just not fun it's not interesting to look at it doesn't feel good to play mechanically it's frustrating the story is confusing and wordy and translated from russian by a mystical rat who only speaks in riddles it lacks almost anything that would normally keep a person playing a game and yet people keep saying it's great I think it's great too it's an incredible game that barely anyone will have the resilience to actually play long enough to appreciate and that's maybe even the point so this time on the assorted massive unrelated concepts that can scarcely be called a YouTube channel I'm going to talk about all the things I find particularly interesting about this game and what they bring to making it so unique I'm also going to talk about the problems it has that prevented it from seeing mainstream success and then give a spirited defense of half of those problems anyway in the name of their artistic value it's not a bad game it's an amazing game but it's also a bad game it's a major time investment to in many ways it's a more interesting game to discuss than play it's possible that pathologic only exists so that we may speculate about it so in a way making this video is really for my benefit more than yours I played over sixty hours of this thing I have almost 600 gigs of pathologic footage on my harddrive I get to make a video about it that was the deal [Music] part 1 what is pathologic publisher that should be gone the intro on the surface it's a very easy game to explain pathologic is a first-person survival horror RPG with story rich and Atmospheric doesn't it look fun it's set in a town deep in the Russian steppe at some ambiguous point in the last hundred years and by ambiguous I mean imaginary there are guns but they're kind of old timey types a lot of the Dacor ranges from the late 1800s to early 1900s but there's some baroque looking buildings lying around the town is built around its meat industry so there's bowls everywhere but the abattoir is some kind of huge ancient building fused with the earth and its workers live in a huge housing complex that looks nothing like the rest of the town and some buildings are actively impossible like these staircases to nowhere and then there's the polyhedron a giant floating tower that cannot be sticking out of the earth suspended by unknown means and made partially out of its own blueprints so yeah I'd say the time periods pretty ambiguous you play as one of three different kinds of doctor who each arrive in the town for their own reasons just at the beginning of the outbreak of a horrible plague that threatens the entire town and probably the world if it manages to spread the doctors have 12 days to get their [ __ ] together save the town and somehow survive long enough to do that in some ways it's kind of an immersive sim you have an inventory weapons clothes and items but look at the wording of these items it's not food it's rations it's not medicine or healing it's drugs and what is other well that's where you keep less common stuff you can use or sell like hair pins and bracelets and flowers you picked and are those human organs as soon as you hit new game it becomes clear that any simple description of its basic genre conventions doesn't capture how the game actually feels the three playable characters The Bachelor the haruspex and the changeling aren't simply chosen by a menu so it's all about recruit to you wherever have you come from no no I detest trickery but if we ourselves are to suffer deception our hands are no longer tied where are we we open in a theater which you actually visit in the game world later looking down on all three characters as they argue on stage over who is best suited to solving the problem I can do miracles just let me will you please be quiet the dialogue gets across each character's basic viewpoint it's also written in a strangely theatrical way the truth is my shepherd I don't yawn me clothes this calls for the gentle hand of a surgeon your gentle hands are you not giving life you will inevitably do harm as for brainy he has no regard for casualties at all it sounds written it's not even trying to be natural it's like you're watching bad actors stumbling through their lines while rehearsing for a play which you are the actual play is about to begin with you playing as one of them they conclude they can't work together and time is of the essence and the house lights go down we won't ever get along and I suggest we be on our way the sooner the better off we go then let's go the clock is ticking [Music] when you go to leave the theater then you get to choose which one you play even before the games started the presentation is strangely off-kilter and brings in ideas of performance and the theatrical it's definitely the weirdest character selection process I've ever experienced you can't play as The Changeling until you've finished the game as one of the first two but frankly if you're actually going to play the game more than once you should play both of the first two first and really ought to start with the Batchelor he's regarded as the default pathologic experience he's slightly easier and his character is an outsider from the town so you learn more about it from that perspective and that's really helpful The Bachelor Daniel Dan Kowski is a Bachelor of Medicine and is working on the ultimate utopian project a doctor can aspire to defeating death itself it's not going well the powers that be and the government I guess are shutting down his lab unless he can come up with something substantive to back up his ideas he's come to the town because he's heard that a man who lives there Simon Kane has lived a remarkably long life so maybe he can learn something about defeating death from him your quest log has the main mission for that day the side quests for that day and your overall mission which for the bachelor is saving his career and maybe all human life by learning how to defeat death from Simon so you go to meet him and you learn from Simon's brother Georgie that he died right before you got there oh well Georgie asks you to help him find out who or what killed him luckily you think you have a lead on how he died because he met with a town community leader is it oberoth right beforehand and he was a respected local cultural figure and the town's head doctor of sorts so they might have discussed his health or who might have wanted him dead so you go to meet him and he's dead too people are speculating about a serial killer or a demonic step creature of myth the shab naca deer being responsible and then you start to notice signs of a plague and it becomes clear it probably killed both of them and is about to kill everyone else for days and days as the lives of people in the town and your own odds of survival get worse and worse that original quest Dan coughs keys bright-eyed naive mission to defeat death itself on his way to meet a dead man will stare you in the face every time you open your menu and check your mission for Dan Cove Ski this message doesn't update when saving himself or the town become his priority for the rest of your sad life you have to deal with being reminded that you came here for something completely unrelated so yeah get used to that pathologic snot a game about getting answers or resolutions to your personal quests or even about being heroic it's not a game about feeling safe or having fun it's a game about part-2 futility and disempowerment you might be wondering why I'm reading the words out when they're on the screen and that's because some people like to listen to these videos instead of watch them I put a lot of effort into my visuals but you know that's fine so I think an important way of explaining the features and effects of this game is to talk about the first thing that'll probably happen to a new player you start the game in the house of yawn who's letting you sleep upstairs she tells you that she's heard noises outside and there's some strange men hanging out in her garden oh one how games work this is a tutorial quest RPGs sometimes have easy early quests that act as a sort of microcosm of the game a tutorial for how various mechanics work so you go outside and you're greeted by these strange boys these aren't the characters hanging out in her garden these are more tutorial figures these are characters that pop up a lot in the game tragedians and executives these are their costumes they're actors at the local theater performing plays and so on but executives also perform important roles during the plague like getting posted up outside the houses of important sick people to relay messages given that the game is already being framed as one large theater performance with you as an actor sometimes they break the fourth wall like right now where they're telling you a living human person how to live in the world these characters teach you how the basic mechanics work time advances no matter what so if you don't do the important things you're supposed to be doing other people will have to do them for you and might get sick and you might need them not to get sick so maybe don't let that happen your reputation is important so don't start too many fights eat food so you don't starve and die and so on this game came out in like 2004 so the idea of having to eat to not die and time mechanics was actually pretty unique for the time this is executed in an awesome way look at how this tutorial is framed this conversation won't take too much of your time especially since time stops during dialogues and our dialogue is extremely important you need to know how to play after all what are you talking about I'm neither a gamble an or an actor he doesn't understand what the tragedian means by play the tragedy and is talking past him to you so that you know the mechanics but the bachelor has no idea why someone's telling him this need I remind a wise man like you of the fact hunger is sated with food food can be found in shops The Bachelor is having the weirdest conversation of his life the fourth wall breaking stuff in this game is genuinely the best anyway what's next ah yes the side quest so you go around to see about the men and Eva's garden and get a cutscene showing them and you realize one of them is a creepy-looking inhuman worm great another thing I'll have to figure out later I guess if you try to make them leave in a threatening way in dialogue a fight starts the way fights work in this game is you get beaten to death in a matter of seconds and the game is over oh oh jeez hello again you two no need to be so dramatic actually no that's your job isn't it in pathologic combat deliberately feels off the game has fighting mechanics in the same sense that a car being driven off a cliff has flight mechanics punching is slow and plays a random animation with a different length before the attack actually goes off and it's range is highly deceptive the range enemies have with their attacks is hard to decipher as well it's very swimmy like there's lag in a single-player game you have to learn to intuit exactly when to close in for your attack to hit and when to step back and not get killed it's quite hard to be good at fighting in this game the game does everything it can to stack the deck against you if you get in a fight the muggers who spawn at night open their combat with you by throwing a knife at your face which no joke deals like 90% of your health in a single hit no one gets distracted by guards once they pick a target they just keep going for you while the guards chase them and hit them in the back and they seem to only reliably drop loot if you're the one who kills them you can right-click to trigger a blocking animation which is pretty cool it doesn't actually do anything though guns are eventually an option they kill in one or two hits but bullets are super rare they're really expensive and you have a tendency to miss even when you're pointing the gun right at someone's head I don't know it just feels a little weird but this actually works in the context of the gameplay because it further disincentivizes you and doing combat because even sure bets like bringing a gun to a knife fight and never really that sure fighting always feels like a risk and it instills that you're not really supposed to live through this game while getting in tons of fights you're never handed satisfaction or enjoyment from fighting which normally is the sort of thing that's the most visceral part of a game experience the game knows this too and likes to throw challenges designed to hurt you and not be satisfying right in your face once you're past the point in the game where your likely to have a revolver a weapon with six shots before a very slow and vulnerable reloading animation a side quest pits you against seven guys and you have to stand still to open the menu which doesn't pause the game to unequip it to switch to anything else it's like the creators are laughing at you seeing what deliberately weird difficult thing they can put in front of you and have you still actually do this whole fight is optional so really it's your fault if you decide to try a dozen times to shoot seven people with a gun with six chambers remember how I said early quests and games are like a tutorial the lesson of this tutorial is you're gonna die if you make bad decisions heck you're still probably gonna die if you make good decisions fighting is hard and punishing especially against more than one person and realistically you wouldn't be seeking out fights like this you should be trying not to get killed first a two-on-one fight in the first two minutes of the game before you know all the quirks of its combat is a death sentence and the developers know it they put this fight in here to teach the player lessons about how they should be thinking about the idea of fighting or on the whole taking unnecessary risks death is cheap and your health is expensive I mean that literally - how do you get health back simple just rest in a bed for a few hours oh no that does nothing actually it just made everything worse my hunger meat has gone up now okay I'll eat an egg and oh no that's that's not gonna close my wounds it's an egg it made my hunger go down but wait it only made it go down at tiny amount and that was all the food I could afford oh I'm [ __ ] the only reliable way to heal is to take a painkiller like Mirador more novocaine these are expensive but they cause you to regain health over the course of a few in-game hours which is agonizing ly slow but it works they also cause a lot of exhaustion which also raises over time while you're awake and causes you health damage if it maxes out just like hunger there are items that heal you without any downsides tourniquets and bandages but they don't heal you that much they're pretty hard to acquire and the worth enough money that you might as well just sell them and buy some more delicious eggs basically in this game taking damage hurts after retrying a few times if you manage to kill the two people in this fight the items they drop her barely worth the health you lost to get them you get a couple of bullets like literally a handful and you don't even have a gun to use them with yet if you use the weapon you started with in the fight your scalpel it's taken to your ability damage and is now already less effective and you'll have to pay to get that repaired oh yeah weapons lose durability and effectiveness in this game and they do it super fast this fight is barely worth doing when I was playing I just reloaded and let the guys get on with whatever they were doing they're on the run from the law whatever they'll be on their way soon it's their problem and they're not interested in you or Eva anyways you can even ask them what the deal is with this guy he's just one of the locals some of the people of this culture are just physically different for some reason for me the cannon choice my bachelor made was to leave these guys alone and just let them go away it's fine it's not worth it this opening is an exercise in disempowerment you're not the main character of the story I mean first of all as literally two are the main characters but on a deeper level you're not special and sometimes you have to keep your head down to survive you are nobody's hero your characters stats page is a really helpful way of keeping up with all eight of the chokeholds the game has you in reputation goes down when you start fights kill people or other generally immoral things and goes up when you do good things like in quests or killing muggers or giving money to the poor or medicine and alcohol to the sick not to kill them but to help ease their pain so they can die in peace a pretty morbid way of doing good despite being an RPG where you can get into fights with anyone you want in the street a la fallout or elder scrolls the game has a very powerful ability to strongly incentivize that you don't do whatever you want not only two fights hurt but your survival relies on you being accepted by society if your reputation is too low shopkeepers won't sell to you and then you're kind of doomed to starve to death or to get sick to death or die to death exhaustion just goes up over time and is reduced by sleeping but there are things like raw coffee beans and lemons which reduce exhaustion and give you more time to do things other than sleeping but lemons increase your hunger and Coffee decreases your just like in real life but what's immunity and infection well immunity is your ability to resist the plague kind of not really when the plague becomes a factor if you walk into a cloud of plague or get touched by a plague carrier or bitten by a rat you get the plague your immunity defaults to 50% there's expensive medicines you can take which increase are temporarily but these also hurt you to use and you have to use quite a few to raise your meter a useful amount if the meat is absurdly high and I mean close to 100% and you're wearing a couple clothes that protect from infection if you get hit by the plague you might might not get infected it'll just lower your immunity a bunch so you get infected the next time you touch something hooray if you get infected you start to lose health over time and occasionally your camera gets all wobbly and distorted and your infection level starts to raise non-stop and as it gets higher the effects will get worse and if you get too infected some NPCs will try to kill you with fire there are antibiotics which decrease your infection level but these also hurt you to take and are also expensive and don't actually stop the plague once you're infected how do you cure the plague you can't [ __ ] you don't catch the plague [ __ ] it's not really up for discussion is it [ __ ] plague plagues are really bad statistically in Europe from 1200 to 1800 roughly 100 percent of all living people died of the plague okay there are items that can cure the plague but you really want to not be wasting those the games about curing the plague so you kind of might want to not use those on your personal status effects if you get infected either low to save or prepare to have one extra thing to worry about for the rest of the entire game there's one other important meter you'll need to keep a close eye on as well time the clock doesn't wait for you every day has a main quest and you have to complete the quest on time or someone else has to do your job for you and they're not as good at your job so the night is gone the most pressing endeavors of the day were fulfilled at the expense of several layers of your bound if you don't complete a quest in time the story advances without you and one of your friends gets sick which means you won't be able to talk to them unless you give up some of your medicine at the door to keep them upright for the day some quest lines take place at certain times too so you need to keep an eye on things and plan ahead between all this and reputation the game imposes a horrible feeling of dread on the player a pressure that never really lets off there are so many things to manage to think about just to stay alive and that's not even getting into the story you're trying to progress while you do all this you're always on the clock and almost always need to be in two places at once and as you navigate the town to get where you're supposed to be going you get more and more aware of how slowly you walk you can't run it's just this it's horrible you're not a character in a fun RPG you're a person traveling at frustratingly person like speeds trying to outrun about eight different ways of dying this is one of the first truly divisive things about the game the walk speed is slow and most of the game is about walking from place to place walking to buy food walking to buy medicine walking to the trash can to find things to trade walking to talk to people and walking to the theater to see it predict all the walking you're gonna do speaking of the theater every day after midnight they rehearse a new play these often comment on what happened that day or predict the future in quite interesting ways people only fear bloodshed when it's their blood and their shed yeah that's right stay out of my [ __ ] what the [ __ ] are you talking about and as the plague spreads you start having to either take longer routes to avoid infected districts or start risking infection and having to load saves and lose even more time this is not fun or pretty it's just walking I've had people tell me the walking is what turned them off it takes so long to get anywhere even if you're not in immediate danger because things are going well you're still giving up a lot of your time going places and the clock is still ticking down so you're always racing and you're always racing slowly but this is also the point of the game in microcosm it's not supposed to be fun on its own here's a head scratcher our games supposed to be fun maybe but should they always be is that the only reaction games can or should explore creating in their players well I think it's useful to at least experiment this boredom isn't a bug it's a feature it adds even further to this sense of disempowerment it also has a profound emotional effect as you get increasingly aware of your impending doom and how limited your abilities to get things done really are even walking around becomes tense and stressful pathologic is the subtlest survival horror experience I've ever played the act of standing still in the game makes me nervous I'm wasting time ah [ __ ] it's three o'clock I have to be somewhere after a while even the process of the travel starts to really get its hooks in you once you get used to it there's nothing quite like it as the story deepens and becomes more complex the travel becomes an opportunity to think about what's happening if you're being played why you're being asked to do this who it really benefits whether someone's messing you around to waste your time and stop you figuring out what's really going on the walking becomes the most engaging thing in the world I've never been more alone with my own thoughts than when I was playing pathologic I'm one of the two remaining defenders of no man's sky the others were lost in the Great Purge but when it came out I liked it at the time almost primarily because it came closer than any other game to doing this in fact I made a reference to pathologic in my little video about it but in reality pathologic is still the absolute greatest at this and puts no man's sky to shame especially when all the patch has made it much more like what everyone else wanted and much less like what I had enjoyed man I should revisit that game imagine a game holding your attention not because anything in particular is happening but entirely because it's got inside your head oh and then just to make sure you're paying attention a plague cloud made of screaming skulls flies at you and you go the constant racing against the multitudinous clocks of time exhaustion and hunger trying to get enough surplus stuff done to afford to manage it all and the many ways you can be killed easily or survive but with the game made even harder by taking damage or losing time or getting infected or getting so desperate you decide to kill a guy in a dark alley for his food is the exact opposite of a heroic fantasy story at all times the player feels powerless instead of the player being free but with some survival mechanics to keep track of its flipped the game is a large collection of things that will kill you unless you submit yourself to their whims you're free but you should be doing what you're supposed to be doing or you'll fail and die you're placed under a level of constant stress maintaining your frail body while racing against time to actually get anything else done you're always technically in control but it's hard not to avoid the feeling that you're the one being played by the game constantly reminded of all the things you don't have time to do all the things you need to avoid and worrying maybe the game's gonna come up with something new to stab you with on the next day which part 2.2 day 2 I came up with the titles in this video to amuse myself I don't really care what you think about them day 1 is kind of a walk in the park you even have enough leeway to take a walk in some of the parks you get used to the basic mechanics buy and eat some food progress the story a little and meet some of the other characters and at the end you realize that a plague might be about to hit if you manage to survive day one and complete the quest well congratulations you've done better than most players but the real game hasn't started yet day 2 is the next big hurdle and even less people make it past that the bachelors day 2 is where players will decide if this game is for them or not and the drop offs in terms of achievements demonstrate this pretty well you'll know if the game is something you're going to try to continue with after this so you make it to bed on time with a decent amount of money prepared in case you need to buy more things and with all your meters sufficiently handled maybe everyone's warnings about how hard this game is were sufficient to prepare you and you've got this in the bag now on the morning of day 2 prices rise tenfold the money you started the game with is no longer enough to buy a single delicious egg the plague hasn't properly hit yet but words got out there's an outbreak coming and people are stockpiling food and medicine not only is being able to afford food suddenly a much more pressing question than you expected any food you do have on you doesn't seem like a good idea to eat I mean that's a lot of money you're holding to make matters worse the town's governor Alexander Sam Roth won't agree to do anything about the plague because he'll be seen to be overstepping the mark if the other rulers of the town don't agree on there being one so a plague is starting but no one with the power to take proper action will help because everyone has their own agenda so you spend a good deal of the day with your hunger rising a no sure way to solve it because your money is worthless now running around trying to find enough proof to get all three of these groups to agree there is a plague and to give Sapir of the power to start making emergency orders your main quest is getting these warring factions to agree that the obvious problem exists along the way you pick up two side quests in one of them you meet up with a former buddy of yours and race - Mattin and apollo greeing that the shit's hit the fan or rather the town you decide to get out while you can but andrew won't leave without his brother peter who doesn't want to leave that much but Saburo of the guy who will get emergency powers anytime soon bears a long-standing grudge against peter which will probably lead to him getting killed once that happens and this isn't unfounded by the way when Sephiroth does get emergency powers later in the game he uses them to try to get peter killed so you need to get proof this is the case to get Peter to agree to leave with you both which you get from talking to Maria Kane Simon's nice about this issue however if you tell her why you need to know this she intervenes and prevents either of them from leaving failing the quest unbeknownst to you Maria needs these guys in the town for her own reasons so don't do that so you go to give this information to Peter Allah [ __ ] this is an actual recording of the first time I saw this statue you can see in the footage that I've freeze up like it's terrifying this is the second game ever to jump scare me with a [ __ ] still object it's genius I can't wait to show you the other one sometime that one's great too you know which one I'm talking about you all agree to meet at the train station at 10:00 p.m. so you're starving and the town sucks but at least you have an escape plan now the second side quest is called the house of the living several of the town's more charitable people have decided to establish a shelter for when the epidemic hits and they each give you money to buy some food for the shelter before the prices rise any further I will make the purchases I have to do a lot of walking today anyway the money they give you is not enough to buy all the food they want so you actually have to use whatever spare money you have or sell some of your items to afford this you give up all your remaining money and items to get food you also need just to give it away and you have to watch your hunger go up and your time go down as you rush around trying to find the stores with any bread or meat left when you get it all you're told the location of the shelter so you can deliver it let's just break this down part of a quest on a day when food is incredibly scarce involves carrying a ton of food somewhere and not eating it it's actual torture running around watching that hunger me to go up and not knowing how you're going to resolve it even though you're technically holding a solution the whole time it's awkward and engaging and tense in a way that no game has achieved before or since the game doesn't punish you for eating it either you don't have to do this quest you can just keep the food or the money you were given to buy it with and just ruin the chance to build the shelter but you don't because that's hardly what a doctor would do preparing for the plague and maybe there's a reward for doing it or it helps you further down the line you're making a positive moral choice on a quest in a video game you know how this works there's something in it for you so you go to deliver the food the house has already been hit by the plague everyone there is sick and dying and the plague clouds will actively hunt you through the house if you stay too long there's an executor there who tells you this mission was obviously a failure so you leave and go back to the quest giver and give her all the food intended for the shelter she gives you some nuts to tide you over as thanks for your hard work the reward for successfully following this quest to the end is dramatically worse than the money or food you could have just run away with at the very least this quest results in finding proof of the plague so the part of the main quest where you go in search of a plague-ridden house is at least solved by this - if you do the main quest instead though you get a genuinely terrifying encounter where as soon as you realize you've found a house filled with women who have the plague once you try to leave it spawns two more right where you just came from and they try to grab you to appeal for help and give you the plague if they do and you just have to dodge past them it's genuinely super scary and just emotionally awful you just abandoning these women to die it's a horrible nightmare which thankfully you could not do if you did the house of the living finally Samper off has the power he needs to start establishing hospitals under quarantine rationing food distributing medicine and so on and he even gives you a gun so it's a day late but things are finally where they should have been already perhaps too late to prevent a full-on outbreak but better than nothing at all you can defend yourself a little better now at least luckily you're getting out of here soon so 10 p.m. rolls around your quests have been one major failure and one minor resolution to a power squabble that you're sure will heat up again tomorrow and you haven't eaten anything so you head to the train station when you get there you find guards blocking the trains the samisen Brothers are nowhere to be seen they just didn't show up and according to the guards no one can enter or leave the town now because it's under quarantine thanks to the emergency powers you helped Sava Roth get you just trapped yourself in the town if you try to talk your way out all the guards attack you and you lose reputation for killing them because these guys were just doing their job best all there's an executor standing there this one doesn't say anything and seemingly can't be seen by the other characters he just stares at you letting you know he knows how dramatic the irony is laughing at you for thinking you can just leave the town so you're trapped and you're starving in the middle of the night you go to see a play being rehearsed at the theatre the plays about how you're [ __ ] bird news the governor will abuse his power when the morning hits the game nonchalantly says it all ends in less than 10 days exhausted from a daze being a pawn in someone else's power grab and scrambling for resources for a quest that was doomed and starving half to death you eat one of the nuts great you're completely [ __ ] and you're on day three day two is excellent game design it's deeply engaging watching your attempts to get anything at all done get frustrated and it also sets a general tone for the game it does the special game design trick that I like to call recontextualizing players come to games with their own expectations and understandings of how a game is supposed to work and feel and play a certain general set of ideas about what all this is supposed to be like if you're playing an open-world RPG you know what dialogue trees shops trading and hunger and time mechanics and moral choices are and you think you know how they work day 1 partially plays into this it takes pains to show how fragile you are and all the work you have to do to not die but it's doable it makes sense it doesn't feel that much different from a normal game when the prices rise so massively that money is effectively worthless and you were given no warning this would happen everything about how you relate to the game experience is thrown out the window and do you feel that happening in your brain as you play and realize what just happened walking around while slowly starving getting rid of the rest of your own items to try to get the food for a doomed quest carrying food you can't eat around and wondering when you will get to eat and watching your meters inevitably rise as you race to help the town and only barely achieve anything you start to make realizations about scope of this experience you weren't playing a game with the mechanic where you have the option of using money to buy things you were playing a game about having no money you weren't playing a game where you have to eat food to survive you were playing a game about starving you weren't playing a game where you can choose what sort of morals you have you were playing a game about how betraying the people who trust you is better for you than trying to be a hero and doing the right thing is an exercise in getting your time and energy and money wasted survival horror RPG lies you are playing a pain simulator this is a deeply masterful trick I've seen very few developers pull we're commonly understood mechanics are twisted in such a fashion as to force the player into a specific mindset and relationship with those mechanics and everything straight forward suddenly becomes different and off once day2 happens you no longer have any idea what's coming money turning out to be virtually useless the growing threat of the plague who knows how bad things will get in the next few days even though the game doesn't get that much harder and technically the game isn't that hard if you know what you're doing this sequence of experiences fills you with dread for what might happen next and the game doesn't stay this difficult forever the point isn't how hard the game actually is if you measure it objectively the point here is how the game makes you engage with it the game has a reputation of being depressingly punishing and difficult and while all this is true in places and it does get very hard and brief bursts the fact the game manages to create this reputation without always being that hard is a serious credit to its execution day two grinds you beneath its heel and even if things pick up for you or you master the art of stabbing bad men for extra cash you'll never really feel in control again and that is genius design one of the ways you can make surviving slightly easier is to sell your gun the gun you just got is worth a lot of money and so are bullets which might be good for solving some of the more pressing issues of the game you don't get in that many fights especially if you're avoiding them but being put in a position where the best chance of survival is getting rid of one of the main things a first-person shooter is known for it's even in the name that's a notable almost everyone I know who made it this far sold their first gun allowed themselves to remain vulnerable for the chance to maybe not die of something else you can also learn to hold on to certain objects to trade for better things in trash cans you can find all kinds of stuff sometimes people throw out jewelry or needles or empty bottles which you can refill with water for free and drink to reduce hunger and increase exhaustion or save up to trade for bandages with the town drunks the children in the town will trade flowers or nuts or blades for various useful things like medicine and bullets so the nuts you've got were useful you just might not have learned their value and this is another big ly clever thing the game does the economy isn't as simple as I give you money and you give me my delicious it's a web of needs and wants from a variety of NPCs which informs the value of myriad different items which you can benefit from if you pay attention and learn the game never hands any of this to you and that makes discovering and using these things feel good like you've worked it out and solved something one type of child in the town this little girl sometimes very rarely has an item on her called Schmoll derp they're expensive to trade for but they're worth it if you use it it reduces your health to almost nothing but it cures the plague there's a very limited amount of real cures available throughout the story so getting your hands on some of these is a real help even if their downsides are too much for you to risk using other people will pay thousands and thousands of rubles for them almost $50 worth and hey maybe some of your friends might need curing later just saying this all works in the context of the story too The Bachelor is in a foreign town whose customs aren't like the ones he's used to and so are you and all this tension and storytelling happens largely while you're just walking from place to place in a town it's quite an experience and this experience is enhanced by the game's music which is some of the best in the business it takes a front seat during a lot of the walking and it does excellently with that spotlight [Music] it's intensely atmospheric and moody and when it needs to be it's strange and unsettling it feels at the same time natural and alien like you're witnessing and normality that isn't familiar to you personally since II used alongside more naturalistic drums and rhythms to further destabilize the setting the music even evolves with the story each main region of the town has a theme and when that area gets infected its theme changes and becomes even more strange and distorted [Music] on top of the slightly remixed original music you can now hear a distant and frenzied chanting it's great and some of the tracks sound subtly different for different characters which is awesome the opening theme is a real banger too [Music] except it sounds oddly familiar I can't quite put my finger up oh damn it part three the writing by now if you've been pausing to read the text for some reason you'll be very aware of how strange the writing is and whenever you begin dialogue with someone they actually say something out loud when we do not find peace of mind in ourselves it is useless to seek it elsewhere truth does not do as much good in the world as the appearance of truth does evil oh wow that's a good quote I'm gonna use that in a future video and pretend the philosopher said it watch out for that everyone's very wordy and flowery talking about their dreams and visions and sometimes it's hard to tell if you're discussing philosophy instead of the task at hand the game has a very specific writing style one more evocative of your typical novel than other games and it is in my opinion very well written it succeeds in making you feel transported to a world where things aren't as simple as they seem where dream and metaphor are entangled with reality if a sentence feels strange or hard to follow it's doing that on purpose to make you feel weird like you have to put effort into understanding instead of simply telling you you're a small part of a strange universe it makes you feel that way by refusing to pull its punches with the ideas it's meditating on try this on for size do you believe in prophecies and race to Matan it depends I agree this may seem inconsistent with materialism on the other hand when your own experience convinces you to their effectiveness you have to take them into account I wonder that myself for a moment I thought you was driven by the same feeling that I am a great man when unexpectedly betrayed by the people he loves will often seek to fill the whole universe with his blind spiked yes the feeling is indeed familiar no one talks out loud like this in real life but that's not a mistake it's part of the point you're stuck in a world where people do talk like that and have to untangle it to make sense of things it's very hard to call this game pretentious because not only does pretentious mean affecting a greater importance than has actually possessed and the game definitely does say important things but it's also too self-aware about how all this looks and it loves to make fun of itself the plays make fun of the characters and plot and writing style the cool fourth wall breaking executives complain about how unwieldy their outfits it's lovely stuff while this video is definitely going to spoil lots of the plot there's lots of really interesting aspects I won't have time to go into detail about if you want a more complete breakdown and analysis of the three characters stories youtuber saw metal made a great video doing so linked in the description there's such a ridiculous amount of depth and complexity that it still astounds me now and even trying to cover all of it is beyond my powers when I was talking about this with Mandalore gaming whose video on pathologic is also really worth checking out the offhand mentioned an entire aspect of one of the characters I've completely forgotten about and isn't even in seoul's video either this game is about as dense with story as a real novel with an equivalent amount of words to read obviously really getting across the cumulative feel of the writing style is hard to do in video form and I was never really good at book reports anyway so instead I'll talk about some of the more specific storytelling techniques that help the game achieve what it's going for firstly the constant use of deception other characters lie to you for all kinds of reasons or have access to incomplete information and then share it on reliably there's lots of manipulation and hearsay going on and it's left to you to figure out what's actually happening every character in this game has their own end why does Maria Kane want to keep the statins in town why does the Inquisitor seem to always want to investigate the polyhedron and find an excuse to destroy it did all games key lock up the term Atari to prevent the plague getting in or has it already struck the place and he was trying to prevent it spreading out are his complaints that you should be looking into the Kane's business first a genuine concern for their power plays or is he just trying to get you out of his hair by pretending to be this goes the other way as well of course sometimes you can play dumb to learn more about someone than they'd let on if they thought you weren't on their side and sometimes you can lie for your own benefit like you can get a second pistol if you tell Andra you don't have one when he asked you figuring out and catching someone in a lie or successfully lying to someone else feels great because you really are gaining ground in a struggle for truth and control it's very engaging getting lied to by a story and having to put the pieces together yourself secondly there's the way you experience the same overall story from three very different perspectives The Bachelor for example is a clever and rational minded man but he's so obsessed with pursuing his specific lines of inquiry that he spends a lot of time getting tricked in doing busywork or ignoring the real story and when he is trying he can be pretty bad at it he's an outsider but rather than working to gain people's trust and get on a decent footing the players text options relate that the character they're inhabiting can be a total [ __ ] but could I please offer you a piece of advice I need no advice I mean look at this choice this is something The Bachelor thought to say you're supposed to be asking this guy for help Daniel what the [ __ ] are you doing several characters in the story have the power to predict the future and the bachelor has the power to be a dismissive piece of [ __ ] to all of them The Bachelor says things that he must think in his head sound really cool but to say to another person is like super weird you are broken Lara I on the other hand I'm used to winning at numerous points in the game you can just randomly say a Latin phrase to try and sound clever medicham Orville and he waved ass but he lies to the bachelor about who's responsible for the town's water supply being destroyed but the guy who actually did it just made a mistake she's buying time for him to get to safety by sending you on a wild goose chase because she rightfully believes the bachelor will try to [ __ ] kill the guy if he gets the chance the bachelor is such a piece of [ __ ] look how he talks to this poor woman this is incredible characterization like you're just stuck in the body of this pretentious buffoon it's great in conversation with the Harris pecks ass but he casually refers to the bachelor as the prickly prick that'll bury us all bachelors plot is largely a struggle to do what seems obvious to him with his degree in medicine but which conflict with the values of the people of the town he wants to inspect Simon's body but the Cain's have a family ritual where bodies are left unobserved for 24 hours then later he wants to dissect an infected body to study the plague but the local culture forbids any kind of defilement of the body including surgery and autopsies it's a special right given only to special families of Medicine men that Manku The Bachelor spends multiple days literally and figuratively fighting the people he's trying to save to the point of getting arrested attempting to subvert their laws so he can help sort things out by the end of this Dan Koski has a very low opinion of the townspeople and their traditions and decides he has to work within them to get anything done and turns to someone who can do the things he can't over the course of his story Dan Kowski finds himself siding with the characters who appeal the most to his belief system about the world and against the more folksy wisdom of the Harris backs and the supposed miracle working of The Changeling all three characters play through the same 12 days and these stories aren't separate whichever character you play the other characters are dropped in the world too and follow their stories as well you even interact with them as part of your story you cross paths with the other characters quite a lot but you never really have an understanding of what the other characters path is early on it sounds like the Harris pecks is responsible for the deaths of both Simon and Isadora though some people vouch for his innocence but then you find out that Isadora is his father would he really just kill his dad like that but then it turns out the plague might have killed those people as far as you know anyway but people seem to be saying he's going around killing people now they're calling him the Ripper I'd wondered if maybe you play a serial killer in his plot when you talk to him he seems reasonable and like he's trying to make a cure for the plague a panacea but both you and Dan Karski seem wary of his methods he's using a kind of medicine that seems kind of folksy and a bit made-up so you kind of ignore it he's got his own [ __ ] to deal with something about a guy called Foreman Oh yawn and what a big problem he poses dan Koski never even meets that guy who ever hears but because he's a trusted member of this culture you need him to do some stuff for you for part of the main plot you have to help break him out of a prison to help you because the governor doesn't believe he's innocent of all the [ __ ] he's heard about him at this point basically when you're playing as The Bachelor the Harris pecks seems a whole lot like a dangerous weirdo who's helped you happen to need but when you're playing as the Harris Beck's his side of the story actually starts to make sense and that kind of asymmetrical storytelling isn't something you tend to get in video games in keeping with the unsettling and anxiety-inducing design of the rest of the mechanics the game's dialogue system deliberately frustrates your ability to fully understand the story to when you're talking to someone you often have the chance to ask questions or make observations but often in a chain of dialogue you can't come back - there aren't really dialogue trees here you ask one of several things and that's your lot sometimes dialog choices exit out of the conversation with no way to go back and progress it the only way to learn absolutely everything you can is to load a lot of quicksaves around dialogue or try to only ask questions you think you don't already know the answer to there is absolutely no way wasn't intentional the game wants you to feel trapped in dialogue so you have to think carefully about what to ask and if you can trust those answers to ever learn anything and you can't go back and ask the other without the inconvenience of loading a save you have to figure out what thing your character should say which won't end the talking if you want to learn more about what's going on so you learn to talk manipulatively instead of truthfully do you really need to tell someone you think their idea is bad when you can play along and learn more it makes even dialog somewhat tense uncertain what option will end the talking take into account it's possible to fail quests by saying the wrong thing and you have a great system nestled precisely in the fact it seems unforgiving and incomplete the system only feels bad if you're trained to expect to be able to go back and learn everything you want but as we've just spent over 40 minutes covering the games about not getting what you want and hating people for it one thing that complicates discussions of the writing is the fact that the game has had two English translations now the first which came out when the game was released overseas in 2005 was notoriously so strange that some sections of the game are borderline impossible to understand without a guide or a philosophy degree and some sections were even taken out completely for foreign releases because they just didn't make sense the HD remaster has a new improved translation and has the cut parts put back in it also has new voice recordings which is good because the last ones weren't great see that's just not fitting at all The Changeling is an ambiguously magical little girl not an evil elderly crone witch Simon the land has cast out a monster from the bowels to bridle his impedance Katerina I'm sorry she's Katharina in this version is one of those clairvoyants I mentioned earlier but she's also whacked out on morphine most of the time this voice really isn't appropriate for her I need morphine yeah that's better the new vocalists are much more fitting and better directed to they would have had to rerecord the vocals anyway because the translation they were going from was pretty bad for example there's a cultural term the Harris pecs uses a lots refer to the Batchelor anon oh I know I need time to pick up my tools the original vocalizations well that left a little bit to be desired go onion I need to collect the tools it's epidemic acts as if it has a mind of its own this disease behaves as though it has a mind of its own yes see maybe they forgot to delete a sentence there I don't know traces of the supernatural are found more often than most reasonable and wise people would like morally feeling it chime eras that had been hahahaha Kimura's worship okay that's a little better that sounds like it might even be a way of saying it it's chimera right oh god I don't even know anymore how to pronounce chimera please become error chimera what needs fixing that is not how you pronounce Jimmy ray it sounds like someone machine translated the original Russian script into English then went through doing right-click thesaurus to make it sound smarter it's tough to pass and it really throws me off every time a character's died of a conversation turns out to be three lines of this kind of text my brain groans at me and I have to pause for a sec to mentally prepare to read it the game's weird writing was like that in the original game too Russians don't walk around talking like this this is just how it was written I originally thought this line in the old translation immortal dragon was weird like they were trying to refer to Simon as a mythological creature but accidentally refer to him as a creature that we have a lot of visual connotations for the new one says Leviathan which seems more appropriate if you call someone a Leviathan it sounds metaphorical and less literal but I checked in the original Russian version calls him an immortal dragon too and dragon doesn't have any special metaphorical meaning in Russian it just means TRACON it's just a weirdly written game that the old translation makes even weirder by taking it way too literally but there's an interesting intersection going on here you see while the translation is improved at least my opinion the sense of strangeness in the unforgiving and alien culture of the strange town was completely intended some people actually defend the older translation for adding to this feel like some people will actually say that the worst translation is better at getting across the field the game is going for now we're going to get into some subjective territory here we're gonna have to peel away a few layers of the onion of interpretation but while I can see that argument ie your [ __ ] phony okay fine I have something embarrassing to admit about my relationship with this game which really throws my pretentious hipster credentials into question yeah I'm doing it now are you doing it I'm doing it are you doing it get out of my [ __ ] video you see I have two failed prior attempts to make it through this game in 2013 I found the Rock Paper Shotgun articles by Quentin Smith hallowed be his name and found them really convincing on the subject of how games could be they really opened my eyes and changed how I think about gaming so I decided to try the game for myself the original translation bounced me right off it was a little too much for me to want to sit down and put time into when I bought it in 2013 and had a degree to pretend to work for and Gundam to watch and I actually took a picture on my phone of the funniest thing about this experience which was when the most understandable sentence I'd read so far was a character apologizing for if they don't make much sense I was like yeah thanks so I stopped then a couple of years later I tried again pushed past my initial problems hated being alone with my thoughts when I was walking around the town because most of my thoughts are about a good turn a Gundam was and basically did such a bad job I was dying over and over on day 2 and realized I'd have to go back and gave up so I spent years agreeing with critics convinced of their arguments that games could do more things than be viscerally entertaining or mechanically fun despite failing to play the central game many used in their example of the value of negative experiences it was too negative for me apparently only now with the HD Edition and the new translation did I finally stick with it long enough to truly enter into the experience and I'm glad I finally got to do that and I think I really needed the better time nation to help bring me in that older version probably has its charms and I'm sure it must considering the game had defenders for almost a decade before the fixed version came out but it was certainly too much for me however even the new and improved version of the game still has its problems we've already covered aspects of the game that are just not gonna be for everyone the slow pace the tone the feel of the gameplay and mechanics now let's talk about the actual problems part for the jank one thing that's absolutely necessary to successfully progressing the story is to read your mail you get letters from people over the course of the day and the only way to know you get them is to know you get them and the only way to read them is to hit the L key on your keyboard to open up the letters menu the game doesn't tell you this the game's tutorial amazing in its own way as it is fails to tell you one of the most critical things you need to know if you don't read your mail you straight up will not know what to do on some days and as far as I can tell nothing in the game tells you unless you check your keyboard options this is a huge oversight the game does do interesting things with not giving you proper information like it never tells you that food prices are about to ruin your life or it doesn't tell you that some of your quests will end in disaster and you maybe shouldn't have bothered or run away with the money and if someone's not going to get to those moments because they didn't understand what they were supposed to be doing or got annoyed they hadn't even been told a core feature by the game it's a genuine flaw speaking of the floor here that thud when you have too many items in your inventory the item drops on the ground in a bag and you have to drop something else to pick it up if this is a plot important item not hearing that and looking down to swap something out could cause a lot of problems I think the game could have done a much better job of letting you know when you don't have room for something this is a section from The Changeling story later on I can't pick up this bag because my inventory is full but the game has no way of telling me so I'm just sitting here getting stabbed to death and then have to load a save and drop something in order to pick this up this isn't as critical but it showcases the problem in a funny way if you sneak up on a rat instead of letting them see you and chase you you can pick them up and actually use them in a rat races later on but if your inventory is full they turn into a bag with a rat in it if you can't progress the story because you dropped something or you're too busy micromanaging what's in your inventory in case you get given something important then you're being made to miss out on what's good about the game by a poorly implemented mechanic pathologic is already not for everybody and the mechanical stuff like this only two trade-offs are the mechanical stuff like this only detracts from what makes it truly unique there's a lot of jank in the game AI bugs out if you stand in the wrong place during fights spins in circles or stands still and waits to die you can get stuck in level geometry sometimes the physics like to explode the thing is a lot of these sorts of problems are a result of the game existing at all like you could spend a ton of man-hours making the AI work perfectly in fights that aren't on completely flat ground or you can get the game out before your team goes bust and in many ways much like AI divine cybermancy or vampire the masquerade bloodlines the bugs are a good thing they're a reminder of how much bloody work it took to whip this thing into existence with the available tools I still shudder what I think about how to get the source engine to do things I or vampire did and pathologic engine seems like it was made out of whole cloth do you have any idea how hard that is video games are hard to program it takes years of work to make something good games as a rule even the stable looking ones are usually at their core hugely hacked together to barely do whatever they do and even what seems like simple slight changes run the risk of absolutely obliterating everything you hold dear so a lot of the games weakest aspects feel like a compromise for the inability or instability of the engine in the story for example sometimes characters interact they talk or get one another to do things but while your present characters are never doing anything they're just standing where they're supposed to be standing and you go over and talk to them and you get the impression they're in the middle of doing it or taking a break or something sometimes characters meet up to discuss something or get attacked by soldiers and escape but it's always just happened when you walk in and everything's already over whenever you're there it's not super immersion braking but a little more interaction or being able to watch the characters do the things you're told they did might have been nice also characters sharing a space together don't seem to regard each other they either do their idle animation and occasionally say lines like they normally do just next to each other yes now you sick or something how's my brother any news on him or there completely frozen in place you never even get to watch a conversation between two characters even when they're in the same room you talk to each of them separately again these aren't things I would really criticize the game for these are reflective of the absolutely miniscule amount of budget and time the developers had and the limitations of their engine these are things that it would have been nice to see working better but aren't a huge problem when you're actually playing there's other technical problems too there's this weird bug where the screens entire color palette shifts when certain effects are playing like fires or blood splatters during combat I'm sure there's a fix for this but I decided to just live with it it felt in the spirit of things to do that but it's still very distracting and definitely not intentional all in all all the little things like this contribute to the overall feeling that the creator's had lofty ideas for their story and world full of characters to interact with and environments to explore but were limited in what they could accomplish however it's important not to confuse limitation with artistic choice because some things in the game are easy to dismiss as problems but work in the context of the story that's being told and the overall effect being attempted on that note we haven't really talked about the graphics yet visually even for the time the game was regarded as pretty ugly everything is a weird angular facsimile of what it's supposed to be the color palette is drab infected and dying districts tint things even uglier shades and all the minor NPCs look the same as each other however I think that ugliness was deliberate and actually serves a purpose oh no it's the pretentious police they found me oh Jesus Christ the game is set in a dying rural town the sky is never clear everyone's sick everything is depressing and the filters that turn up in infected areas make everything even more sickly the fairly low texture detail and polygon count do end up contributing to this look and feel in their own way by being not much to look at the downer tones set by the story and mechanics isn't thrown away by looking pretty the game's art designer when it comes to characters or the more interesting locations is imaginative enough that even if it doesn't look visually great you can see what they're going for and understand what it's supposed to be at least so at least in my opinion the art style contributes to the feel I think it works that it looks like this and not other ways but I'm not sure if I'm happy with saying that because if the game had looked better like if it was on par with half-life 2 I don't think I'd have been saying this should have looked worse would I it's one of those things where because it works well enough for what it is I don't feel a need to complain that the graphics are bad even though obviously they could be better people can decide for themselves where the experience has improved or worsened by things like bugs or inventory stuff or the combat or graphics or translation and ultimately the game is what you get out of it and for some people the line of what makes a game good is very far away from anything any version of this game is doing it's completely understandable why some people don't engage with the game or want to and bounce off it I certainly did that the first two times so I can respect that like I said it's not fun I can't really recommend you play it that's why I'm here sharing what I think is interesting about the experience and not telling you to play it for yourself I suffered so you didn't have to once you get over the initial humps and learn to deal with the difficult elements cope with the survival mechanics and get good at walking Wow what a phrase get good at walking learn to do a repetitive unsatisfying thing on your way to a goal walking in pathologic reminds me a little bit of doing exercise or cleaning my kitchen it's not fun but it's important to learn how to do it or the empty cans of kidney beans that still have some juice and a bean or two in them you left on the side to figure out which bin to throw them out in start to smell after getting left there for a week and a half that's not a real story once you figure out what the game is demanding of you it doesn't stay as difficult as it seems I think people tend to overstate the game's unpleasantness when it's not a constant it's just an early spike as it teaches you what the experience is going to be like once you get into the swing of things the bachelor is a cakewalk but without the cake I mean you aren't exactly given no help almost everyone important trusts the bachelor and he starts out with some useful items a weapon decent money some medicine and he can make a whole lot more during the game doing quests for the rich people who trust him it is possible to get on top of the games economy and survival mechanics as the bachelor it gets hard at times and even harder if you insist on doing the good guy things in quests like not running away with all the money or food you bought for that one quest or giving away literally all the money you have saving six random people from getting wrongly executed which I didn't do I loaded my save after this cutscene played and kept the money and I'm a bad person for it but even if you do all the good guy things if you know what you're doing and take the opportunities that are given to you you can make it through alive even while being a good person the bachelors story is technically quite hard but ultimately forgiving it's a pretty balanced experience all in all anyway the HERA specters story begins with you bleeding to death upon arriving at his hometown via the train station after 10 years away studying surgery the Harris pecks artemiy Bora has been stabbed repeatedly in a fight with multiple people who believed him to be a murderer trying to escape via the station Artemis just got here and he's already bleeding out while wanted for his own father's murder and this isn't just a cutscene that happens before the game starts oh no you begin the game at the train station surrounded by corpses with your health low your reputation even lower and your hunger and exhaustion meters already half full now if you were wondering why the Harris pecks did what he did in his playthrough he is the first of many reasons why it turns out that Farrar to me everything was [ __ ] all the time yeah sure The Bachelor playthrough was pretty hard you maybe even figured out how to play it and not die too much I bet you thought you were good at this game that's where you're wrong Donald and cough skis fun step vacation was just the tutorial fart any grass tormentas nightmare [Music] some people refer to playing the HERA specs as hard mode and I must admit at the beginning it is a little bit like getting stabbed in the dick but after that it gets much worse remember that horrifying moral quandary as dan coughs key where you could risk six innocent people getting executed if you choose not to get involved in something that isn't your business anyway the hair respects has a moral quandary a million billion times harder and it's his first quest after getting chased into the warehouse territory by an angry mob you go inside and meet a gang of children this gang was there in the bachelors playthrough but you only really visited them like once they weren't really very interested in talking to you and the bachelor was too busy sucking up to the important people to care about a bunch of children when you talk to not kin their leader he says they have a rebel who stole something from them to defect to a rival gang he says if you do him the favor of killing them for him he'll give you a gun and some ammo now I don't want to tip your hand as to whether that might be a useful item to have in this playthrough but as soon as I left the building a man tried to beat me to death remember that reputation mechanic it turns out that when it's low enough in addition to shopkeepers not trading with you all regular NPCs will attack you in the street oh and because these people are just law-abiding citizens attacking a wanted criminal killing them in self-defense is a crime and your reputation will drop even further so either you run away to preserve what reputation you have left and tried to do good things to correct it or fight back and make everything worse good luck [ __ ] if those guys seen me yet they've seen me I feel very seen right now since fighting is more of a fact of the hare respects his short life yeah having a gun would really help with that so you go out into the steppe and oh oh [ __ ] off of course this was a gang of children of course the rebel member as a kid so you can tell him off and send him on his way for a miniscule reputation boost and if you kill him it drops a bunch because you know you've killed a child but your reputation already can't get much worse and not Ken's offer of a gun is a pretty big deal and this kid has a shroud ER on him it's one of the critical items it's basically the one thing in the game you can't pass up an opportunity to get Plus he's in a gang so he knew the risks so you can get a gun super early on in Artemis playthrough but at a significant moral cost obviously the kid is just polygons but if you take the role-playing seriously or even just stop for a moment and ask yourself if you would do this in real life if it meant survival there's a lot of feelings to unpack here I mean let's recap in many modern RPGs child murder is still a thing that won't even go on the table get on the [ __ ] table McCready oh I'll be back for you and fallout 4 [ __ ] when you're old enough to die in pathologic one of the most taboo things there is in gaming is one character's first quest and there's significant personal justification for going through with it you are dying and you need the stuff you get for it desperately you just have to find a way to live with the fact that you are now wanted for a murder you definitely did commit along with the one murder you didn't now it's not all bad for the Harris pecs okay it is but he gets one thing as it Manku he can also dissect corpses a thing The Bachelor had to get you out of prison to do for him every corpse you come across carries a heart a liver one kidney I don't know just go with it and some blood these grisly items form a new kind of currency various characters in the game will trade you really useful stuff for these opening up an entirely new black market economy characters who wouldn't even talk to the bachelor are now an extra tool for survival if you know where to look give me the herbs worm Artemis father's secret lab has tools to make medicines that can raise immunity and lower infections super easily making him infinitely more survivable when it comes to the plague than done cough ski if you put effort into perfecting the recipes they work like the medicine you've used before but much stronger and with much less downsides if you get them right I really like the asymmetrical storytelling that's happening with this aspect of the gameplay not only is it just an extra layer of fun stuff to learn and master to survive in the town and it feels good getting it right but you're also seeing the sides of the world that Dan coughs Keys beliefs just denied him access to he thought that this medicine was made up and here it is keeping you alive even if you get infected as artemiy and actually it's really hard not to as him it's much less of a problem because of all these herbal remedies you've got but that's about it so you're [ __ ] but once the play becomes a problem you can live long enough to be killed by something else like this great bit where as soon as you leave a building it spawns to muckers outside and they both throw knives at you which kills you instantly at the very least if you have to defend yourself and lower your rep you get to keep whatever was in their pockets and their meat pockets and with the new economy maybe not being accepted by society isn't as much of a death sentence I really do feel like Barack doesn't enjoy unnecessary violence he's an educated man he seems quite noble in a way he wouldn't do it if he didn't have to it's unbecoming of his station wait does that guy have a shotgun Oh getting a shotgun one second give me give me getting a shotgun on day one feels a little broken after how late I got one is the bachelor but what makes it extra engaging is the knowledge that I'll probably need it selling weapons as the Harris banks is even more nail-biting than before just because of the way his campaign is set up you will need everything you could buy with that money even more desperately than before but you also kind of need the come on what the [ __ ] there's five guys so it's about now that I realized why artemiy ended up with his reputation as the Ripper he was in a desperate place so he was forced to make difficult decisions and the few options available to him involve getting his hands dirty the story makes a lot of sense now he wasn't a serial killer he was a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to fight to survive and solve his own father's murder and maybe help the town and one of his skills happens to be surgical ability luckily there are some chances to redeem yourself you hear one of your attackers from the opening got away and is bleeding out in the graveyard this guy needs a blood transfusion and if I save his life maybe he'll help clear my name so you traipse all the way across the entire town to get to the Hunchback who will draw some of your blood for you if you have enough health despair pick it up don't forget to pick it up this time or you'll have to come all the way back again and then take a long stroll all the way back did I say stroll I meant to say seven guys are chasing me oh god stop it leave me alone I'm a good person it's just a misunderstanding oh thank god a sewing needle hey kid take it thanks for the medicine I'll be needing that anyway back to being chased the walking in the easy mode the bachelors playthrough was pretty tense at the best of times but now it's an active fight for survival leave me alone and please just let me do a good thing why don't you try walking a mile in my shoes you know what don't put your feet anywhere near my shoes you can all put both of your feet in the grave look don't criticize my one-liner okay I'm under a lot of stress [Music] ooh a lemon and blood transfusion I did it I saved a life now I'm well on my way to clearing my name and I'm only mostly poor and exhausted and hungry and dead [ __ ] so remember the perspective thing I talked about the Harris pecks as a former local of this culture is trusted by the people who hate The Bachelor and spends a lot more time in places The Bachelor only got to go once and then got the [ __ ] kicked out of them for going to oh yes [ __ ] gay inmate yeah ha ha ha so you see a completely different side of the story and of the town since you spend time being public enemy number one the reputation mechanics basically didn't come up in the bachelors run unless you killed people for no reason but now you have to face the problems having a low one poses and build it back up to survive it's hyper engaging not just because it's hard but because you remember how it was before it's the same conjuring trick as day two's food shortage everything is different and scary all over again I love it it's hard it's punishing arguably it's incredibly unfair but I love it you learn more about aspects of the plot the town jester had no idea about for example you are the reason this to Matins never turned up on day 2 and cowardly little Dan coffe ski tried to flee the town Maria found out about the plan and got you to convince them to stay by telling them you'd invented some cool new alcohol the statins are really into the local drink twine an absinthe like spirit with possibly magical properties and your medicines actually are derived from the same ingredients which you can trade with Andre for great stuff and then just to keep you on your toes once you get your reputation sorted a few days later it all happens again you get captured by sava Rob's men and thrown in jail just like you did in Daniels story and here's where another aspect of the multi character structure becomes clear by actively [ __ ] you when you aren't in control of a character they make worse decisions than you did when you talk to him he talks like the worse of the options you could have chosen he's naturally more of a dick he even says random latin phrases at you it's great I love this prickly little prick he's just so well characterized and I love how much the game hammers home what an idiot he is in this the story the big city guest jumps the gun too much not the mystery-solving type really but he doesn't know our traditions he's bound to be deceived even the plays that you can go see called an costea piece of shits all in all we can fight you self-serving joke Don coughs kee believes the disease came from the wells he's wrong but more importantly he never stayed is a prison break you have to break yourself out then later in the game he [ __ ] up a quest you did easily when you were playing as him and then you have to break him out of prison nice going down coughs key okay okay fine don't panic I'll bargain for your release 30 clips of rifle ammo listen there's a plague going on we're kind of on the clock here and I'm not giving bullets to a gang of violent kids someone could get hurt I did it I saved the bachelor [Music] the Harris boxes main quests are to develop a panacea an actual cure for the plague to figure out who killed his father obviously and to assume his father's duties in the kin the people of the step to do this he gets to go into the avatar and talk a lot with Foreman Oh Leon the guy who's currently in charge and the bachelor barely heard anything about and who is also bad at his job and everyone hates and wants you to replace him he starts giving you trials to prove your worth two of these trials are he gives you a poison and you have to do something for him before you die of it I'm not gonna say the trials are just tricks to try and kill you but I don't know the final trial is to jump into a big hole and die I'm not really sure about this one chief he says it's a spiritual experience and your father did this too to take his place in the Kin but no one else has anything about any trials by the way if you jump in the hole you die there is a spiritual aspect to Artemis life in the town though when you're walking around out in the steppe you can hear a cool distant chanting now the character later tells you the voice you're hearing is your father's voice that's really cool you feel more in touch with the land in his story and you kind of are Artemis medicines are made from plants that grow in the town and he can actually pick them up when he sees them around the place the wide open empty space you felt was kind of meaningless as The Bachelor is suddenly rife with items that can help you you start to literally see the town differently as the Harris pecks and that's just incredibly cool all the least fun bits of the first playthrough were ramped up to 11 the walking is even more excruciating and circular the survival mechanics are harder on account of having no money and low reputation a lot of the time and not having as many rich friends many of the quests are deliberate in story attempts to waste your time and get you killed by Foreman early on but you're invested now the suffering is engaging and you want to know what happens how it all shakes out for him you take the hours of walking in stride haha you see all the efforts you go to as proof that you're willing to go through hell and high water to save this town if you didn't like this game you wouldn't get to this point anyway but if you somehow did it's excruciating it's awful you're having a [ __ ] time being bored but if you care about the story if you've got immersed in the atmosphere and are engaged fully with the survival mechanics and your understanding of how much harder things are now this is the best [ __ ] time I've had in a game in years it's still not fun it's something else this other thing I can't even describe it's satisfying in a way I'm not used to games being in a way the game is asking you a serious question about whether you're willing to be punished to succeed if you give up and close the game and stop playing it you're basically letting the town die without your help on you Oh Yoon is trying to make you give up and stop playing and I'm not gonna let him I'm gonna solve this [ __ ] and I'm gonna cure the town just remember to pick up the quest items that drop at your feet oh you have to come with [ __ ] way back again you also learn how badly you'd accidentally messed a lot of things up as The Bachelor without even knowing it late in the game when you've learned a lot of the mystery and figured out at last how to make a cure for the plague but only in extremely limited quantities whose source ingredient is almost impossible to get there's one side quest where a giant bowl mysterious the appears stuck to a giant stake the giant balls blood can be used as a source of the cure you get some from the bull and make arrangements to get it pulled off the stake and rescued properly the next day which might even give you enough to save the whole town then you remember that when you were the bachelor there was a side quest featuring a staked ball surrounded by people which was a clear health hazard what if people congregating like that spreads the plague or what if they're planning a riot so you nonchalantly ordered the ball to be burned and thought nothing of it dan coughs key you prickly brick you've buried us all so make the most of the blood you got the day before because that's all you're getting in any case the Harris pecks run is a spectacular playthrough it's excellently designed it forces you to relate to mechanics you felt like you knew but an even more knuckle tightening ways and every time you get one over on the world or o Yanna and survive to the next day having learned more it feels like a genuine victory having an in-depth understanding of the layout and purpose of each part of the town and then getting to be a fugitive from the law in it is so cool you get to see your previous character how other people saw him instead of how you probably felt while playing as him you learn more about the mysteries of the town from a second perspective and you finally have something of an idea of how everything slots together all the problems the game has are even more glaring after another 20 hours of playing a story in it but I had an even better time as the Harris pecks overall and I'm glad I sat through the grim bloody nightmare of the story to the end the bitterest end destruction is inevitable there's no miraculous way out there was nothing to hope for from the start I can't really talk about pathologic without showing you how it all shakes out it's too cool not to talk about by the final days a town is a warzone an Inquisitor and later the army have shown up to try to get things under control but the commander hates the Inquisitor and they won't work with each other he loses control of a bunch of his troops half of them die of the plague themselves and all they've really added to the proceedings is now the Army's shooting the diseased in the street so I've really hoped that you have medicine because if you get too infected god this last section is hard actually here's a weird thing if you get hit by the flamethrower it does a ton of damage but it also reduces your infection level I think it's meant to be a metaphor for burning out your infection usually this kills you but due to a bug if you somehow survived the fire because you got out of Dodge super quick and had a lot of health if it reduces your infection past zero it cures you of the disease hey thanks for that you little [ __ ] the disease itself is chasing you down in an evolved even faster form that looks like angels made of blood it's a nightmare the armies brought a giant cannon and has orders to shell the entire area to the ground to prevent the plague from spreading if it comes to that and it is coming to that however after a lot of false starts and internal politicking and generally getting messed around your characters managed to find a solution to the plague the trouble is each character finds their own solution The Bachelor has helped develop a vaccine which can protect the healthy from getting infected and falls in with the Canes the utopian academics and elites who helped develop the polyhedron the impossible structure next to their house that has kept most of the town's children safe inside and may now house Simon's soul it's a marvelous miraculous thing that heralds a new and beautiful future he also comes to think the town is a lost cause he's sick of the babblings of its people whose customs have prevented him from helping them over the course of the game the bachelors map of the town evolves as he learns new things and gets more and more disillusioned with his quest to The Bachelor the town is an ugly and disgusting thing crammed on a hill where it shouldn't with its blood and darkness seeping into the soil and eventually the beautiful mathematical polyhedron joins it a wonderful thing skewering through the dark earth and its corrupted blood bigger and more important than anything else he believes at this point the plague is caused by the backwater people's unsanitary practices causing animal blood to congeal in the earth for thousands of years the bachelor wants the commander to shell the town destroying it and the plague and freeing the polyhedron of its corruption leaving the survivors to build a new town on the other side of the river governed by the visionary canes if the bachelor gets his way he really did bury them all the Harris pecks however is a local of the town and has gotten more involved in the internal struggles assumed his rightful place as the leader of the kin and finally gained access to the source of blood he can use to make a panacea and cure the infected a step closer to defeating the disease than the bachelors vaccine he manages this after a let's say mildly tedious final boss fight with the Foreman yeah the Harris Peck Sauron has a final boss fight in it punch him thirty times and he does a quarter of your health each hit you finally get your revenge on the man who it turns out killed your father his map screen evolves as he learns to betraying the town is built on the back of a giant bowl with the veins of the world portraying the town as a gigantic organism then the polyhedron appears tearing through the veins injuring the earth itself blood pools at the base of the tower myopic dreams of utopia scraping a nightmarish wound into the earth to the Harris pecks the polyhedron caused the plague and it should be destroyed so the town can heal [Music] I like these two divergent climaxes both characters have such different perspectives and experiences that you can see how they came to the conclusions they did and it highlights their differing philosophies about the world and how to live in it dan coughs kee wants to transcend the flesh to defeat death itself to build wonderful and impossible things he doesn't really care about average people he feels like he's too important for them he doesn't even like them really his ultimate medicine prevents infection shields you from the plague but doesn't actually stop it killing the people it gets to an ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure but what about all the people who need curing they get written off not just by his version of Medicine but the town itself has to die for him to be certain the plague is dead with it he'd rather destroy something than risk it spreading the disease a mistake that actually helped doom the creation of more actual cures every choice he made was understandable and yet it was never enough to actually save most of the people of the town artemiy is a polar opposite he's more concerned with curing the sick than protecting the healthy he gets down in the dirt the bowels of the earth and makes tough sacrifices even killing innocent people but he does it compassionately to try to end the suffering for real and protecting the townspeople means protecting them from the high-minded idealism that led to the negligence that failed to prevent the plague early on and invented the structure that caused it all in the first place a lot of this stuff is very ambiguous there's a lot of ways of looking at it but at least in my interpretation the game seems very concerned with the tensions between the utopian dream of a better world and the actual people who have to build it and live through the Follies that come with these projects it's hard not to notice this Russian Games parallels with the history of the Soviet Union as for the changeling I can't be bothered I mean come on do I really need to do a third 20-hour playthrough and then explain all of that I'm sure nothing that interesting happens in it these endings don't just happen on their own however left to its own devices at the end of the twelfth day the army destroys everything and the bad ending happens in order for your character to successfully get their ending none of their bound can be sick they have to prove that they're a good doctor which means doing the main quest on time every day and if you didn't you have to cure the ones that got sick you can do this by using the panacea shmow as you found over the course of the run so if you didn't use them yourself or sell them for tons of cash they're a kind of get out of bad ending free card per person who got ill if you prove you've done your duty as a doctor you let into the cathedral to argue your case and when the day ends you get your characters ending yay the end but on the same day you also get letters from the other two characters they both still have their own ideas for what needs to be done about the plague but because you weren't in control of them they kept messing up their plot lines weren't quite as successful as they could have been and a bunch of their bound caught the plague they plead with you to help cure them so they can argue their case too and if you cure all of them you can invite them to the Cathedral I'll actually pick their ending instead of yours you can tell the commander to go with someone else's idea if you get them a seat at the table then you get their ending instead and in the classic HD edition you get an achievement for it that's nice you get that anything instead cool but if you do manage to invite someone else something else happens to you get a letter from the powers-that-be inviting you to the polyhedron you only go there like twice as the bachelor and once as the Harris pecks and you never go very far in only those with young unsullied creativeminds can see it for more than a series of small rooms this time you can descend to the very bottom to meet the gods of the world major spoilers from here on out folks this is the secret [ __ ] half the people have finished the game never even learn here we go that model looks a whole lot like the town with the polyhedron sticking out doesn't it oh [ __ ] it is the town you're in a garden and two giant children are there surprised that their doll has come to life the town everyone in it and the plague are just an imaginary story told by two kids in a sandbox they tell you you're a toy and you can complain about your fate and how unfair being not real is at them but it's all futile you can't change anything they're kids playing God and you were their imaginary friend a doll who briefly got to question his masters before returning to the game so this ending is pretty divisive to say the least it really annoyed some people there's plenty of posts out there about how much it messes with them this happens 20 to 30 hours into a story you've been super engrossed in and if you do really good at the story the secret extra revelation is that none of it was real it was all in vain in fact as thanked offski your mission statement finally changes here to tell you it was all in vain after a whole game of staring at Dan coughs Kees quest to defeat death it finally changes to acknowledge all his quests were always pointless he was never even real I mean this is equivalent to a movie all turning out to be a dream it's a bit of a kick in the teeth honestly in a way it's the ultimate depressing move to have worked this hard and suffered so much and then to be told you were just a toy it's so much so mean and yet it's exactly what pathologic has been doing the whole time even right at the end they still managed to hurt you one last time but guess what there's an even more secret ending there's an even twisty of [ __ ] twists if you saved both other characters bound which as either character as hard as hell since it requires all the panaceas you can possibly get in their quests and the couple shroud as you can get which let me remind you requires child murder plus maybe a few extras from trading with this kid who Bailey turns up and rarely has a elder to trade for anyway she was like seven flowers for it to I got one from her in 20 hours playing The Bachelor and now this isn't even the clip of me finding it I can't remember where it is because there's like 23 hours of footage once you're done with the [ __ ] revelation offered by the powers that be you get a second letter from the people who executed the whole thing inviting you to the theater the theater the place you started it always meant something and now it's going to show you what remember the first time you got to the end of the impossible quiz and it turned out you had to have kept all the skips that's how getting here and realizing I needed to have never used any of these things was I'm glad I didn't but wow they give you cures to the status effect that threatens you the most in the whole game and the only way to truly win is to never use any and save them up for the end and they don't even tell you you were supposed to do this it's genius because it's so [ __ ] mean I mean it's just aa pathologic man this close to the end with the town ghostly and empty awaiting the time of my final decision getting a last-minute secret invitation from the figures behind everything even more behind everything than the gods who made the world is so mysterious and satisfying and amazing I can't tell you how cool that last trip from the polyhedron to the theater was in a town with no more dangers no more threats just me and the empty world the walk to the theater is the most amazing journey of all are these the same guys from the tutorial the ones no one but me could even see oh my god these aren't the people behind the events well they are but they're more than that these are the developers of the game holy [ __ ] the final secret is a chat with the developers the first thing they do is point out the children aren't real either and I mean they're right - none of this is real why would you be annoyed by the it's all a game played by children twist ending it is all a game you always knew that you're literally playing a game the whole point is that games feel real even though they aren't that's what suspension of disbelief is you never really believed a game is real but you briefly pretend you don't not believe to engage with it and the game gave you a shitty twist just to make you wonder why that twist hurts when it's just telling you something you already knew God what a cool double twist I love this so much you even get to pick whether to talk as the character or as yourself god this is cool in reality all games are a conversation between you and the developers all pathologic does this rip down the curtain at the end and show you that's what it was and tell you that's okay it's fun to spend time in a world someone else made for you it never had to be real to be real Oh God forgive me if my speech is unclear or absurd I'm still reeling from this even writing the script after playing the game and even saying it now I'm just I love this I can't even communicate it and that's what I've been trying to do for tens of thousands of words now it's so good anyway time to go pick my ending you can say a final goodbye to a bunch of the main characters on the last day and talk about what might happen next each of your bound has a thing to say to you as the Harris pecks if you've got to meet the creator's you can taunt the Inquisitor as the player with the knowledge that she's all pretend and as The Bachelor a changeling you've been weird and talking about how transcendent and special you are this whole time but did you know this is all just a game played by children wait what she knows she knows house she knew what the [ __ ] was happening in the changeling sorry so it's all about trickery too you know no I detest trickery but if we ourselves are to suffer deception our hands are no longer tied Clara begins by waking up in a shallow grave the executives tell you you're going to be mistaken for a murderer and a thief but also a miracle worker and your reputation is always going to drop Cora is immediately adopted by Catarina saber of the semi magical lady and wife of the governor she sees her appearance as a sign of divine providence who will do great things for the town and believes you have magical healing powers you also hear that someone with your description is thought of as a thief in the town and someone matching your appearance was said to have killed Simon or Isadora Clara replies yes she is a good person and the bad things she'd heard must have been her identical twin sister her is that an in character fact about us or did our character just tell a lie well it's both how is that possible [ __ ] you the sava ROVs tasks Clara with proving she has healing powers you hear there's been some violence out in the steppe some guys tried to stop a murderer escaping the town and got [ __ ] up that sounds weirdly familiar and while you're there you probably get into a fight with the looters and here's where you find out Clara's combat is hilariously terrible I mean that literally I was cackling when I discovered her [ __ ] this is Clara doesn't have a fist fighting animation instead she kind of waves her hands around all magic like it's a very slow attack and it does even less damage than the previous characters attacks oh and she has tiny hands so she can't use any weapons or guns except for one shitty gun that sucks so good looking face as Clara 45 hours and two earth-shattering revelations in and the game's still finding ways to destroy me this is the devs saying okay we know you've probably figured out how to fight in this game now so what if it was even harder from any kind of typical design standpoint this combat is horrendous but it works because at this point you know the developers are just messing with you for fun it's like when a close friend is rude to you but in a cute way you both think is funny that's the kind of friendship you have with the developers now I mean to even get here you might have even met them already you then find the injured man you are supposed to save and you find out it's not a man it's hey remember this guy in this version of the story the Harris pecks tried to kill the kid and the kid was injured but got away because you know he's not as good at stuff when you're not in control that sort of thing from the kids perspective and Clara's he's a monster who tried to kill a kid but from being the Harris Beck's you know what was on the line it's cool storytelling you see Artemis side but you also have to recognize that he's far from an innocent man here luckily he doesn't have as much blood on his hands this time it seems especially since we're going to help the boy anyway you lay on your hands to heal the kid and complete the quest oh he's dead so Clara's powers if she has them at all don't seem to quite work how you expect at least not for healing traditional wounds the man who was supposed to serve as a witness to your Healing Hands far from assuming you're a charlatan or a demon or a murderer actually still believes you're a hero though he decides the kid had been judged by your power as a sinner and then killed instead of healed he thinks your power is the divine working through you in mysterious ways consider yourself purified you still have to prove you can heal people but he's basically sold on you as a divine being I'm not sure how to feel about this version of the story in a really good way Harris pecks made a very tough choice and had to live with it but I think it might actually be even more bleak to have a story where a character tries to heal the child of their wounds accidentally kills them and is heralded as a miraculous hero anyway I love this stuff it's horrible it makes my skin crawl with the harder fighting and the constantly lowering reputation you have to actively keep up by doing good things the game is pathologic at its most pathological you have to do good things all the time give money away give up on your medicine kill baddies with your awful attacks and so on bachelor has a hard spike on day two and Harris Beck's has two hard spikes at the beginning and partway through when he gets captured but Clara is constantly swimming against a current of negative press someone who looks exactly like her has done a lot of bad things you have a new set of bound of course all the remaining main characters who weren't in the first twos care as always your job is to protect them from getting infected or dying wait the foreman of the abattoir oh that's not gonna end well Clara's story has a lot of little extra things in it to learn about character relationships and choices lots of them are too small to go into depth about but at times it was like a victory lap the writers creating an extra post playthrough story for a character with a magical ability that justifies them learning all kinds of new things it's another way of exploring the richness of the story you're still interacting with and causing the story to play out the way it does but you have the strongest idea of why it all worked out now with two stories worth of hindsight when you talk to the foreman who gave the HERA specs so much trouble and help him verify Artemis a legitimate heir to his position this conversation causes him to devise the trials he tormented you with when you were playing the other story he comes up with them on purpose to get rid of artemiy thanks Clara which is how it felt like as the hare respects but getting that confirmation is really something on top of that the thing where the other player characters are worse that their jobs is cranked all the way up after the first few days the Batchelor in her aspects is relationship breaks down so bad they're actively trying to hunt each other down for much of the story you get letters from their allies asking you to find them and warn them the other is coming for them and you can even rat their locations out to each other for money and medicine it's fun seeing how the worst-possible of their timelines plays out when you aren't stopping either of them from being jerks that said it's clear that Clara is the most rushed of the stories you can tell mainly because a lot of the side quests are the same side quest each day for the second half of the game you have three side quests every day and they're always the same two of them were to warn the bachelor and her aspects about each other and the third well Clara starts getting letters or possibly dream messages but it's in the letters menu from her twin sister the evil Clara who is hiding out somewhere new in the town each day if you don't find her based on cryptic messages and get her to leave which takes a lot of sleuthing and running around infected houses the district she was hiding in will be permanently infected for the rest of the game it's creepy talking to your own character too whenever you find her in a house she's always facing away from you and it's super weird dodging the plague in houses to find a weird copy of yourself is great stuff you then also have to scare away her followers who are hiding out in very hidden places you won't think to look and if you don't that area gets infected too so after the halfway point every day these are your three side quests they're always the same with the slight variation being the house that the bachelor aspects are each hiding in is a different place each day you only get given vague ideas of why they are and you have to look around yourself and Clara's letters are actually quite cool puzzles I guess to figure out where exactly she is in the town based on your intuition and knowledge of the town from two full playthroughs it's quite interesting but having all three side quests be the same one each day with no real advancement of the plot really gets to me the other characters had serious cool subplot stuff but Clara just gets busy work I started to skip these quests after a few days there's also very little communication that you can heal infected people as Clara oh did I mention that I didn't mention it earlier on purpose because the game sure didn't when you use your hands on the infected it plays a different animation and you get reputation back and they do a little bow it costs some health too I guess so it's another thing you can do to keep your reputation up and it's also a cool trade-off because you lose health for doing it as well and there's a risk of getting infected while you're in those districts doing this but I don't remember being tutorial eyes door told by the game you can do this I only know about this from other videos mentioning it I know pathologic is a game that prides itself on not conveying stuff and letting you figure things out but from a design perspective this feels like a misstep I feel like if they'd had more time or resources they'd have made this much clearer I mean they seem to give the implication Clara's attack is an attack you use it to kill people and it kills the first person you try to heal and the first person you actually heal happens in a cutscene they do the opposite of letting you know you can do this and this only works on these characters to not the people who appear to be in the early stages of infection they just drop dead like I said earlier for the HD edition all the character audio was re-recorded but in Clara's scenario is specifically for Katarina on around day 3 for some reason one of the old voice actors lines is still in there nothing threatens your daughter everyone will die but you will remain I feel like this sort of oversight probably happened because development of Clara was rushed even for the HD version and an old line slipped through and didn't get caught which makes sense a very small amount of players ever get to the point this could happen and I'm glad they spent the time elsewhere instead of triple-checking all the voice lines for every character for every character's story but it's at least a good indicator of how generally rushed some of the changelings stuff is it's a minor thing but it points to the major thing or the very least I noticed it and I want to pretend that I can make a point out of it overall if you were interested in pathologic story Clara's root is really satisfying if you're not it's just more text and combat even more frustrating than before and yet more walking but it's much more rewarding in forthcoming with information than the others you put the work in you played 20 to 40 hours of story now lots of the missing pieces you were curious about can get filled in the story isn't pulling its punches either they know you've already played the game once I love a lot of sequels to movies and games where they don't need to reestablish or explain the simplest stuff they can just go nuts with established material and ideas and this really hits that spot it gets kind of meta toward the end too so it's all about trickery to you wherever have you come from no I detest trickery if we ourselves are to suffer deception our hands are no longer tied it's like Clara kind of knows what's happening without having to be told some of her text options imply information she never even learns herself but you know it from the other stories this is some malkov en [ __ ] right here god I should really make that vampire video I teased years ago it's on the pile somewhere hey you what are you doing out of your cage I'll get to you it even starts to become clear what the story might really have been about all along like what does the polyhedron actually do people say it can store dreams so people can revisit them and share them or trap a soul and keep a dead person alive what does that mean our souls literal things or an ephemeral conceptual thing the idea of someone the presence they can manifest through the effects of actions from while they were alive is a piece of my soul in this video perhaps even surviving after my death I put a lot of myself in my work am i immortal now in a sense maybe I am I'm going to say the word now now when did I say that looking at the clock its 4:16 a.m. on the 9th of November 2019 but when did I really say it I now will be 27 and talking about pathologic forever even if you come back in another 27 years maybe I'm immortal and freed from earthly flesh by existing in the form of a video maybe the opposite is true maybe I'm trapped here forever and maybe this is worse than being dead mm-hmm forgive me if my speech is unclear or absurd you have a lot more in-depth conversations along these philosophical and spiritual lines and to me now the polyhedron feels like a metaphor for videogames themselves the rest of the town represents the down-to-earth day-to-day boring reality of walking to places talking to people getting lied to being a regular person eating food getting sick sometimes and eventually dying but in videogames in art death isn't real you can be whoever you like games are stories but more than that a way for people to share their stories with others forever to take part in them and live on past the boundaries of their simple material existence everyone who made pathologic will be dead one day but they'll still be here in this world they made staring out at you in eternal polygons talking to you sharing their ideas and feelings a hand reaching from the grave to grasp you once more art is the road to or to permanent expression and games are a collaborative expression - you're playing it interacting being in it this game is made for you and you a part of it this game is a reminder of the immense spiritual value of games to be somewhere else and move and act in it to be a piece of someone else's vision for a moment the polyhedron represents the uplifting unrealistic and yet truly real power imbued upon us by our ability to have dreams literally and figuratively that's just how it reads to me though it certainly feels that way at times speaking of the polyhedron when you visit there as Clara partway through you get to descend to the bottom and meet the gods of the world several days earlier than the other characters they're genuinely shocked to see you this time it's like Clara herself has more power than the creator's thought she would and here explains why Clara is the way she is why there's such confusion about her nature why there's two of her the powers that be are in disagreement over who she is and what she's doing one of them thinks she's a thief and the other things that she is some kind of divine being in their story I think this is actually really clever the powers that be are having competing interpretations of this character they've made Clara's quest eventually leads to the discovery of how her healing hands work they transform people's blood give them something that can protect them from the disease and if she uses it on stronger people for example her bound if they're sacrificed and their blood is taken it can be used to make many cures for the plague so she can get seven of her bound to agree to atone for their sins by being sacrificed to save the town when you describe this to form an O yon he sees it as a chance to undo the damage he's caused and agrees wholeheartedly he tells you to tell the her aspects to not bother with the final trial the one where he jumps into a hole and dies since he no longer needs to kill him to protect his position in the Kin you can straight up ask him what happens if he'd gone in the hole and he tells you he would have died because yeah it's a big hole I left this out when I was talking about the hair aspects for dramatic effect but I don't want to not mention it as the Harris pecks you do get Clara cryptically offering to assist you and if you agree when you go in the hole you instead get this cool scene where you can see your own corpse surrounded by executives and you can choose someone from Clara's bound to die in your place artemiy survives by doing this and then fights the foreman so it really was a spiritual experience if you let the changeling into your life at least I guess this is because Clara in the Harris pecks this story doesn't get a [ __ ] together enough to realize she can use o u n-- to solve the plague problem directly herself anyway it's very funny to me that in Clara's run the Harris pecks is genuinely prepping to jump into a hole and die so oh you know and six others agree to make this sacrifice and that's her ending the town and tower get preserved but at the expense of people sometimes giving up their lives to maintain it I like this ending it feels like the reminder that for society to survive intact requires work and sacrifice to protect itself from its own internal tensions and contradictions that sort of thing Clara's map evolutions are suitably miraculous instead of either the town or the tower being monstrous the tower is a part of the town bring some new thing a dream a life the future and the town is feeding it it's a symbiotic relationship which takes sacrifice but which might be worth preserving and the sky is dreamlike reflecting either Clara's more miraculous fantastical perspective or her knowledge that the world really is a dream of sorts Kara's first extra ending is nothing special you've already met them once in this playthrough so there's no real revelation here hey guys it's me again third time around now how's it going what [ __ ] okay that's cool the game keeps being meta about all the things I think it won't address like just when meeting the developers were starting to become a repetitive idea here it is getting one-upped by the third go-round making fun of how that's starting to feel and here in the game Clara kind of validates my thoughts about the town and the polyhedron talking about these characters as if they're fragments of real people and in a way I really do feel like I know these people now I've spent a lot of time with them in their world experiencing their creation you can even ask them more directly what the other characters stories were supposed to be about it's a fantastic send-off getting to discuss the story with its creators holy [ __ ] that's so [ __ ] cool I talked about this earlier it is on purpose oh man this is great I love this I utterly love this this is the best thing ever and it's so tiny so small it's the devs showing you all the little tricks they used to make you frustrated and trapped right there being complained about by you ah god it's excellent you can ask what their plan was with the changeling and they make a joke about how rushed and slapped together it was that's fun I like that they're acknowledging things the player would definitely have noticed about this by now it feels personal and real they're not resting on their laurels and being pretentious about themes or ideas they're apologizing for things they knew they got wrong and even making a joke at the expense of this own indulgent last part what a great ending god I've loved the story of this I wish I could have gone into more detail about it but just talking about the things that jumped out to me the most has taken this long it's been genuinely super awesome even though it's all fake it's all just a kids game and on top of that it's all just a video game I feel a sense of achievement for having stuck with it in a strange way also I quite like how hard you have to work to achieve the actual good ending like the bachelors ending is just like [ __ ] he's such a [ __ ] and the high respect is ending does kind of destroy a really awesome cool invention it's only by actually pulling through the whole game at least twice that you get the chance to really get a decent ending for people breathe it in ah actually no don't breathe it in you didn't have to play the whole game you just listen to me talk about it for a couple hours [ __ ] you there are fine things old boy which are more brilliant when unfinished than when finished too much so pathologic does a lot of very clever things to make you feel away games rarely even try to make people feel and I think it achieves its goals fairly well it's an experience I have a hard time recommending and which I know to be flawed but which I'm extremely glad I played in full pathologic is the antidote to the entire modern game design ethos it isn't a skinner box that rewards you with simpler satisfactions like beautiful splatter graphics when you get a headshot or a quest that makes you feel heroic and powerful it makes you stare at the abyss of human cruelty and ignorance and dares you to blink to close the game and give up I can't think of many other games that manage that I super love this game and its world even though I don't think I'll ever want to touch it again once I'm done making this video I'm glad I did it all and I feel like I've learned a lot about the potential of games and the many unique ways games can have all kinds of effects on you all that said and I've said it so much in this video I'm not making this to recommend a 15 year old game I'm making it because I couldn't recommend this 15 year old game I could barely even recommend it to myself it took years to get around to playing it past the first couple hours I had a really interesting time but 65 hours is a long time to spend to eventually have an interesting time and I couldn't in good conscience inflict that on someone else by telling them to try it especially not now [Music] so yeah love pathologic amazing game one of the best games ever artistic masterpiece but don't play it it sucks luckily there exists a game that does everything pathologic wanders wrong right a game I can recommend so so much more that game is pathologic too you don't have to play one to understand - especially not now that I've told you everything you need to know about it when I sat down to play pathologic - I cynically assumed it would be a compromised version of one graphically and technically improved but lacking the sorts of bold design elements that contributed to making the original so unique like making a game like pathologic more accessible and understanding for a newer audience making it more engaging to play even would surely mitigate what it did best I've never assumed so wrong it's even more horrifying even harder and a massive step forward in every possible way except the music the music and one is better in my opinion but the music is still incredible stuff like top 10 best music in games no question the creator's made good on maintaining the atmosphere and feel while removing the bugs and elements that were truly bad and took away from the experience they even threw in meta stuff for people who played the first or even people who knew the twists from the first I learned painstakingly the hard way and you just learned easily over one video perhaps finally after all these long years the deep game is here well almost here because pathologic - isn't done yet it's not an early access per se but not only is it still getting what I'd say a critical bug fixes for example an update while I was making this video solved the performance problems I would have talked about right now so nice one there but only one of the game's original stories is in this version at least right now the Harris pecks it's still a full game because pathologic was three full games already basically but they're going to add more if they can afford to I'd buy the others as DLC or expansions frankly there was a demo the marble nest a few years ago where you play as The Bachelor for a day and they just patched that into the main game as an improved version of itself and that's awesome - and yes the bachelor is even more of a [ __ ] I love him truth does not do as much good in the as its counterfeits do evil God what a great character I love him so much it's just he's so well written as him insufferable [ __ ] oh man he's great I swear to god I'm gonna cause play as him first chance I get pathologic too isn't exactly a block put there sorry I've spent hours and hours recording this boy so the game isn't exactly a blockbuster smash hit it's a niche sequel to a barely known cult classic from Russia a decade ago loved mostly by native Russian speakers and Western pretentious nerd critics that's not a jab at pretentious nerd critics I'm one of those did you hear that [ __ ] bit about this video having a soul come on let's not pretend I'm any better but even if we love it we're not exactly a huge demographic I don't tend to do calls to action in my videos I like to let people make up their own minds about what to do with their lives or whether a game is for them if you play pathologic one after I deliberately didn't recommend it congratulations you passed the true test by deciding to play the game for yourself and I love you for that good luck with the fight with barley and on day one you can find extra food left out on Nina's grave pretend I left that for you nah keep the fact I didn't recommend the first game despite loving it in mind when I say you should buy pathologic - it still might not be for you but you absolutely must try it to find out and in a world where mainstream games are starting to feel like they're converging upon the same Pavlovian uniform design with only minor branding variations supporting independent work and true experiments with the form even if they don't turn out to be something you personally like seems like these step forward for video games the only other obvious step forward I can think of is starting a game developers Union pathologic one is the best game you didn't play it's the best game I almost didn't play but pathologic - is better and you are going to play it go experience one of the most unique satisfyingly hurtful experiences there is in gaming I'd analyze it in detail but that would require spoiling it and you are going to play this so I wouldn't do that to you not for a while at least I need time to collect data about other people's experiences and think about how it achieves the effects it does and I want to play it all the way through three more times okay everybody break go play pathologic - and meet back here in I don't know six months to compare notes for my analysis of the sequel oh and whatever you do don't take the travelers deal you would supposed to take the deal Brendan [Music] hey thanks for watching all the way friend my videos are supported by my backers over on patreon and I love them for it I used to do a thing where I read everyone out to back to certain amount during the credits but I have the best problem ever of there being too many people to do that so I'm reading them out one last time before I change things over in the future people who back me 10 dollars or more per video can vote on what my next video is I'll have polls for what I feel like working on or based on ideas and suggestions you folks give me I always want to do like four different things at once so this will hopefully give me some more perspective I'm amazed that I have some happen as well supported as I have and I'm eternally thankful for being able to do ridiculous things like get covered in soy build and destroy a set or spend almost a month playing and reading and writing about an old Russian video game masterpiece with your continued support I hope to do even more ridiculous things so for the last time at least for the foreseeable future if I ever finish any of the video games I'm trying to make I'll hide a reading of all my patrons names in there in addition to all the names scrolling past the screen right now I'd especially like to thank gay Rosencrantz 8 goblins in a trench coat at Coen sell Pro a bowl of creamy tomato soup a cat with shades and a new California Republic first recon beret a deftly styled 4k Merc in HD underscore 1080p a fish named Nabi a psychologically damaged dragon Abe Lincoln R&D Carter ABI bellanger Aislin ada Hall Adam Appel Adam Benson Adam lb Adam Tengku Adam Warsong ad Thornton Smith adults or donor Adan croute al Swigert Alan Orozco Alicia lemons Alex Len kovitch Alex Madson Alex Parkinson Alex Borstein rudl Alexis Shan Brooke Alicia Parker Martel Alison J Alan Smith Allosaurus Alison sugar all thief Amanda Beverly Alastair thank you for playing life is strange and beador see anakin fry walker andrea chen andrew Brannon Andrew Gilly Andrew Harding Andrew Jackson Andrew Schumer Andrew wanker Andy Karras Anthony ha Antony peony Antonin Edom Inc Aoife O'Brien April March is on [ __ ] tap the insufferable art offend Falcon Tom OH Asha holy Astrid Harper August or ensure our pun Avery P look mom he said my name I'm famous now please love me avi Finkel as bad commish banjo hits bardic college of controversy Basu gasps ooh bakuhatsu Bakumatsu Beatrix Williams Bebo sloth beekeeper gal Ben's later Ben dick Croxon Benjamin Davidson Benjamin Reuter Dell novels Passat and Jenny Billy Reed bleed red Bob from accounting bong water tea bose car bjorn llamas Brandon Broughton Brendan Dunn's Moyer ghosts Brendan young Brian Johnston Brian par Brianna Maria McKenzie Bryce pullin Bridget Gainey booty sales Busch button Byron Callan Caden the dingo Kate Sethe Caleb Romo Calum Meghan son Cameron Dillon Cameron Ross charismatic Casey explosion cat kupo Kate chance Mims jarred bottom Charles siz Charlie Hawley Charlie pepper Chloe Cooper's Chris rag nachi Chrissy dial Christian Goethe Christopher Patroni christopher waltz christie Komori chutney ferret Kieran CJ is a hot boy hot boycott boycott boycott boycott boycott but Claire the Shambala Cleaver bacon clown shoes : Andrew : poachy Connor Wilkinson Connor rain Keenan caught NIDA worst crazy.we monkey critters my CTO Connor daddy Corbin Dagmar marker ax damn it Joe Damacy dan sparks Danny G durog Exton dark lady van star darkside flame Darwin Harris David barrel David Christie David and win David rose definitely not a robot dare shield Eric Deus Ex caffeine ax Devon's hands melt darl off do Bella Kaminsky dingus dr. Mike dogs summer camp demacia Vitus Dominic guilfoyle Dominic Rocio Donnan Donovan a person of interest Doug Carol DeVoe Drake Lazarus Duncan Park in Newton gains dungeons and randomness Dylan new Dylan Tegan Dylan Wignall Aten gold strim l ik r lb Eli Paz Nick's favorite sex friend Eli jf winnable kogane Elizabeth Hamilton Elizabeth Kubiak Ellie Rogers Elise Kennedy Emily Crist Emma Emma McCartan Eric Davies Eric hunter Erica aleeah's Eric win lolll Erica Sanwa subarashii Lincoln deaths Aaron Alma's a tensile Eugene Butler Evan Evan Hill Evan Richie Fanta boy 15 fat boy likes cake Findlay Berwick Copley flag burner flaw boo flem Z flexed amok signals Florian Knox forty tentacles Furyk aka on ironic love for Sonic Gabriel Savita Ramirez Garrett Gutierrez Gary Marshall got sign Fatih Gracie Lipscomb Greg day Haley Haldor Olufsen handsome unlimited Hannah Reese happy kitty hash brown Patti masters Havelock's miggles heel al Ganga Vic Henry dahling Hilary Thomas Hill web 'dom Hyrum hero our war Hudson Hayward Ian Earl I does not imrat industrial robot I rockers in granite Isaac Silbert is at the transcripted who stole your bones Jack Alderton Jack Arnon Jack Davies Jackie Scroggs Jacob brood shoemaker Hamblin pike Jacob Martinson jay levy Jake Nicholson Jacob Bruns Jacob ho man James Adair James Duncan Pfeiffer James King James Ronald James Stowe James Warmsley James Williams James Edwards Jayme Wallace Jane Lusby Janet computer face scruffy 64 Jasmine Jason Harris Jason Walter Jason's rage Jake alder Jeffrey Theobald Jeffrey Wickstrom jelka Jerry Terry Jess Gault ji Mandar Oh Jimmy Alice Andreini Jo Tyler Johanna Roy Joe Rowe who Linksys John Stevenson John's Sox John Cantwell John Fortescue who I personally believed to be a decent individual John Kieran John Carlos Rivera Jonah flam Jonathan Wardle Jordan Tullus Jordan Brown Joseph herb josh Josh doctor of / geology Beach Josh Thomas Josh Watkins Josh the cellist were Braddy Joshua Featherston Joshua Hagen Fenton Joshua miss Rach Julia Bachand Julian just in Dutch just in Witney capsule Cameron fall of the patriarchy Karl Marx said twink writes cat McIntyre Kate Brock Kate J Katherine Al McCaslin key no kin Tony Kennon ward Legolas underscore Catan Kevin Thurber kit Foley cold beans commissar KP chris Christie Wallace case vests Durov ladies making comics lands manly sorcerer of sin Lauren Lauren Hutton Smith Lavinia leftist tech support Leah Schuster Lena letters and punctuation let the loser melt Leicester alferov Lois McDermott Lightcraft mini paint studio Lindsay Bowser lint Logan Mears loveling low and de Neve Lucas Miceli Lucy X Luke Swanson lose fault X M Allen misil Mackenzie Malaya sha mallow Melfort we ma Maria Babbage mark bools Mark Smith Matheson Bailey Matt feenin Matthew E Cooper Matthew Maggs Matthew Scarlett max W mcbrick s-- McMaster mecha-shiva Megan bond Meghan kee he'll make Mazel Mel is my favorite fan especially because they're non-binary me nap feast Mert is to mine Baba Michael Campbell Michael Curtis Michael H pray McHale Jones Michele Bearheart Microsoft inator Mike Jeff got Mike Wayne Milo whippet MIT Morpho Portis mother's basement my weight in nudes na koni koni naoto shirogane a nathan beam nazi destroyer Nathan [ __ ] Nathaniel P Graham niala Ernst WA never mind er Nick Abigail Nick Fijian Nick Pollard Galen ooh aunty Fay ningún z-- wit attitudes Nolan Segrest null rush ocarina solo octo nian bouche and Omari Antony otter Owen Piper paged white panda KB Parker Vincent parsnips Patrick brown Patrick Morrison Patrick portress Paz Brooke peel ops pendrick an Peng J Howell Perry Lewin Pete ASIC Peterborough derson Peter wonder Petra McCartney Philip Metzger Phobos - 390 Phoenix Moonbeam pace gif Poplar Preston Michael ezio previous mammoth sigh 43 Quay Team Alpha qui-gon jinn good night sweet prince rachel ann recovering zombie red Rosa Reese Adams Reginald butter sphincter Ren beam on rhythm Richard Pearson Riley night row Morris Rob Rose Robert Ankeny Robin Veidt rocket Howell Rory Alec Ross Lakia Ryan Meany Ryan VNO Rylan Hudson s/m sage summer seis salem al iraq Sam glass sam mckeane Samael Samuel Baker Samuel Vergara Ekman Sarah yet list Surya melody Scott Girton scramp short friend Seamus Yossarian a serpent perplexed Shawn lock Sebastian Emanuele sin' Sebastian Lorenzo Sebastian Simon seeker of light Shanna Hansen Shane Smith Shane Boyles Sheena our trip chic on Nico shining star justice zigfried pinzer Silas pumpkins syllabub cosplay Silver Wolf sir Monday SJ slight bones snazz ghoul soul Spencer st. James spicy fun dip squid heart star boy Stardust Ultima Steven Notley sugar cane summit dreams super depressing lifestyle championship edition super Kate super dark 33 super cut Sven Lorenz swamp selkie Sydney Stevenson Cynthia and Briscoe Sebastian demel Titan ater talk gibberish Tapio ant Oh Oscar Rita Ronan Taran the Exile Ted Ted ington Ted's Vil that Flying Scotsman the 4000 the Yamaha dx7 Trent Reznor broke with his mic stand or foot the buyer phone the d-pad the Durban ater the immortal science of dialectical materialism the specter of communism the sinner mom think Oh plex this drawing of a tiger Tom Frei Thomas Kent Thornton prime three possums in a trench coat pretending to be a human Thunder Tia's Timmy Elberton Timothy Crowley Tom Pinkney Tom Thorogood Toby on Outland Vilhelm s'en translated leak tricks Troy Kaden Tristan young turbid Tyler Nunez unsurpassed travesty Velazquez velov V Hoffman vesko vincit omnia whack man weber william case William Moore William Nelson Willow H whisk xx emo samurai X X Y Greg 32 your good boy Urich's Yvonne with a smiley face Zachary Pro Kowski Zach Radley zamyla Zen e0 anonymity Zoe Zoe Burke on Magnus Paulson and finally honestly I'm just curious what you'll do with my name

Channel: hbomberguy

Views: 2,321,505

Rating: 4.9298744 out of 5

Keywords: hbomb, hbomberguy, pathologic, and here's why, Pathologic Review, Ice Pick Lodge

Id: JsNm2YLrk30

Length: 130min 52sec (7852 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/teor]

For anyone who wants to try Pathologic - don't go for the original version.
Pathologic 2 is pretty much a remake and superior in almost all aspects.

[u/TheDreadfulSagittary]

Very few spoilers review from Mandalore if anyone's interested.

[u/[deleted]]

Pathologic 2 is a beautiful experience and the most innovative game of the year. Patho1 is one of most literary games ever made. If the rumors of IPL closing down or splitting after P2 are finished, then it will have been a wonderful work to close out on.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/IBlackKiteI]

I don't everyone needs to play Pathologic but I think everyone interested in games should at least know about it.

Gaming is still a pretty new medium, there's a lot of ways to do it we've probably never considered and a lot of trends that could be done differently in interesting ways. There's a lot of doom and gloom in gaming nowadays but when you really look the major suckiness (microtransactions, sequelitis, betas on launch etc.) is still only mostly regulated to the biggest most visible AAA scene (which like Hollywood will rarely churn out anything particularly memorable or interesting anyway). Alternatives in all sorts of genres with all sorts of ideas are ever more abundant although Pathologic's whole 'deliberately unfun to get at an alternative point' angle is pretty rare.

I really hope though that some of Pathologic's (or The Void also by IPL) ways of doing or looking at things bleed into future games, there's nothing quite like it.

[u/Schwarzengerman]

I think theres a lot of interesting discussion to be had around games that arent "fun" in a traditional kind of way. Or fun at all really. It's also interesting this video has come out around the release of Death Stranding as well which is another title that many consider not "fun". Not nearly as much as pathologic but still I'm glad these kinds of experiences exist.

[u/GoldenJoel]

So, I have never played Pathologic, but I want to before I watch this.

Is the remake out? I hear there's really obscure for puzzle answers, like on the level of Grim Fandango. Should I just look that up?

What are some good steps for a first timer?

[u/ZombiePyroNinja]

This makes me want to try Pathologic 2 so bad.

I saw it during the last sale and thought it was too niche and weird. Somehow I find out it's even more niche and even more weird and I can't help myself but wanting to experience it.

[u/GoldenDirewolf]

What was the song clip used at around 1:05:55?