Pathologic Classic/Pathologic 2

[one-armed dwarf]

edited the title cause no need for two threads for two weird Russian games hardly anyone will play

 

I started this. I don't expect this to be a popular thread, but it's a game I've wanted to try for a long time.

 

Premise is hard to explain cause it just throws you in and your character knows more about the world than you do. Basically there is a plague, and there is a mystery. After a long prologue you're in a town and you have to solve the mystery of what's going on, I think, while also not dying. You've got health and thirst and hunger and a lot of other survival mechanics to manage. You have a sort of notoriety mechanic which affects your influence with people in the town. It's basically some sort of hardcore immersive sim Shenmue thing except if you are not in the right place at a certain time you will permanently miss out on certain stuff. So far I've spent most of my time trying to find the one friendly person in the town who doesn't hate me while rummaging through bins for a few stale peanuts so I don't pass out. 

 

Parts of it remind me of what BloodBorne, story wise. It's very weird and unforgiving. Kind of a bit of a David Lynch fever dream at parts. Anyway this game is free on game pass so there's no harm in trying even if you hate it. Game seems really hard, like you're destined to just fail the first playthrough.

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't know Nag, I stopped asking myself that question a long.. oh wait you mean the game. Well that's a spoiler.

[shinymcshine]

I played the first one on PC for a bit 10 or so years ago. I'll I can recall is walking around a very brown looking boring town, knocking on doors and having people snub, ignore me, or say come back later.

 

So a bit of an early 'walking' sim, with not much happening but also no real idea of what to actually do. It wasn't fun, and I didn't finish it.

 

So, the sequel sounds similar!

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah, it isn't fun. The difficulty slider when set to max says 'intended difficulty is to feel miserable'.

 

So while I'm really interested in seeing where this goes playing it is hard work. I've only completed day one and I apprehended a bunch of dudes who were getting ready to lynch a guy who they thought looked like me. I said 'no, that isn't me. I'm me'. Then they killed me. 

 

Oh well, it's going to be like this the whole way through isn't it lol. Then I got casted off to some sort of Lynchian theatre where a 'director' told me I would be reincarnated at my last save point. But now I will thirst, hunger and run out of energy more easily and my life will be more miserable.

 

If I ever get to day 12 it's going to be a while. My after work gaming is going to still be the Witcher I think lol

[one-armed dwarf]

This is out on PS4 now

https://bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/3607569/pathologic-2-finally-sees-debut-playstation-4-march-6/

 

Also there is a sale on steam.

 

lol, who the fuck wants to play a game like this right now ?

[one-armed dwarf]

I came back to this, I dropped it before cause living through an actual IRL pandemic sort of made it a not very appealing thing to play lol. But I wanted a immersive sim to play so I started it up again.

 

I only got as far as the end of day 5 before I got into an impossible death loop. Basically what happens with this game is it gets more and more severe the more progress you make. At the start it's just a murder mystery and you go around getting supplies and keeping your different meters in check (thirst, stamina, health, hunger, exhaustion). After a point there is a supply chain problem, people can't get in food. Prices go way up, economic crisis. So you have to barter. Then an outbreak occurs and things get even more difficult, prices go way up and just trying to mete out an existence means you might have to turn to more violent or dishonest measures. 

 

What it does well I think is it has a good push pull in its morality systems where as the town's healer you're trying to earn a good rep across the town by helping people and being generous, which in turn determines the daily stipend you get from the town council to try and make ends meet. But if that fails then you might have to fall back on your good reputation to maybe do some not so good things like rob people cause otherwise you literally might not survive. Which matters cause you won't be able to help develop a serum to cure the illness (or contribute to research on a vaccine to save other towns from the same fate). It's kind of an ends justify the means sort of situation. My playthrough ended cause I got infected and my health was so low that I turned to murdering people in the street, stealing tourniquets from people and harvesting their kidneys so I could concoct a shamanistic remedy made from herbs and human organs that would get me through the night and give me a chance to barter with some kids the day after for an apparent cure to the illness. Of course the game doesn't mind to tell you whether the cure would work or not, anyway I died in my room waiting for my cannibal medicine to brew so that's the end of that playthrough

 

Super interesting systems but a bummer that I couldn't figure out a way to slog my way through to see some sort of ending, even if it was a bad one. I know enough now about the game that I figure I could start again and get all the way through it, but I don't know I have the stamina. I think this game is a little like Dead Rising in that you're probably definitely going to fail the first playthrough cause its systems are so obtuse. You really don't want to be buying lots of stuff and for some reason kids really like junk and have lots of shotgun shells and pistol rounds, so you should get good at knowing the relative value of every thing you see as soon as you can. A couple walnuts can get you some buckshot and if you don't buy the extremely expensive gun at the start of the game you could be in for some serious hardship later on when you're trying to get through diseased parts of town while bandits are chasing you and stabbing you.

 

I won't say that playing this has changed my view on survival mechanics in games, I still don't like them. But I get why they're needed in a game which is trying to push you into psychologically difficult decision making.

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

HBomberguy did a video essay on the first version of the game last year, I've not watched it yet but I hear it's good if you like longform game criticism shit

 

[one-armed dwarf]

I went back in and beat it. 

 

This is an outstanding game, but one I can hardly recommend to anyone. You've got to be a glutton for punishment. I guess if I tried to make a good pitch for it now I would say it's Shenmue meets Resident Evil but way more brutal. I managed to get through the first 6 days or so way more smoothly as I expected. The trick is to understand that not a single item in the game is useless. If it doesn't serve an immediate purpose it probably holds value in the hobo economy, or it can be used for crafting. Learning to think of your reputation in the town as a currency which gives you leeway to do bad things is also an essential strategy to navigate parts of the game where you make a mistake and find yourself underresourced. As I did on one day where I didn't complete my daily tasks in the hospital and had no stipend for that day. I went to a part of town where I had good reputation and just walked right in and looted a house. Now they don't like me there, but the important thing is that I survived another day.

 

It might be a technical mess (everything animates at 30 fps even if the game is running at 60, which gives stuff a claymation quality. Combat is horrible and every death on my second playthrough was cause of it). But I was really impressed by how for the entire 11 days it just ratchets the tension. As your the town plague doctor it constantly forces you into difficult bargaining positions between your responsibilities to the townsfolk in an epidemic and your responsibilities to yourself. Time, health and obviously serums/immunity boosters are the plates you have to keep spinning as you run around the town trying to decide who is in more need of your help and if you can even afford the personal cost of running across a plague ridden district to give somebody an antibiotic which might not even get them through the night.

 

 

The way it works is the whole infection system is based off RNG, it's like this wheel of fortune thing where the better their immune system is or the more medicated they are against the infection the less likely they will perish/catch the disease. But even on my playthrough I got one kid down to a 25% chance of dying overnight, he was one of the first to be infected. But he died anyway. This was after doing an all nighter trying to save as many as I could, where I was eating down coffee grounds to keep myself awake and robbing people's houses for bits of stale bread so I wouldn't starve to death. This is not a game for OCD completionists, you can save everyone but the game is designed so that you probably won't unless you're really good/lucky. Out of the 30 or so people I was tasked to protect close to half of them died despite best efforts. One other part that got me is where I was in a plague ridden part of the town and could hear a baby crying. They tell you earlier on during the initial outbreak that if you save and bring back any lost babies you will be well rewarded. But what they don't tell you is that these 'plague houses' are full of lepers who will grab you and often enough the risk and cost of getting infected and dying is not at all worth what the town containment effort will give you for saving a baby.

 

It's really like no game I've ever played, would probably have been on my GOTY list last year if I played it then. I really hope they get to do the 'bachelor' campaign but apparently this game was a financial disaster and it's unlikely they will finish the rest of it. I guess that's the cost of an auteur not making any concessions towards accessibility. Really interesting contrast between this and Death Stranding where that game felt like some weird out there art shit but it still had those forced shooting sections, this game meanwhile is completely dedicated to its vision of psychological discomfort and misery.

 

just screenshots

Spoiler

 

 

It's also very fucking meta

 

 

Unfortunately I can't make well heads or tails of what the story is trying to say. I've never read russian literature beyond a couple pages of Crime and Punishment so I don't know if this game is trying to bombard me with stuff that would make way more sense if I was into that. The whole game and town is an elaborate metaphor for something, maybe encroachment of human progress on nature or something. Or industrialisation. I don't know, the localisation is such that you can tell that some of its ideas don't really map well from Russian into English. Might have to watch that youtube video to figure it out.

 

One last thing I want to add though about story as the thought occurs to me, you know how that term 'ludonarrative dissonance' got popularised by a scathing review of Bioshock? Gaming had come a long way as a story telling medium, but the problem of game stories feeling separate from the way they are played is still a big issue. It's why we harp on Nathan Drake. It is still the case that big story ambitious games rely on cut scenes to deliver their big story punchlines. TLOUII has amazing graphics but if you're just watching the story or having a big QTE interrupt it to convince you of how important its plot is it's still a very contrived method IMO. So what is remarkable with P2 is just how much in harmony the game part is with the overall story. The actual story of P2 isn't that interesting really if you write it down on a sheet of paper. But the way the game escalates the crisis in the town and implies different decisions for the player to take makes it something which realises its narrative ambitions in an extremely organic way.

 

Apologies for that wall of text but this game is immense.

 

 

[Sly Reflex]

I've not read any of the thread but I've seen you banging on about this game. I just saw the art for it on Steam because of you review and I think I know this game. It was covered forever ago as one of those games that had really poor translation but was really creepy. I always wanted to give it a go but I don't think it was freely available.

 

EDIT: Is this a remake of the classic or not? The classic is pretty cheap, so I might just buy that. 2 I'd wishlist and hopefully get to it somewhere down the line.

[one-armed dwarf]

If you can hold on a day or so I might write up my thoughts on classic (which will probably just have very light spoilers about how it sets things up, but nothing more major than that). I've nearly finished the second of three character playthroughs. The third character playthrough (Changeling) is apparently rushed and crap but I definitely have some thoughts about the first 2.

 

But if you're interested in the game you should probably play 2 first as it is a remake of the Haruspex story, classic is much harder to get into. However Classic is a much more complete version of the story as you get three character perspectives (Bachelor, Haruspex and Changeling), in 2 they only managed to complete 1 so far and it sold so poorly that they may not finish the other 2.

 

The '2' in Pathologic 2 is just a strange marketing decision all round, it's only a sequel in a sort of meta sense.

[Sly Reflex]

I think 1 might be the way to go, especially if it's complete.

 

I remember seeing this on Cracked.com or somewhere and thinking I really want to play this, but I cannot be fucked with the terrible translation. They had examples of the mangled English and it was one of those instances where they'd just translated as is so it made barely any sense, so you'd have to interpret whatever fucked up sentence they gave you on top of working the game out.

 

Expect this thread to be bumped whenever I get around to it.

[one-armed dwarf]

2 minutes ago, Sly Reflex said:

I think 1 might be the way to go, especially if it's complete.

 

I remember seeing this on Cracked.com or somewhere and thinking I really want to play this, but I cannot be fucked with the terrible translation. They had examples of the mangled English and it was one of those instances where they'd just translated as is so it made barely any sense, so you'd have to interpret whatever fucked up sentence they gave you on top of working the game out.

 

Expect this thread to be bumped whenever I get around to it.

Classic HD is a retranslation so you don't have to worry about that. However the script is still very dense and confusing at times, it also has a few typos. But it's generally a good localisation and I find it an easier story to follow than the Remake. But there is another reason for that that isn't cause of the localisation which I'll probably talk about when I'm done with Haruspex classic (and possibly Changeling.. we'll see).

[one-armed dwarf]

Ok, I figure I'll say what I think of Pathologic Classic. The Changeling scenario is dull to me so I don't know how long it will take to finish.

 

But basically what stands out about it is you have this story taking place over 12 days in the town, but unlike Pathologic 2 it's told from three different perspectives. That ends up being important cause neither of the three perspectives tells you the whole story. So for instance, I was saying I find the story in Classic easier to follow than the remake. The reason for this is that with Classic you start off picking one of two characters: The Bachelor (a bachelor of medicine I guess, he's a trained doctor) and the Haruspex (a shaman who might be a psychopath, he creates remedies from human organs). 

 

So right off the bat that is two really different characters, and it feeds into the way the game is designed and wrote. Bachelor is a big city doctor coming to the town pursuing an academic passion. He gets dragged into a Twin Peak-sian web of intrigue (trust me this is justified, it's the most Twin Peaks shit I've ever played). He's an outsider and has got no ideas of the customs of the town. But has a great reputation because of his qualifications. His story largely revolves around the power struggles and politics in the town as shit goes out of control, with his lack of knowledge giving the narrative justification for people to just exposit the town's politics and history to him and at him at all times.

 

This lady has dress nipples lol

 

So his gameplay is largely about conserving cash, observing the economy and helping people out. That's how you get through the 12 days, not to get into what actually happens in those 12 days cause it's super spoilerish. His campaign is the easiest of the three and introduces you not just to the world but also the methods of exchange in the town. You aren't as severely punished for your mistakes as on the other two so if you have a tough time figuring out the town's economy it's not too bad, especially cause his jobs pay more. He also gets fucked over way less. This is the one you start with, cause of the onboarding. However you also end up with the least shit answered by the end.

 

The other character, Haruspex, he's the guy whos story got remade for Pathologic 2. It's kind of the inverse as you could probably figure from the part where I said he is a psycho who carves peoples entrails out and makes remedies out of them. With him you may need to delve a bit deeper into the game's underworld and black market, even paganism. It gets a bit more spicy. However you do have one advantage which is you can make way better immunity boosting meds than anyone else, which is a huge plus. His theme is about performing acts of necessary evil to save himself and the town. From a gameplay standpoint it's the most interesting of the three and it makes sense that this is the one that they remake. It's the one which best encompasses that principle of being in a sandbox of suffering which is forcing you into some really stressful decisions (should I sell my gun for food.... or use it to rob a house and kill its occupants, then sell their organs to make tinctures to save those I care about?). But it also is the weirdest from a story point of view. Which makes it a tough place to start.

 

 

The other character I don't got a lot to say about, her whole mechanic is that everyone is suspicious of her and her reputation is constantly depleting. So you're forced to constantly go around helping people who are dying in infected districts, a mechanic I completely ignored as the other two cause it seemed a waste of time but is fundamental to surviving as Changeling cause otherwise the entire town will outrun and beat you to death. Which again is expressed really well through the story, she is so eager to please in a way that borders on narcissm.

 

So with Changeling and Haruspex in particular there's a superb coherence between game mechanics and story, then with Bachelor being the easy introduction where they throw money at you, well by this game's standards at least.

 

But you should not play this game, case IMO this is a game is for two types of people: those who will gladly chew their way through a brick wall and those who played Pathologic 2 and want more of this world and have too many unanswered questions. The reason I recommend the remake over the Classic even tho it's incomplete is that the survival mechanics are just way more rich in P2, even if the story deliberately hides certain things cause it wants to explore them later on with campaigns which may never release. But it is such a good game, while Pathologic Classic is just a really interesting experiment in ludonarrative coherence that will wear most people down. Which is partly on purpose, the game is sort of trying to stress you out and make you suffer and see how you react. But P2 does all that way better. Each day in P1 is about 2 hours long, I think? So with 12 days between each character that's a hell of a lot of game. I'm near the finish line with Changeling and I'm sort of losing wind a bit now. I'll see it through I'm sure but I see why people say campaign three is rushed and bad, even while still interesting. 

 

I don't regret playing this game, I'm glad I did actually cause it just sets everything into context for me and gets me way more excited for the Bachelor campaign for Pathologic 2... which will probably never release but never give up hope. It's a really interesting construction but you don't really want to invest the time in something like this I think unless you are already really bought into it. Because at its core this is a really boring brown game where you trod around a town for 10s of hours. The mysteries and relationships between characters are written really incredible, it's such a richly written story. Even the boring walking bits sort of take on a meditative quality where you spend the time thinking if characters are being honest to you (people are constantly lying, or sometimes they appear to be untrustworthy but are more on your side than you might imagine). 

 

Anyway here is a screenshot of a bed with a loaf of bread beside it, which I believe is considered an important custom in Russia

 

I stole this bread and stabbed the father of the household and his kids to death and carved out their kidneys, this was all for the greater good tho you have to understand.

 

 

edit I beat the Changeling story, 

Spoiler

there is an actual 4th wall breaking convo with the devs saying that they didn't really understand their own ending they wrote for her and just sort of threw something together. Which sums it up I think, lol

 

[one-armed dwarf]

No updates on the rest of the game, but IPL send off 2020 in appropriate fashion

 

 

Still my actual game of 2020. I want one Bane mask that that lady has.

[Sly Reflex]

This is in the Humble Monthly if you want it cheapo. Glad I held off now.

[one-armed dwarf]

I still don't think this will ever come out, but we got an update today on the bachelor route in the form of a podcast translation, this is an entire thread of stuff.

 

TL;DR, lots of different gameplay and story mechanics, not coming out in 2021. Different to Haruspex (the guy from the main campaign in Patho 2). Exhaustion and anxiety as a mechanic? lol

 

 

 

I especially like this description

 

 

They try and achieve the above through the dialogue choices in the original, but it didn't always come across so well in gameplay terms and I think when I played the first game I missed the point of this character a bit. He's supposed to be a misfit arrogant cunt who just doesn't get it (which is why when you finish his playthrough you don't fully understand the reasons for why things are happening because everything has to be literalised for him). 

 

There was some talk a while ago about them setting up a Patreon, I'd like to pay into that if it ever happens. The problem going forward for this studio is Pathologic 2 doesn't sell well enough for them so they have to supports its development with lots of smaller titles while this continues to be their big ambitious art piece.

[radiofloyd]

Steam seem to promote Pathologic pretty well though. Pathologic 2 is often one of the highlighted deals on the home page. For me anyway.

[one-armed dwarf]

They did an interview with Edge back around a year ago I think which suggests they built up some momentum sales wise after a while. I think videos like the hbomberguy one give it a boost. But they also had tremendous layoffs and reduced the team to 4 or 5 members for a while. Maybe they have built up that workforce again. But they've said a lot of the smaller scale projects are needed to keep the lights on

 

 

https://www.resetera.com/threads/pathologic-2-is-a-commercial-failure-staff-to-be-reduced-to-4-5-people-console-release-time-unknown.136712/

 

I think it's one of the most incredible things I've played tho and would happily sub to a patreon if things don't look to work out for them. Especially after playing the first game and thinking of how they could improve so much on it with the other story perspectives

[one-armed dwarf]

Giving this thread a small bump cause the team shared a sorta weird update on the path they are taking for the story for the 'Batchelor', one of the three characters you could play as in the original. Granted I think I'm the only one here who really liked this game but well, it's sort of interesting maybe. In fact the game is probably more interesting to read about than actually play at times

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathologic/comments/vp2jii/an_update_posted_by_ipl_concerning_the_studio_and/

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dthaATQh2YGZx2yYiIHDN412jS5iocMW7aqPfUPjYu8/edit

 

They include a bunch of references to design inspirations I don't know a lot about, like BBC's Sherlock and the game Her Story. You play as a man investigating the meaning of aging, death, time and the secret of immortality, as well as doing some sort of people management when it comes to dealing with the epidemic itself. You walk around a town getting inspired by floating words and stuff, and it's maybe a more narrative based game than an intensive 'weighing up the costs of x and y' survival simulator. It might be a non-linear fragmented (like Pulp Fiction) stream of consciousness type narrative, which sounds ambitious (potentially in a messy way, tbh). But it will be more on rails and probably won't be doing the survival horror mashed with shenmue thing as such. On the bright side, the god awful combat might be removed

 

They mention a lot of movies with fragmented time in this interview, lol, like Memento also.

 

They shared this video of the new infection system in the game, the plague forms in invisible clouds which you can only see with a special device. This is a sort of familiar mechanic to the original game, but it sounds like they want to make the presence of airborne disease a bit more threatening gameplay wise

 

https://i.imgur.com/E5N39Nh.mp4

 

Either way, I expect this game to be beloved by about 5 people and sell like shit lol.

 

Doesn't sound as interesting to me personally as what they already put out, the synergistic aspects of the gameplay and story in the first campaign are what blew me away, while this sounds more 'walking sim'-like,  but I'll check it out if it ever gets finished.