Pathologic HD (Completed)

You can’t save everyone.

The longer you play games, the more you fall into the pattern of genre expectation. We have certain expectations of body counts in our FPS’s, an acceptation of grinding in our JRPG’s and if we play hour Horror games and don’t experience at least a couple jump scares, we would consider ourselves misused. It is these patterns that form a groove into which the unknown becomes known, and wonder is replaced by predictability even before the game is played. Pathologic on the other hand, is what makes you remember that games can be anything but predictable.

 

 

–Spoilers–

While Pathologic may be roughly considered a “First-Person Psychological Horror Game,” this description falls grossly short of what the game actually is. In fact, I can’t tell you what Pathologic is like, because there’s no other game (to my knowledge) out there that even comes remotely close to its characteristics. It’s more likely that in the future, this game will be the progenitor to how I describe other games. But enough pomp–what’s the circumstances?

 

 

The game starts out more like a sleepy mystery novel than anything else. After a brief introduction to your character, you’re placed inside a quaint town of stone houses and gas lamps. Charged with discovery of the murder of Simon Kain, you play meet-and-greet with the various characters that you’ll be spending the rest of the game with, interrogating each of them for clues. If you don’t discover the murderer by the end of the first day, the murderer kills you. In spite of this, the first day is rather pleasant, if not a bit surreal in regards to NPC dialogue.

 

 

Things quickly take a turn for the worse by day two, where you become accustomed with a few critical features of the game–combat and survival. You see, the town of Gorkhon contains many odd herbs and flora; one of which is in heavy bloom during the season that the game takes place. This herb is never extensively discussed, but the gist of it is that it makes the air heavy, exhausts those who breath it at an accelerated rate and is fatal to anyone in a weakened state. This leads to a large number of NPCs being in a constant state of delirium, talking as if in some sort of haze or fever dream–and it’s left to the player to decide how much of that is the influence of the herb and how much of it is because the town’s denizens are bananas. However, this is not simply an instance of creative narrative–the player themselves suffers from the effects of the herb as well. Hunger and exhaustion are two stats that make themselves painfully noticeable on the second day, as your previously full stomach and rested body from day 1 have now dwindled to empty and exhausted respectively.

 

Combat comes in the form of crooks, who picking up on the chaotic state of the town (both from the herb haze as well as the panic caused by Simon Kain’s murder) begin prowling around, throwing knives and stabbing player and NPCs alike. On the one hand, the combat is extremely simple. On the other hand, it is highly functional–you will need to fight in Pathologic, and you will need to get good at it. However, in most scenarios, you will never truly want to fight. Resources are extremely rare in Pathologic–exponentially more-so when you are playing it for the first time. To make matters worse, the “friendly” markets around town have inflated their prices to an outrageous degree per the laws of supply and demand in the current state of chaos in the town. What does this mean? It means a loaf of bread can cost you 2000 silver pieces. To put this in perspective, a crook may carry about 300 on them. “The Bachelor” (the player character) comes into the town with about 1500. 2000 silver should probably be enough to buy you bread for a weak, if not a month–something that the NPCs allude to as well.

 

 

So how does this relate to not really wanting combat? Well, combat requires health, bullets, weapons or clothing, or a combination of any of those four. Weapons and clothing degrade, bullets are almost worth more to sell than they are to use, and health is self-explanatory. After expending any of these resources, you will need to recoup these losses somehow. If you’re lucky, the life that is bleeding out at your feet had something valuable on them that you can hawk at the local shop, but more than likely you’re going to have to cut the losses from your personal stash. This means spending time and less-presently-valuable-resources to offset the presently-needed-resources. I say “presently” because nearly every resource in the game will be needed at some point, or can be traded for that which you do need. The catch? Remember, I said time. Time.  Did I forget to mention that this game never stops moving forward? Balancing even one of these simple needs on the backdrop of time inevitably means that other needs (hunger and exhaustion, plus two more that will be mentioned below) will become more pressing the longer it takes. This puts you in a state of constantly difficult decision-making, as you try to juggle what you can do with and do without… for now.

 

 

But did you think that was the end? No, my friend. That was day 2. There are 12–and each day introduces another obstacle that complicates the gameplay (for the better, I’d argue). Day 3 introduces you to the true murderer–The Plague. As it turns out, no one murdered Simon Kain; he died of some horrific and largely unstudied disease known as the Sand Plague.* This is where the game gets really good. Suddenly, all that medicine you’ve been picking up on days 1 and 2 make sense. Suddenly, all the “immunity” and “infection” stats on your character and equipment have a purpose. Suddenly–this game becomes “14th century plague doctor–the simulator.” It is now that you come to terms with the fact that you cannot save everyone.

*Due to the complicated web of narrative that is this game, along with the fact that every single NPC is an unreliable narrator, it is almost impossible for me to confirm Simon’s existence or even his death without some degree of doubt. It is possible Simon is a figment of the town’s imagination. It is possible he was never alive to begin with. I’m actually not sure.

 

It’s during days 3 through 11 that the entire town takes on a life of its own. I wish I could begin to account for every single scenario, every single character, plot and exciting feature that happens during these days, but I can’t–or rather, I won’t, as this article could easily reach two-dozen pages or more. What I will say, is that you find yourself in a town where the plague is moving, infesting and corrupting different parts of the town each day. For every piece of the town you take back, another is stripped from you. For every life you save, 10 more lie dying in the streets. And as the clock ticks and tocks evermore with each second, you yourself come closer to dying.

 

 

The game doesn’t have to tell you this–there’s no scripted moment where you watch a cinematic and “suddenly, you have the plague.” No. It’s just inevitable that eventually, you will contract it. A rat will bite you. You’ll breath in the wrong air. One of your patients will infect you. And then the hard choices have to be made. I’ll be honest–I got desperate around days 5 and 6. I had to make the decision, rationalized only by the thought that if I died, I could no longer help anyone–so I began to slaughter the sick walking the streets, just so I find enough resources to continue to live.

 

What’s funny, is that what’s been discussed so far, really is just a taste of what Pathologic is. There is a wealth of character dialogue; a pseudo-sandbox nature of town exploration–main characters can die, I repeat DIE, because of your negligence, and you better HOPE you don’t need them later, because if you do–if part of a plot point needed that person–you are out of luck. The game’s narrative presses onwards, whether you’re there to see it or not. There are very few pieces of the plot that are mandatory; if you miss out on it, it was your fault and you are left with less information, less clues and fewer allies to proceed forward. There are dozens of side-quests and odd little rabbit holes to dive into. You will not be able to even remotely come close to completing all of them your first time through. Once again, you must choose who lives and who dies by which quests you finish and which ones you leave. Some quests have no consequences. Others have consequences that last the entire game. Oh and did I mention the intricate barter system? The need to desperately trade bits of flowers and sewing needles to children on the streets for supplies?

 

Pathologic is one of the best games I’ve ever played. What initially came across as a strange oddity from Russia quickly turned into a 50-hour long experience that I can never forget. Want to know the funny thing? I got the worst ending possible by day 12.

 

 

Too many of my adherents (characters that are bound to you according to a prophetess) were either dead or dying by the time the end rolled around. A normal person would reason that with all the possibilities of NPC life and death along with the optional quests (of both the side and main variety) that this game has a lot of replayability. However, we cannot afford to be normal people when judging Pathologic. There are two other characters in this game. TWO. Other characters. Two. With their own storylines. And dialogue. This 50 hour game could easily become a 200 hour long game, if I let it. I may yet. It’s worth it. I only mourn that there is not a Tier higher than 1.

Steam Link