Pathologic 2 is “supposed to be almost
unbearable” according to devs Ice
Pick Lodge, who created the obtuse,
near-unplayable original Pathologic,
and purgatorial horror game The
Void. Pathologic 2 challenges you to
survive 12 in-game days
in a town that’s going
completely to shit.
Disease, paranoia, mob
justice, and paranormal
happenings unfold in
real time as you plod
through brown, foggy
districts, invading
people’s houses for
scraps and occasionally meeting
important figures—a mob boss, a
childhood friend, faction leaders for
bands of roaming children.
It’s a deliberately exhausting
experience. An egg is not just an egg
in Pathologic, it’s an “empty illusion
of possible life”. You need to scoff
many empty illusions of possible life
to keep your hunger bar from maxing
out and eventually killing you. Wells
spread through the town help you
quench your thirst regularly, but
disease and exhaustion are persistent
factors you have to manage all the
time. The town has a detailed barter
economy, and I eventually started tofind semi-reliable ways to source
food from kid gangs (they love sharp
objects so hoard those scissors), but
the survival elements have been
harshly tuned. You’re going to die, at
which point the dandy of fate will
curse you permanent
ailments like a health
or hunger debuff.
The survival
systems constantly get
in the way of a
fascinating mystery
game. When you chat
to key figures in the
town, they drop motes
of information that form a growing
web in your journal. Empty nodes
imply there’s more to explore in a
given line of enquiry. It’s a great way
to keep track of the abundance of
leads you collect from day to day.
There are so many threads I wanted
to tug at. What happened to my
father? What’s inside the floating
tower where half the town’s children
have gone to live? Who, or what, is
locked inside the abattoir?
It manages to be quite an
atmospheric game, even in spite of
rigid character models, static faces,
sparse and repetitive interiors, and an
extremely clumsy first-personcombat system. The game is always
pushing back against your attempts
to explore, but there are delightfully
macabre ideas hiding away in corners
of the town, like gurgling tree roots
that drink blood and give you herbs
in return. As a surgeon, you can
extract organs from any corpse and
then sell them to a particular buyer
for food and medicine. These
opportunities open up organically
during a day/night cycle that also
serves as a doomsday clock pushing
the town closer to disaster.
It’s a slog, and that’s the point of it.
The suffering of your character and
the townspeople is reflected in the
torment of ever-hungry survival bars
that drive you to theft and murder.
One character talks about how her
client asked her to design the town’s
layout to be deliberately confusing
and annoying to navigate, in order to
stretch people like a spring so that, in
a position of distress, they might
discover deeper wells of creativity.NO FUN ALLOWED
The speech has the ring of authorial
self-insert, but I haven’t experienced
enlightenment yet, only annoyance.
Health bar management is a tedious
admin task that communicates
nothing in the way of true suffering
or even discomfort—the dissonant
sound design does a much better job
of this. Though I admire the way the
game keenly rejects the idea that
games should always be satisfying
fun factories, I just don’t see the
worth in wrapping a good mystery in
layers of irritant. The devs are
planning to add difficulty options that
should make the game a bit less
crushing. Until then put off that
spooky train ride home unless you’re
sure you’ll enjoy Ice Pick Lodge’s
original vision for the game.NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A survival game set in a
grim town beset by a
mysterious disease
EXPECT TO PAY
$35
DEVELOPER
Ice Pick Lodge
PUBLISHER
tinybuild
REVIEWED ON
Intel Core i5-2500K,
6GB RAM, GeForce GTX
970
MULTIPLAYER
None
LINK
http://www.pathologic-
game.com66
A gruelling mystery
game that smothers
its big ideas with
incredibly dour
survival mechanics.VERDICTAs a surgeon,
you can extract
organs from
any corpse and
then sell themA
fter years away you have returned home to your village in
response to an urgent letter from your father. Three men
try to kill you the moment you step off the train. The town
instantly knows about this, and blames you for some other
recent murders. To top it all off you’re also quickly dying
of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and blood loss. That’s just day one in this
strange, gruelling survival game.UNWELL
The grim reaper reigns supreme in the
glum streets of PATHOLOGIC 2. By Tom Senior
ROGUES Guess which one of these Pathologic characters we’ve made up
BAD GRIEF
Collects scissors and lives
in a warehouse with kids
and invisible animals.WRONG’UN ROBIN
Eats fingernails and
complains endlessly
about Game of Thrones.MURKY
Thinks he can hear the
voices of the dead in
herbs, idiot.
, but he exists in real life somewhere.Pathologic 2 Sure, Wrong’Un Robin isn’t in ANSWERBIG VLAD
Town kingpin, runs a
vast abattoir, wishes
you were his son.REVIEW