Pathologic was a bizarre Russian indie game about being a doctor in an isolated village facing an apocalyptic plague. I never played it, because the translation was legendarily bad, and I never managed to get around to learning Russian. Apparently the gameplay was also pretty jank, and consisted primarily of walking across town, making rounds of house calls, never quite knowing if any given patient actually needed the visit.
Pathologic 2 is the studio's attempt to revisit their masterpiece of writing and try to turn it into a masterpiece of gaming, by adding actual game mechanics to their video game.
Although the early reception by both critics and player missed the point so hilariously as to be memetic, I believe they were successful.
(Pathologic 2's Steam Discussion forums on release day, paraphrased).
Pathologic 2 is a game about being a human being, with limited abilities and resources, in a world that needs superhuman effort to save. You are faced with constant decisions about how best to make use of your resources to survive, thrive, and save as many people as you can, in a decaying surreal world with strange taboos you must learn when to honor and when to transgress.
The town is impoverished. From day 1, there's barely enough food to go around, and the economy is beginning to experience hyperinflation because their scheduled supply shipment is late. If you can manage to negotiate the complex web of scavenging and trading well enough to keep yourself from starving for the first couple of days, you'll find the town beset by a mysterious plague so infectious that even the buildings develop lesions. This is when the stress really begins to set in.
Every resource you can use to save someone else, is a resource that you, yourself, need to survive. And resources are scarce from the get-go, only growing scarcer as time goes on. Unlike in many narrative driven games, time does not wait for you, and every moment you spend doing one thing is a moment you cannot spend doing another. There is literally not enough time to do everything that needs to be done, and every event you complete, or fail, has consequences that aren't necessarily predictable.
I spent much of day 4 scavenging the town for a barrel of water I could convince people to drag to my friend's house, so she could set up a homeless shelter, only to be informed at the end of the day that my failure to do so had prevented the plague from spreading into her district of the city.
The narrative arc of the game unfolds over twelve days. After two weeks of play, I've only made it to the end of day 4. This isn't because the game is long, though. It's because, as it progresses, it becomes increasingly stressful to play. I find myself, more and more, giving into the urge to go back and do things differently, because there is too much I didn't manage to do. I'm not good at triage. I want to be everywhere. I want to save everyone, even though the loading screen tells me explicitly that I can't.
This game is physically and emotionally exhausting to play, but it's also fulfilling in a way I can't describe or explain.
Here, maybe just watch this well thought out, halfway coherent review.
