Day 137 - Path-O-Logic
Short and Free, Sorry Skeeter, Sam is just reviewing a different game ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Pathologic manages to do two things - have one of the funniest visual gags I’ve seen in a game, and have one of the worst starting quests I’ve seen in the game.
I’ll start with the starting quest. You come across some stupid kid in town. I’m not just calling this kid stupid to pick on the elderly challenged, this kid is legitimately dumb. Here’s what the little shit looks like - you can see the lack of sentience shining through his dark, cold eyes:
He’s standing out by himself in the middle of a fence, shoveling dirt into his maw. This is another indicator of his room temperature IQ. He looks up at me, mouth muddied from the saliva mixing with the dirt. He gives me the final piece of the puzzle of his intellectual scale:
You’d give up your 100 Gold… for an apple? Kid, there are these things called “stores” that sell food. You can go exchange your gold for way more than just an apple. Why the hell are you eating dirt and wistfully telling strangers you’d give away your 100 gold allowance for a fucking apple. Jesus, this kid’s survival instincts must match his wits. Hell, it even seems like 100 gold is a lot in this town - I mean, my adult self has zero gold and zero furnishings in my house. Kid is doing better than I am:
Which brings me to my next point - the visual gag.
I laughed so hard when, upon moving horizontally, my little sprite went from this:
To this:
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 0%
Time Played: Played: 10 Minutes
Sam’s Take:
It’s a rpg-maker style game that closes when you reflexively press “esc” to pause. It was made in a week, isn’t very good and I only chose it so I could actually talk about:
OH SHIT BOY, IT’S PATHOLOGIC CLASSIC HD EDITION!!! LET’S GOOOOOOOOO.
The main reason I had to pick a fake game for this review is because you can’t really get a first impression of pathlogic until four hours in (end of day 2), and forcing Skeeter to play 4 hours of Pathologic Classic HD would be a war crime. I believe Skeeter has played (and enjoyed) a bit of Pathologic 2, but I have not played that yet, and from what I’ve been reading there are some significant differences.
There are three separate storylines you can play through in Pathologic. There’s The Bachelor, a doctor from out of town trying to research a way to cheat death. There’s The Haruspex, a surgeon who was born in the game’s main town, but spent a large portion of his youth studying elsewhere. He’s come back to talk with his dying father. Then there is The Changeling. She’s a little girl who seems like she’s a witch or something? I haven’t done her playthrough, sorry I’m a fake critic!
I finished the Bachelor storyline roughly a year ago, and while I think back on it positively, it was also one of the most draining gaming experiences of my life. It was about a week ago when I finally felt the urge to really go into The Haruspex route, and so far I’m on day four of twelve.
You might have noticed that so far I have called this game exhausting and felt guilty at the prospect of making Skeeter play it. That’s not just a me thing, in fact I have proof that I am more tolerant of Pathologic’s bullshit than 93.9% of players:
Pictured above is the achievement for finishing the game with the starting character (The Bachelor). Finishing the game at all is a gold achievement. Actually, finishing day 4 is a gold achievement:
So what is it that makes Pathologic so impenetrable? It’s a game about a character arriving in a mysterious town and trying to save it from succumbing to a horrible sand-plague. While you do this you have to manage your hunger, infection, exhaustion, etc.
Seems simple enough, but the problem is sleeping makes you hungry, eating makes you sleepy. Infection drains your health, taking immunity boosters drain your health. Most things drain your health. Want to drink water? Great idea! Enjoy losing 1 point of hunger and gaining 4 points of exhaustion. No, in order to manage these stats properly, you’re going to have to learn the economy. Sell what you don’t need, get some money doing favors for the townsfolk, then buy some DELICIOUS MEAT for 330 coins.
Great! You’ve learned day 1 of Pathologic! Why do I specify day 1? Glad you asked. That’s because on day 2-
Oh fuck! Everyone’s hoarding food now, so they put an extra zero on everything! You can’t afford shit anymore! Well if you wanna eat it’s time to strap in and learn about the Pathologic Dynamic Street Barter System(tm). The PDSBS starts where every good barter system does, in the fucking dumpster.
This is not a joke, the dumpster is a magical place. It’s the only place in Pathologic where you can gain something at the cost of nothing. Free empty bottles, free needles, maybe a broken pocket watch! The dumpsters have given us the gift of trash, and now we must turn trash into goods, and turn goods into PROFIT!
There is no fast travel in Pathologic, and since time continuously moves forward outside of dialogue, you’ll spend 90% of your play time walking across the length of the town at 0.0001 miles per hour desperately trying to save people from this plague while not catching itself, and then usually learning that what you did wasn’t helping anyone and every quest giver was just lying to you so they could gain power. The game is generous enough to lay down some FUCKED up beats while you walk at least:
BUT WE MUST NOT RELAX DURING THIS SLOW WALKS! No, while we fail to save the town, we must remember The PDSBS! We can’t not save people if we are dying from hunger! CHECK THOSE DUMPSTERS! Now, take that empty bottle. Want to sell it? FUCK YOU IT SELLS FOR 1 COIN. Fill it with water. Should you drink it? HELL NO THAT’D MAKE YOU WAY TOO SLEEPY! Get 4 more bottles, fill those with water. You’re not deviating from your quest path right? You got places to be! Times a-tickin’! Oh look, there’s a homeless man! Confront him! GIVE HIM YOUR BOTTLES! THE HOMELESS MEN ALWAYS TRADE BANDAGES FOR BOTTLES!
Great, now you can heal yourself with bandages. JUST KIDDING FOOL! HOW ABOUT YOU GET GOOD AND STOP TAKING DAMAGE! There’s a store on the way. Stop in. Sell your bandage NOW YOU CAN AFFORD A LEMON!!!! Wait, lemons don’t help with hunger… RELOAD YOUR SAVE! BUY A DRIED FISH! EAT THE DRIED FISH!
Congratulations, you have successfully staved off the hunger for like… one third of one day.
And so you continue to learn The PDSBS. Sell a broken razor to a kid in exchange for morphine, sell dead flowers to a little girl for the pistol ammo she carries around. Sell the bottles for the bandages. ALWAYS SELL THE BOTTLES FOR THE BANDAGES.
Some days may have a short main quest, and boy you better take advantage when that happens. The REST OF YOUR DAY must be spent exploiting The PDSBS. If you can end a day with full health and a fish in your pocket, you are basically God. Most days however, that timer is no joke. If you don’t complete a main quest, one of your bound will die (bound are characters tied to your life, it’s a whole thing, we don’t have time).
The events of any main quest are always done, even if you fail to do them. The idea is if you didn’t successfully set up the shelter for example, then someone else had to, and they got sick. So failing doesn’t result in a game over, but any of your bound dying will almost certainly lead to the bad ending. You can run to their house within a day of them getting sick and either give them pills to help them survive another day, or one of the exceedingly rare cures that you can find throughout the game.
It’s a strange mix of oppressive and forgiving. Sure, The PDSBS can be brutal, and timing all your quests while watching your hunger meter slowly rise in the corner of your screen is stressful enough to cause me to stop playing this game for a year, but also… you can just not complete a day. You can just not do the main quest, and give up one good item to make up for it.
I think there is an obvious reason for this, and it’s unfortunately this game’s biggest failing in my opinion. I think the developers want you to play through this game without reloading saves. Makes sense right? You fail a main quest, but you continue on, figure it out. Catch the plague? You can still chug pills for the rest of the game until you find a cure. It’s a considerable drain on resources, but that just means you may have to skip some side quests where you give people medicine. Being a good person is genuinely difficult, and Pathologic wants to express that through one continuous playthrough.
The reason I call this a failure is that this game is just too janky and annoying to allow for this one run style. We’ve already seen that 94% of players couldn’t bring themselves to finish the game as is, and I imagine that that number would be even higher if the game punished save-scumming.
I think most people would agree that I have a MUCH higher tolerance for punishing rpg mechanics than most, as well as a massive tolerance for slowly walking for hours. I’m the “find a mod that turns off the mini-map and objective markers” guy. I’m the “walk from The Boomer’s base to New Vegas and back three times before I even CONSIDER fast-travel” guy. I made the arrow texture that shows where you are in the Witcher 3 map invisible so that I’d have to guide myself via landmarks. I love it when games force me to interact with navigation in their world, and when they don’t, I MAKE THEM MAKE ME! I’ve had important NPCs die in other games because of their pathfinding bugs, and I continued onward without them because THAT’S THE FAKE INTEGRITY I CRAVE. When I play Pathologic, I reload every time I contract the plague too early.
While there are undoubtedly some purists on the subreddit who would call me a coward for this, I have no shame in this case. Pathologic is, purposefully to an extent, painful to play. It’s mechanically designed to drain you, it’s literally an anti-power fantasy, but this is a hard line to ride. The combat is floaty and terrible. I have no idea what the range of my knife is, nor what the range of my enemy’s fist is. The quests are sometimes reasonable, yet equally often expect you to know to talk to a character, leave the conversation, then reinitiate dialogue with them to get new options. There are times where I can’t tell if a quest is unclear because the game wants to punish me, or if it’s just jank.
That jank, at least for me, makes the idea of “continuing with my mistakes” a complete nonstarter. The idea that I might get into a losing state where I have too much disease and not enough resources because I didn’t realize I had to talk to the same NPC twice is just too painful. Even if every quest was perfectly explained and executed, I still just don’t want to imagine spending another 6 hours walking the same exact paths, looting the same exact trash cans again. It’s an exercise in misery, and while exercise can feel good in the moment, doing your whole routine again because you slipped on the treadmill once is grade-A madness.
So why put up with this jank at all? Because Pathologic is the only game that is Pathologic. Never before have I been so lost in a miasma of conflicting motivations, that I honestly didn’t know if I was helping or hurting the town with each action I took. Never before have I played a game where I had an inventory full of food to return to a quest giver and thought “boy… it’d be a lot easier if I just… ate this”. Every line of dialogue is steeped in poetry and philosophy to a point where I can think “wow that was a crazy cool conversation” leave the room realize I have no idea what the fuck that guy just said. In Pathologic you have as many choices as you do in Deus Ex, but where Deus Ex makes most of them viable so you can have creative fun, Pathologic makes each one a bargain. Every single thing you do has a trade off, and you can try to do the right thing and fight off your inner economist, but the town will make it as difficult as possible.
Even the story feels just out of reach. Every moment you figure something out, three more things come into question, and it has that unique quality where you know there is an explanation for the systems of this world. Just last night I got the conversation that explains why little girls are trading bullets for flowers (no I will not explain it to you SHEEP). I don’t want to spoil anything, so you’re just going to have to trust me when I say the well runs deep. The more Pathologic you consume, the more you realize how far down the rabbit hole of its story and lore go. I’m not even halfway through character two of three, but playing as a town native instead of an outsider has made certain characters much more open, and explained a lot of their offputting behavior when I first played as The Bachelor.
So I love Pathologic, but there is no game I can more confidently stamp with “it’s not for everyone”, so it’s time for the whole point of this write up: WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH PATHOLOGIC?
First, read the above text if you haven’t already. I’m sorry about its messy structure, but we write these daily. From what I wrote, keeping in mind that I am REALLY not kidding about 90% of the game being walking around very slowly, does this game sound like something you want to play through?
If yes, then obviously buy it and play it.
If you give a hard-no, then I recommend typing “pathologic game” into google and reading the multitudes of excellent spoiler-ridden write-ups and YouTube essays. Honestly, discussing and reading discussions about this game are often more rewarding than playing it, so please, even if you have no interest in playing, pretend you have and get into those articles and videos. They are excellent and may inspire you to play some other interesting games that aren’t quite as unplayable.
Now let’s say you gave the dreaded “I’m not sure”. That’s okay friend, I’ve got options for you too!
If you’re maybe is a hesitant “…yeeees?”, then I suggest getting the game and playing the first three days of the Bachelor route. This will take roughly 5 or 6 hours to complete and I believe it will give you a full vertical slice of what Pathologic has to offer. If you bail out after that, please read the “hard-no” section above.
If you lean more towards no, but you wish you were the type of person that could say yes, then they made a game for you! It’s called Pathologic 2! I’ve not played it, but I hear the gameplay is much smoother, multiple people have replayed it FOR “FUN”, and most importantly, you do not need to play Pathologic 1 to play it! If you can stand going through the first one, I’ve found it very rewarding, but tough on the soul. There is no shame in skipping to the cleaner game. I live for filth, obviously. Look at the games we review!
Recommend: No (mostly for Path-O-Logic, but also kind of for Pathologic)
Replay Percentage Chance: 0% (100% for the Pathologic though)
Time Played: 6 Minutes (40 Hours)
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