Day 170 - Pathologic 2 But Also Games Skeeter is Playing
SPOOKY MONTH!, Sam is just reviewing a different game, Actually Sad ·
Sam’s Take:
My Pathologic 2 Review AKA I Am a Gremlin and All I Want is for Everyone to be Okay
Hello everyone. I have recently finished the video game titled Pathologic 2. I already did a little bit of a writeup on Pathologic The First, but while Pathologic 1 was a beautiful gremlin game that did everything in its power to frustrate the player, Pathologic 2 turned it all inwards. Pathologic 2 is not the gremlin. I am the gremlin, and I play Pathologic 2.
Just to explain a little about what Pathologic 2 is, it’s a sort-of-sequel-but-mostly-remake of Pathologic. You play as a doctor from the town, just coming back from studying the big city. After a few days a plague hits the town and you’re tasked with juggling your doctorly duties of protecting the townsfolk, finding a cure, and keeping yourself alive. The keeping yourself alive portion of the game is done via THE METERS:
You are a slave to the meters. Why didn’t you finish the quest? The meters demanded sustenance. Why did you sleep through that important story event? The meters wished me to slumber. It is a survival horrorish game in first person, inventory management, quests, dialogue trees, all the bells and whistles. The thing that really separates it from other survival games, is that time is the hidden meter. Time goes forward with or without you, so if you miss a quest, that quest doesn’t happen and that will probably have some consequences.
Before we get too deep into this rambling mess, we have to address the difficulty. If you’ve heard anything about this game, you’ve probably heard about how punishing its survival mechanics are, and that it is one of the most difficult games ever made. This was often painted as a negative thing in several reviews:
There’s a few things to unpack here, but let’s get one thing straight: in the most literal sense, this game is not hard at all. I have beaten this game in a single sitting and gotten one of the game’s two “true endings” by trading for food on the first two days, taking a 9 day nap (with a few interruptions to gather some money and buy more food), then doing the final quest to choose my ending. I took a video of it if you don’t believe me, I don’t expect you to watch any of it, but I just wanted to make sure there was proof:
Now obviously this particular run used some prior knowledge of when certain food was available, but you could have a very easy run of the game if you too just slept at night, then walked around safe districts in the morning hoarding food and wealth. You’d be alive, you get through every day, and you’d get the same ending as someone who saved the whole town. This is the base we will build from. If we give the simplest definition of difficulty, how hard it is to reach a non-fail-state ending of the game, Pathologic 2 isn’t hard.
Obviously, this is not what the reviewers meant. A sleepy speed-run of Pathologic 2 is boring. You don’t learn about the world, you don’t talk to the characters, you don’t help anyone survive the plague. It’s just like Brendan Caldwell said:
“It takes over everything, an unwelcome distraction from the intrigue of murder cases and bizarre architecture of the town’s stranger buildings. It’s maddening. I’m interested in this place, its people, its mobs and disagreements, its decline. I don’t want to spend hours in serfdom to an outdated survival mechanic”
He became invested in the world and its characters, and then the plague took away his ability to flesh out his friendships, delve into the town’s history, and generally do the things he wants to do.
He’s so painfully close to getting it.
Pathologic 1 creates frustration both mechanically and with its dialogue/story. Every character speaks more like a representation of a philosophical ideal, and the story teases you by staying just out of reach. You can almost understand people, you can almost grasp what’s going on, but you can’t quite get it. Every inch of Pathologic 1 is harsh, cruel, and impenetrable. The goal is to care in spite of all that, but where Pathologic 1 dares you to care, Pathologic 2 makes you care, then lets that destroy you.
The first three days of Pathologic 2 are pretty easy. Day 1 has you hated by everyone due to being falsely accused of murder, but it’s easy enough to avoid the townsfolk, and there are plenty of friends to help you out. Day 2 prices for food have increased, but you have free reign of the town and have the whole day to trade and collect resources to your heart’s content. Day 3 is when the plague hits, but only one district and it’s easy to avoid (excepting the quest that tutorializes the infection mechanics, but that is also fairly straightforward). In these three days Pathologic 2 front-loads most of its story. You meet the important figures of the town, learn about what happened to your father, get free time to trade and discuss town lore with the townsfolk. There’s even a quest to gather your old friends and meet by the train tracks at night just like old times. Days 1-3 are the make you care stage of the game.
Unlike its predecessor, Pathologic 2 is also much more fair mechanically. It uses these three days to give you tutorials on bartering, shopping, how infection reacts with your immunity meter. You’ll probably run into a mugger at night and learn that, unlike in Pathologic 1, they don’t throw insta-kill death knives from across the map anymore. Also immunity ACTUALLY PROTECTS YOU FROM THE PLAGUE unlike the first game, where I think that meter was there for aesthetic reasons (I know it makes the plague have a lesser effect on you, keep your shirt on Patho 1 fans).
So the game is fair and wants you to care. It invites you in for three days and says, “see, it’s not so bad in here, you can figure this out you big doctor man”, before closing the door behind you and becomes dead set on proving to you that you are dumb, you are a bad person, and most importantly, you are not good enough.
By day 4 you’ll be managing, but you’ll wish you had stocked up more water bottles in your free time on the first two days. By day 5, you’ll probably have to skip a quest or two to spend time working on that hunger meter, maybe you can’t give medicine to everyone that’s infected. Your perfect run will most likely end somewhere around here. I won’t go through every day, you get the point, but do note that I, while trying to play a goodie-goodie who wanted to save everyone, murdered a woman to steal her cheese ball on day 8 because it was either that or enter a death spiral, leading to many trips to to the theater director.
Oh yea, when you die, instead of just reloading your last save, you spawn at the theater. The director implies that you are a new actor playing the role of the doctor, and gives you a permanent stat punishment or other curse and applies it to all of your saves (less max health, lose the ability to hug characters, spawn an annoying rat to talk to outside the theater, etc). After your punishment, then you reload your last save, only you suck a little more now. Or there’s a rat outside the theater now and your stats are fine. I like that one.
So yes, all this is very punishing, but while you might care and might want to do your best, the plague does not. You can not punch the plague. It does not care about your goals, it doesn’t care about your survival. It just wants to see you fail. When Brendan from Rock Paper Shotgun bemoans having to wrestle with THE METERS instead of exploring the town, I feel the same. This plague has taken away things I care about, the lack of resources it caused has taken time away. If I had known before how bad it was going to be I would have prepared better on days 1 and 2. If I had known I wouldn’t have used all my medicine trying to save everyone on day 3, only to be out when it got much worse on day 4. The plague made me small and stupid. This is not a false feeling. With the gift of hindsight, it is very possible to consistently save most of the town and have a successful run. The game is fair, I could have prepared for this I just… didn’t know.
Pathologic has a few Mass-Effectian choices where there are two options, such as giving potentially infected water to a shelter, or reporting it to The Bachelor, who will order every water barrel in the district destroyed. More often than not though, the choices are organic. Do I save the town’s governor who I don’t even like, or do I spend that time collecting food, and those resources on someone else on a different day? Do I spend this last immunity booster on my friend to give them a 20% better chance to not catch the plague tonight, or save it for myself in case I get into a sticky situation? Even with the water quest above the best solution comes if you say “fuck it” and just… don’t finish it. Giving the infected water to the shelter infects the area, and reporting it destroys many useful water barrels. The harsh economy and adherence to THE METERS creates a situation where every trade, purchase, and used item is as meaningful a choice as any binary quest.
With so many choices, you will make wrong ones, especially if you go in blind (don’t worry about the quest tip I gave, it won’t help that much). You might get upset that you can’t do anything besides barely stay alive in this game, I know I did, but maybe you can push through and just survive until days 9-11, the redemption days.
The last days of Pathologic 2 are spent saving as many as you can. At this point your dreams of a perfect run are most likely shattered. My first run went so poorly that I could barely muster up enough cures to save the two children living with me. Nearly the whole rest of the town died, but I went from punching women for cheese, to at least giving the town a possible future. From a goody-goody saving everyone, to a broken man doing whatever it takes to survive, finally someone just desperately doing anything he can to do some good. Giving those last two cures to my two favorite characters was a greater victory than any game where I saved the galaxy. I missed so many quests and lost so many friends, but my avatar and I came out the other side still caring, the goody-goody doctor was still in there, even if the plague didn’t give him a chance to come out for a while.
Pathologic 2 proves that caring is a weakness, knowing that you will choose it every time anyway. The beauty of Pathologic 2 is created in this conflict. Caring is bad. It goes against everything THE METERS stand for, but if we didn’t care, then what’s the point of playing? To do a sleepy nothing of speedrun?
So to all the reviews that say the survival mechanics took away from the characters and the quests, congratulations. You care, and Pathologic 2 noticed. I think if you opened your mind a little more, you might see that Pathologic 2 also cares. Probably more than any game I’ve ever played.
Recommend: Jesus God Yes. I’ll do a longer writeup on this one day, there is so much more to say. I didn’t even go into the plot.
Replay Percentage Chance: 100000000000%
Time Played: 30 Hours
Skeeter’s Take:
Sam knew I wouldn’t be talking about Pathologic 2 today, so he graciously allowed me and gave me permission and told me it was ok and gave me the go ahead to talk about whatever I wanted. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for today. That’s a lot of power to suddenly be given after years inside of Sam’s cage. I at very least knew Sam was going to write an entire encyclopedia collection on Pathologic 2. I was throwing around the idea of reviewing the new Silent Hill 2 Remake, or talking about remakes and how I enjoy older game design with a modern sheen. I was even considering doing the entire write up on the sound design in the SH2 Remake.
None of that sounded fun. What sounded fun to me was just giving a quick ol’ list of recommendations of games I’ve been playing that we probably won’t talk about later.
I’ll get it out of the way early. I’ve been playing through this and having an absolutely wonderful time at how miserable it is. I mean that in the best way possible - I’m having a blast with this game. Full Disclosure: I think I’ve only played up until the Canned Juice puzzle and got stuck. And this was probably 18 years ago at this point, so I don’t remember much about it. I have sort of desensitized myself to a lot of horror at this point, but boy howdy I haven’t been this terrified since that body fell out of the locker room in Silent Hill 1. I was probably in middle school at the time and very alone in my basement. Still haunts me to this day. Anyway, one of my favorite things about this game is the sound design. I feel like this sometimes gets overlooked in games, but this game sounds amazing. Yes, the music is amazing and hauntingly beautiful - shoutouts Akira Yamaoka - but I’m talking about the ambient sound of the game. Everything feels like it has a sound. It adds a whole lot to the immersion and the madness. A lot of the rooms and spaces have their own unique soundscape and it just blows my mind to think about how much time probably went into the consideration of the sound. When I got the game, I spent the whole night slowly walking through the foggy intro path and just listening to everything. The little metal creaks, the creaking of the wood, the howling of the wind. I love how smoothly each room transitions into the other’s soundscape. I love (aka dread) the crackle and static of the radio that signifies an enemy is close. Most of it’s very subtle, but each sound adds up to make this complex and complete texture. I wholeheartedly believe the sound is crucial to the execution of this game, and it would be significantly lesser without it. I’ve made a small sound reel for you. It contains sections of the intro area, and the hospital (both full Silent Hilleded and the “regular” hospital). There are no spoilers, per se, but I definitely spoil some locations.
That’s all I have to say for now. I haven’t finished the game yet. I think if it sticks its landing it will fall into the “Mastapees” category for me.
Sam and I already fake-reviewed Deadlock back when Valve was still banning people who leaked the game. I’m still playing this. I’m still loving it. Deadlock scratches that shooter itch without me having to ever look at or play Overwatch 2 (YES I’M STILL BITTER ABOUT IT) and that MOBA itch without having to play Dota again.
If the idea of a character shooter meets MOBA appeals to you, this is my favorite out there at the moment.
The dev caiys out here making some absolute banger Vampire-Surivor type games. caiys made one of my favorites of the genre called “Boneraiser Minions”. It’s got some great meta progression, lots of upgrades and hats, and instead of the player becoming OP, they summon little monsters to fight for them. It’s a great twist on the system.
Voids Vigil is still early on in development it seems, but it still feels like a complete package. More of a focus on shorter runs (unless you play survival mode which delivers a more traditional “Vampire Survivor” type experience) and less meta progression. It’s more focused on the player upgrading their robot body and finding things during a run. It has a quicker pace than Boneraiser and feels like more of a traditional roguelike than a Vampire Survivor type to me.
I’m enjoying it and I think caiys makes some really great games. Check them out!
Sam and I are planning on discussing this at a later date, but I’m putting it on your radar NOW! NOW! NOW!
Mouthwashing is from the same minds that brought us How Fish is Made. I think it’s really something special. It’s very character and narrative focused and I found something refreshing about that, as far as the genre goes.
We will return for this at a later date.
I’ve also been playing Hearthstone: Battlegrounds, but I don’t like admitting I play a Blizzard game.
I’ve also been playing some No Man’s Sky. That crazy ass team will not stop updating the game, and I love it. You can modularly build your own spaceship now.
I’m not sure how to end this, so I think I’m just going to Lil Jon it out. Yeah!!
Ok?!
LET’S GO!!
(YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!)
Recommend: WATCH OUT!!
Replay Percentage Chance: LET’S GO!!
Time Played: YEAH!!
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