![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lathanyI wrote a partial review of this earlier - back on day 3. This review follows me having finished one of the three characters. (A combination of this and my previous review are on Gamefaq posted by me - it's not co-incidence that this follows Gamefaq headings).
Introduction
Pathologic is a Russian game which was released in 2006. It is the most unusual and down-right weird game that I have ever played. It ignores standard genres and consequently game-play is a thoroughly incomparable experience. I can't remember how I found this game but it's turned out to be as seriously unique as promised. You play one of three rather different characters trying to deal with a plague and related mysteries in a medium-ish weird town. It’s main problem is the language; the translation is shaky and this isn’t helped by the original text being deliberately obscure in places. However, if you can get over that, you’re in for a fascinating experience.
Gameplay
The gameplay is as a first-person adventure game. It’s a cross between a first-person murder mystery and real-time simulation. You wander around a large scale town and stick entirely to the area, but can go inside all the buildings and watch the time tick from day to night and back again. You get a huge map in Pathologic (which goes weird when you zoom out on later days) and you can enter (sometimes by illegal means) any house that you choose more-or-less; although you have to walk everywhere step by step (as I said before, it gives me motion sickness).
You play one of three characters (I've completed the Batchelor, the easiest) and they all have different roles and come into contact, and sometimes conflict, with each other. You can only play the girl (Devotress - she's possibly twins) after completing one of the other two (the third is Ripper - a surgeon who is the son of the town's doctor). The game has a fixed length because it's sort of real time (One hour of game time = five minutes real-time). There are twelve days to survive; you get a note at midnight that you have survived the day and another at 7am telling you how many days to come and what will happen that day. There's combat, but it's primarily a simulation survival with mini-quests.
The game claims to adapt to the choices you make and to have multiple different endings. Having got through as one character, I believe this to be true. I think it gives you more freedom than any other adventure/mystery game I’ve ever seen and it means that faq designing is very difficult (although the makers do have one on their website).
The controls are keyboard and mouse. The mouse is the viewpoint and it can be clicked in fights and to select objects. The keyboard controls other things including movement, quest notes (a symbol comes up on the screen when this is added to), letter-reading (new letters bring up a symbol on your screen, but no other prompts to read the important communications), inventory, sneak and a few others (I never found a use for jump, but that may say more about me). They’re fine to use, but I found I had my finger down on W (move forward) an awful lot. Also, it’s well worth returning to the manual after the first day or two to check that you’re not missing anything.
Whilst the controls are (relatively) straight-forward, Pathologic is not an easy game. That said, I’m a bit of a completist freak and so didn’t like missing anything. Plus I’m not a first-person shooter player and I suspect that if you are it gets a bit easier - particularly the combats. The quests are not too bad to begin with; speak to X, buy Y, but soon (a few days down the line) you’re looking to take out some person or other with combat using unfamiliar weapons and wondering whether you should have talked to someone else first/be doing something else. Also the game gets harder in other ways. For example, locations mentioned by characters in the first couple of days get automatically marked on your map; by day six, however, you need to look around a more vaguely marked area and by the end you’d better know where the Knots (etc) are and be prepared to go hunting for a lot of things. Also, I’d strongly suggest starting as the Batchelor unless you like challenge in your games as he has the easiest start (the Ripper’s start involves being beaten to a pulp and made an outlaw before you get anywhere near the controls).
Is Pathologic fun? Well, that’s not quite the word I would associate with it. It’s a game about a vicious plague after all. In fact, I’m aware that some players have regarded it more as a stress-enhancing ritual that they passed through because they wanted to see it out to the end. For example, the death count climbs disturbingly. Plus other characters will blame you for the infection of important characters (and you will wonder whether it was your fault). All that said, I enjoyed it, would recommend it and have started playing a second character (the Ripper, as I want to do all three).
Story
The town has a strange social structure with roughly twenty important characters (called Adherents). Many of these characters - but not all - are organised into families with specific histories/traits. You are responsible for keeping about a third of them alive (and you probably want to help the other two thirds as well). You’ll get told which third at some point during the first day and they’ll appear as the second tab on your stats charts (and then you’ll need to keep track of them as no-one will prompt you to keep them alive more than any other characters).
The town is divided into three main parts but has a number of other weird areas and buildings as well. Including some architectural impossibilities. It won’t be very long before you’ll be itching to get inside some of those buildings just to see what on earth their purpose is. The town also has a theatre with a masks’ play that you can see every night which is, sort-of, telling your story. You need to bumble in after midnight to catch the latest installment.
Events unfold on a daily basis as conditions worsen in the town. It’s difficult to write much without giving spoilers, but I think I can say that things substantially change every few days in terms of what’s going on. Your quests vary from day to day, but are connected with the people and conditions in town. All the town characters have their own agendas (and, unlike in some games, this really is true) and many will consequently mislead you (although they tend to be quite subtle about it). And an awful lot won’t make sense to any one playable character (having started playing the Ripper, I can now answer some of the things bugging me as the Batchelor). Also it’s amazing what you’ll stop caring about, even though it seemed really important at the time, because it’s been overtaken by a larger crisis.
Overall the story is pretty decent, although I still have a number of unanswered questions that I hope will be solved through playing the other characters. Also, the ending is superbly strange (the one I saw anyway - there are multiple endings).
Graphics/Sound
The graphics are nicely done (the town is not supposed to look picturesque), the soundtrack is rather good if same-y (same-y suits this game). The sound effects work well and, after a while, you figure when the noise means that you need to dodge or run. Its big problem however, is the language. The translation, as I said before, is not the greatest and the game's weakest point (and the "game over" sequence is in Russian).
Play Time/Replayability
An hour game-time is about five minutes real-time and you wander around for roughly sixteen hours on this ratio and require about eight hours of sleep (although you can take a maximum of six at any one time) which is pretty instant. In theory, therefore, you can do the whole game (twelve days) in one very long day on your PC. However this allows no time for reloads which, if you’re as bad a shot as I am with a gun, you’ll need. Ditto for dodging plague carriers. I found it was a couple of weeks in total, mostly playing evenings.
I think it’s replayable and want to do all three characters. However I have read of other players who felt that once-through was quite traumatic enough, thanks (and, yes, they still get nightmares).
Final Recommendation
Definitely for anyone wanting something a bit different.
Introduction
Pathologic is a Russian game which was released in 2006. It is the most unusual and down-right weird game that I have ever played. It ignores standard genres and consequently game-play is a thoroughly incomparable experience. I can't remember how I found this game but it's turned out to be as seriously unique as promised. You play one of three rather different characters trying to deal with a plague and related mysteries in a medium-ish weird town. It’s main problem is the language; the translation is shaky and this isn’t helped by the original text being deliberately obscure in places. However, if you can get over that, you’re in for a fascinating experience.
Gameplay
The gameplay is as a first-person adventure game. It’s a cross between a first-person murder mystery and real-time simulation. You wander around a large scale town and stick entirely to the area, but can go inside all the buildings and watch the time tick from day to night and back again. You get a huge map in Pathologic (which goes weird when you zoom out on later days) and you can enter (sometimes by illegal means) any house that you choose more-or-less; although you have to walk everywhere step by step (as I said before, it gives me motion sickness).
You play one of three characters (I've completed the Batchelor, the easiest) and they all have different roles and come into contact, and sometimes conflict, with each other. You can only play the girl (Devotress - she's possibly twins) after completing one of the other two (the third is Ripper - a surgeon who is the son of the town's doctor). The game has a fixed length because it's sort of real time (One hour of game time = five minutes real-time). There are twelve days to survive; you get a note at midnight that you have survived the day and another at 7am telling you how many days to come and what will happen that day. There's combat, but it's primarily a simulation survival with mini-quests.
The game claims to adapt to the choices you make and to have multiple different endings. Having got through as one character, I believe this to be true. I think it gives you more freedom than any other adventure/mystery game I’ve ever seen and it means that faq designing is very difficult (although the makers do have one on their website).
The controls are keyboard and mouse. The mouse is the viewpoint and it can be clicked in fights and to select objects. The keyboard controls other things including movement, quest notes (a symbol comes up on the screen when this is added to), letter-reading (new letters bring up a symbol on your screen, but no other prompts to read the important communications), inventory, sneak and a few others (I never found a use for jump, but that may say more about me). They’re fine to use, but I found I had my finger down on W (move forward) an awful lot. Also, it’s well worth returning to the manual after the first day or two to check that you’re not missing anything.
Whilst the controls are (relatively) straight-forward, Pathologic is not an easy game. That said, I’m a bit of a completist freak and so didn’t like missing anything. Plus I’m not a first-person shooter player and I suspect that if you are it gets a bit easier - particularly the combats. The quests are not too bad to begin with; speak to X, buy Y, but soon (a few days down the line) you’re looking to take out some person or other with combat using unfamiliar weapons and wondering whether you should have talked to someone else first/be doing something else. Also the game gets harder in other ways. For example, locations mentioned by characters in the first couple of days get automatically marked on your map; by day six, however, you need to look around a more vaguely marked area and by the end you’d better know where the Knots (etc) are and be prepared to go hunting for a lot of things. Also, I’d strongly suggest starting as the Batchelor unless you like challenge in your games as he has the easiest start (the Ripper’s start involves being beaten to a pulp and made an outlaw before you get anywhere near the controls).
Is Pathologic fun? Well, that’s not quite the word I would associate with it. It’s a game about a vicious plague after all. In fact, I’m aware that some players have regarded it more as a stress-enhancing ritual that they passed through because they wanted to see it out to the end. For example, the death count climbs disturbingly. Plus other characters will blame you for the infection of important characters (and you will wonder whether it was your fault). All that said, I enjoyed it, would recommend it and have started playing a second character (the Ripper, as I want to do all three).
Story
The town has a strange social structure with roughly twenty important characters (called Adherents). Many of these characters - but not all - are organised into families with specific histories/traits. You are responsible for keeping about a third of them alive (and you probably want to help the other two thirds as well). You’ll get told which third at some point during the first day and they’ll appear as the second tab on your stats charts (and then you’ll need to keep track of them as no-one will prompt you to keep them alive more than any other characters).
The town is divided into three main parts but has a number of other weird areas and buildings as well. Including some architectural impossibilities. It won’t be very long before you’ll be itching to get inside some of those buildings just to see what on earth their purpose is. The town also has a theatre with a masks’ play that you can see every night which is, sort-of, telling your story. You need to bumble in after midnight to catch the latest installment.
Events unfold on a daily basis as conditions worsen in the town. It’s difficult to write much without giving spoilers, but I think I can say that things substantially change every few days in terms of what’s going on. Your quests vary from day to day, but are connected with the people and conditions in town. All the town characters have their own agendas (and, unlike in some games, this really is true) and many will consequently mislead you (although they tend to be quite subtle about it). And an awful lot won’t make sense to any one playable character (having started playing the Ripper, I can now answer some of the things bugging me as the Batchelor). Also it’s amazing what you’ll stop caring about, even though it seemed really important at the time, because it’s been overtaken by a larger crisis.
Overall the story is pretty decent, although I still have a number of unanswered questions that I hope will be solved through playing the other characters. Also, the ending is superbly strange (the one I saw anyway - there are multiple endings).
Graphics/Sound
The graphics are nicely done (the town is not supposed to look picturesque), the soundtrack is rather good if same-y (same-y suits this game). The sound effects work well and, after a while, you figure when the noise means that you need to dodge or run. Its big problem however, is the language. The translation, as I said before, is not the greatest and the game's weakest point (and the "game over" sequence is in Russian).
Play Time/Replayability
An hour game-time is about five minutes real-time and you wander around for roughly sixteen hours on this ratio and require about eight hours of sleep (although you can take a maximum of six at any one time) which is pretty instant. In theory, therefore, you can do the whole game (twelve days) in one very long day on your PC. However this allows no time for reloads which, if you’re as bad a shot as I am with a gun, you’ll need. Ditto for dodging plague carriers. I found it was a couple of weeks in total, mostly playing evenings.
I think it’s replayable and want to do all three characters. However I have read of other players who felt that once-through was quite traumatic enough, thanks (and, yes, they still get nightmares).
Final Recommendation
Definitely for anyone wanting something a bit different.
