Preamble
This video be treating spoilers like a bull tramples grass
So consider this your point of ejection
If you want to go in to Pathologic 2 blind.
Also, in the risk of reiterating anything clever someone else already said,
I'm putting a list of links in the description that helped inform parts of my own experience with the game.
Alright, let's get started.
Act One: Agency, Death, and The Conversation of Play
Pathologic 2's best scene is a mistake.
As the game's 11th day concludes, the sky suddenly turns black and the player is
notified that the final day, the 12th, has been cancelled.
What Pathologic 2 had planned for the end of this tortuous journey will not be divulged.
There'll be no do-overs, no quick save reloads, no exceptions to the rules which were laid out when this all began.
Instead, the player boards a train with their internal companion
and the credits roll as the weight of what is happening slowly sets in.
This scene is a mistake, but it's a mistake the player accepted hours, maybe dozens of hours prior.
Here's what's happening:
Pathologic 2 is a game about struggle; the inevitability of death and fate,
and recognizing human fragility.
To this effect, the game keeps the tally of every death the player makes
and with each adds a greater burden for them to fight against.
Health bars shrivel and exhaustion sets in quicker and quicker.
A challenging game becomes even more so and not even reloading an earlier save will rewrite past mistakes
So when the player is offered a deal to remove these shackles
to let their companion take their place and their pain, it is almost impossible to resist.
Even knowing it would come to haunt me I accepted the deal.
The reason I'm being denied the final day of the game
or of any real real ending to speak of
is not because I made the wrong dialog choice or failed to save everyone.
It's because I didn't play by the game's rules.
Pathologic 2 is constantly working on both the game level and through a metatextual conversation
with the player, and this scene where the traveler tells the player straight up they got it wrong
is the culmination of what the game has been saying all along:
the game and the conversation are the same.
Cheating the system is only cheating yourself.
Though highly demanding and unforgiving, Pathologic 2 is not sadistic.
It does not occupy the same space as the deliberately punishing I Want To Be The Guy
or the mechanically dense Dark Souls.
It's challenging because it's thematically demanded.
By attempting to weaken or remove this challenge by accepting the traveler's bargain
I had in turn removed myself from the story the game was trying to tell.
I gave up my role in this play by trying to change the script.
This is so antithetical to the malleability and player centrality
of nearly every game that it feels like a joke.
And it is a joke, but one design to challenge what we as players even perceive our role as being.
In game, it means protagonist Artemy Burakh never leaves the train and Pathologic 2 ends where it opens.
To the player, it confronts the nature of play as being self authored, empowering, and, most defiantly, ours.
We are not the most important person in this world.
Our absence will not erase the game any more than setting a book on the shelf removes the words inside.
Videogames have been perceived of, effectively since inception some 50 years ago
as extensions of classic games meant for amusement, escapism, empowerment.
It is such a deeply entrenched belief that games should first and foremost be fun that is rarely even questioned
what kind of cognitive experience players should expect when a new game releases.
This is greatly simplifying emotional arcs within traditionally fun game genres and non authored player experiences
but point I'm fumbling for is that we expect games on at least some base level to be pleasurable.
This expectation can at times be so strong that players demand revised endings, new modes, or changes to difficulty balancing
and in fact, this happened to Pathologic 2 as well with developer Ice Pick Lodge
subsequently patching in robust difficulty options following the game's release.
Pathologic 2 is a game that, fundamentally, is about rejecting
the expectation of amusement, of player centrality,
and of the ability to shallowly strip-mine the game for content.
From the beginning the player is told that Artemy's fate is doomed.
That they cannot save everyone and that things will happen outside their control and beyond their view.
The player cannot win so much as they can continue to exist.
There is never enough time, resources, information
or persuasive force to accomplish everything and this puts the player in a fundamentally different position
than just about every game I've played.
Though Pathologic 2 shares many features of the survival genre - for example
hunger and thirst meters, the necessity to eat and sleep, a constantly moving in-game clock
there is never a point where death is not imminently possible.
This is not a game about mastering the elements but rather pushing through despite everything in the world fighting against you.
To hurt is to understand what it means to live.
Pathologic 2 needs you to know what's at stake.
That changing people is hard and changing nature is all but impossible.
The world is messy. It does not wait for us.
Pathologic 2 doesn't think game should be any different.
Players are just people. The only god here is the text
and the only way out is to fundamentally change that text.
So, I cheated. I made a deal to write myself out of the story and I got to see most of it anyway.
But this was never going to be the same game if I refused to engage on its terms.
The game and I were in conversation, but we couldn't agree on the script.
Act Two: I Know That I Know Nothing
Clearly
Pathologic 2 doesn't care to alienate the player
and yet is magnetic the way few games could hope to be.
Set in the remote Steppe town
Pathologic 2 runs over 12 days as an unknown plague ravages the populace.
One of three - arguably four - doctors in town
Artemy races to find a cure before he, the town, and the truth about the death of his father succumb to the disease.
Immediately, obstacles are introduced that turn a clear task
make a cure, find your father's murderer - into a murky haze of interweaving lines and things that there is no time to learn.
Artemy is an outsider. He's not trusted.
A civil war is simmering between the town's three ruling families;
paranoia and fear are turning neighbors against each other;
a giant bull might know how to talk!
Yet the mess Artemy enters seems almost quaint compared to the horrors to come.
A fundamental tenet of Pathologic 2 is that you cannot see everything.
Though Ice Pick Lodge have added an elegant mind map and waypoints for major plot points time is never on your side.
With each day the town changes,
characters live and die, and the player is more and more at the mercy of what information they can pry out people.
Which is to say nothing of the possibility that someone may simply be lying to your face.
Pathologic 2's structure is the inverse of Skyrim presenting you with an apocalyptic catastrophe
and then not caring at all if you decide to dick around in dungeons for a year.
The dragons will wait.
Again, Pathologic 2 rejects not only the notion that the plot can and should wait for the player's engagement,
It outright states that they should not attempt to see and do everything.
What they don't see can be just as important as the choices they actively make.
Games have never been bigger, with every corner hiding a sidequest, unlockable,
developer in-joke, or just a gray square for the player to check off.
The girth of a modern videogame is insurmountable, unsustainable and frequently discarded.
But quantity is easy to measure, sell, and buy into
so even as most players will probably never even finish a main quest
let alone everything the most recent Assassin's Creed or Witcher game contains, it's expected to be there.
Philosophically, Pathologic 2 is not interested in excess for excess's sake.
It is dense and large but it purposely imposes limits on not only what the player can do, but what they can know.
Characters might refuse to talk because of an earlier feud.
Someone could die because the player ran out of medicine, and even if they make it on time
a true panacea is rare enough to make survival as assured as a flip of the coin.
The choices that have to be made are both mechanically and narratively compromised
requiring not only moral fortitude but resourcefulness.
It is easy to say that you'd give up your meal for someone starving on the road
But what if that piece of bread is all that's keeping you alive until tomorrow's ration?
If you die because you gave someone medicine and let yourself become infected
are you saving a life or dooming everyone who now have no doctor to care for them?
The philosophical and ethical questions of each character encounter
carry so much more weight because there is never the assurance that choosing the "good" option will reward the player in the end.
There will always be unknown consequences and wasting time on random errands may grant nothing but a thank you.
Late in the game, I received a letter from a group of children who live in the warehouses outside town.
They had found my father's murderer.
Knowing the children to be crafty and frequently aware of elements on the town's periphery, I sprinted to the chosen spot
finding a nondescript man waiting to attack. I killed him only to learn he was nobody,
just a looter who had antagonized the kids.
I had wasted almost a whole day chasing someone else's petty revenge.
I'm not sure if games can be brave, but they can certainly be bold.
Pathologic 2 is surreal and horrifying but it's its willingness to contradict player expectations,
to waste their time for the sake of building a theme that feels most unprecedented.
My free time has recently grown uncomfortably short and less of it than ever is being devoted to games
Yet Pathologic 2 is all I could think about for the two weeks
I spent inhabiting its world knocking on doors begging for bread,
finding myself choking and dead right as I was beginning to understand
and being relentlessly toyed with by both the inhabitants and the game's text itself.
This is not an accessible game
but it is one that treats the player as capable of engaging on levels beyond base enjoyment.
To recognize that the frustration they feel when they are led astray or died in meaningless scuffles is not a failure of design,
but explicitly bridging the reality of player and character.
It is unpleasant and that's the point.
Tragedy as a genre has been falling out of fashion for years
and video games are especially devoid of experiences that push players to confront their failures,
to endure past the point of recoiling and embody characters who are broken, imperfect, ordinary.
That the town and A plot of Pathologic 2
may ultimately be nothing but an elaborate theater production is not just a commentary on the player's role as an actor
but an examination of the value we assigned to entertainment as fictitious.
How many games have been discarded because a lack of fun was mistaken as a flaw?
Are the dialogues surrounding games toxic to the types of games allowed to be made?
Are we complicit in the commodification and flattening of a medium we propose to love?
Conclusions
Pathologic 2 does not offer answers to these questions so much as alternatives.
It opened a door that frankly I didn't know was there.
It feels hyperbolic to say it has changed how I view games as a medium,
but at the same time I cannot recall the last game which so harshly confronted my expectations of what a game could and should be.
It's also only 1/3 what was meant to be a three-character experience and unfortunately
it will almost certainly never be finished due to monetary issues.
Through some cruel irony this perhaps best sums up the game's notion that there are many things we cannot foresee or control.
Pathology 2 is an anomaly in every regard but one which I can only hope will not remain as such.
I'm awful choosing personal favorites or liking things in general
but I can easily say no game has affected me as deeply since I was too young to string coherent ideas together.
Please play this game. That is all.
Hey folks, thanks so much for watching.
This took a lot longer to put together than I thought but I'm really excited to start doing more videos
and it means a lot that you sat through all of that.
I know it's probably a little bit rough right now, but I'm excited to learn and improve
so if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment.
You know how to do the rest.
I want to give a shout out to Marshall Dyer whose footage you saw for most of this review
they were kind enough to have their
videos on Creative Commons, so go check them out. They do cool Let's Plays!
All the music was by Theodor Bastard.
They did the soundtrack for Pathologic 2 and a bunch of other really awesome music so go check them out on Bandcamp.
That's about it. I'll see y'all later.
Bye bye!
