Russian developers at Ice-Pick Lodge are not a group of creators who would draw some of the euro from the mainstream players' purses. No brilliant crowd, no huge hit laundered in various media, at the top of the sales charts and with lots of awards at the neck. Their projects have the hallmark of originality and strangeness that you either get under your skin and platonically fall in love with crazy bizarre or leave you with misunderstanding. Whether The Void or Knock-Knock, each Ice-Pick Lodge game is simply different from 99% of game production.
When the first Pathologic came out in 2005, it was like a revelation. The dark and depressed environment of the nameless settlement, where one of the main characters comes to avert the omnipresent death, comes to life again. After the remastered HD version, which was not bad but appreciated only by fans of the unit, we return to the crime scene again. And it will be no less crazy or bizarre, because the story is unchanged, only this time the character selection does not take place and you get into the hands of a fresh doctor. Other heroes will come next. However, the plot is not fragmented or incomplete. The second part does not require knowledge of the first, so anyone can dive into the game. So if after a few minutes it does not drown in its abstract difficulty.
Just an introduction at the very beginning will tell you if Pathologic 2 is not too big for you. Combining adventure, survival, fights, work with inventory, and freedom in decision-making and running in an open environment is in itself a portion of gameplay that everyone can not bear on their shoulders. Not to mention a world that stands out from conventional, compared to Pathologic 2 to Dozen games. It's not fantasy, science fiction, or anything you may have experienced. The Pathologic 2 world is original, magical and above all depressing, with no hint of light at the end of the tunnel. It is the helplessness and death that awaits every death that entices a more demanding audience with an impressive, even masochistic, atmosphere.
The train journey to your hometown is full of flashbacks, scenes from which you will be clear only one thing: you cannot be sure of anything and anyone. You don't know what a dream or a figment of your imagination is and what a reality is. The arrival of houses will degenerate when not the most pleasant welcome awaits you. With a knife in your hand you can't wait for a heartbeat hug and the subsequent massacre will end in your survival, but blood dripping from your hands will automatically make you the enemy number one. Not to mention that the corpses spear in the city without your involvement. War conflict, strange contagion and depression are everyday bread. And they want to kill you. Disregarding that you are the son of a once influential person. The father is dead, even though he called you home to discover, as a surgeon, a medicine that will save the city and as many people in it as possible. But a strange cult who thinks any cutting into the body is a sin thinks otherwise.
Time flowing independently of tasks is ticking uncomfortably fast. It never happens that you are put to sleep in a calm situation, with everything under control, pursuit of individual quests and time for everything. You will miss it constantly, the minutes run independently of what you do and result in an unpleasant rule you have to play with. You can't make it all, and you can just mourn some of the victims, you can do nothing more. Although you want to help, you can't be in two places at once, you can't divide your time into drug or vaccine development, try to get everyone on the joint, escape from omnipresent death. Tasks are far more than can be accomplished. You have to choose, and that does not mean that meeting, or the prospect of goal and reward, is exactly what you had hoped for and will ultimately help you.
The adventure part is common to Pathologic 2. You run dialogues, try to do things, collect items, and move in a fairly large city that is drowning in tired gray and depressed brown. But the traditional concept of gradual narration and the plot revealing secrets will fall apart like a house of cards. The characters are bizarre, with various masks, strangely mutated, arrogant, aggressive, sociopathic and sometimes simply bad. Believing the innocence of children toasting a puppet and waiting for help from anyone is short-sighted. Dialogues written sparingly, but at the same time in depth, require constant attention. But they are different, no fatness. That's why penetrating the Pathologic 2 world is challenging. There is no one to tell you clearly what is going on, and you have to put all the mosaic pieces yourself. And you will be groping, looking, looking confusedly in order to understand, at least in part, the understanding of that enthusiastic monster that hides only evil within its bowels.
If that were all, and Pathologic 2 would be just a bizarre analogy of the walking simulator, you would surely win a much larger audience. But Ice-Pick Lodge seemed to have chosen a more challenging journey on purpose. We have a survival here that, on the one hand, raises tension and promotes a harsh atmosphere, but at the same time punches into the ground an already croaking gameplay. There are very few commodities, you have to constantly take care of the supply of new ones, and buying them often is out of the question because you have too deep a pocket. You can go stealing into abandoned homes that have already been ransacked by the contagion, and the fact that you can catch it does not add anyone to a positive mood. Vaccines to protect against unexpected death will become a necessity.
Nobody will initiate you into more complicated game mechanisms and you have to figure out everything yourself. Not once will you be lost in the Pathologic 2 world and discover many principles through trial and error. Ubiquitous death is not a traditional penalty when you have to return to your last save (no car, you can only save your position at specific locations), but you will still be penalized from your last play. There will be no traditional recovery of hunger or thirst, health will not come true, and you will die with an empty stomach sooner sooner. I had no problem with water, the ubiquitous wells thirst out, but food is a scarce commodity in a dilapidated town. With every death, playing is more demanding, and even the gradually changing relationship of the inhabitants of the individual parts to you contributes to nothing. Usually, for the worse, and if they don't like you, not only does the trader refuse to sell you anything, but the local guard will go to your neck.
We get to the fights that will be the last drop for many. It is unnecessary to investigate why developers have not dropped them if they are boring, clumsy and useless. The fistfights are sometimes inaccurate, and in addition to a weak and strong blow of exhausting stamina, you can defend yourself with raised fists, but your health will drop if your opponent gets stronger. Using a scalpel or other object will not put you at risk for damaging an important tool that you can use to cut organs from infected people to find out more about the disease. But over time, clashes with aggressive opponents become tired, repetitive and boring.
Technical design has its bright and dark sides. Good first: the environment is amazingly worked out, depression and despair emanate from every texture, the color palette does not slip to patheticity and also dubbed. Intentionally artificial and with a Russian accent to the game fits, similarly the instrumental music. Everything else will bother you: the hardware demands are not caused by complex scenes or sharp effects. Actually, I don't know what, but suddenly the framerate will drop or the game will fall down, no matter what the graphics level or resolution is. Many bugs are smiling, for example, a barrel flame changes its position as you turn towards it, so sometimes it burns outside its source, sometimes the characters stand on their heads and so on. With the animations of the movement, no one worried too much and certainly fell asleep their time and would have been smiling already in the first Pathologic.
Pathologic 2 is an interesting game, just not for everyone. And perhaps it is not so much a game as a drift into the bizarre waters of surreal horror films. The dark atmosphere, with many secrets that would not be lost in any mysterious title, unobtrusively entices you into a world with more questions than answers. In an effort to find a solution for at least some of them, to save a few people, even if you die more and feel uncomfortable with the guilt at your head, however, Pathologic 2 stumbles over its own feet in the most important thing - gameplay, gaming itself elements. Maybe you'll get lost and love the Pathologic 2. But there will be a minority of such players. Sometimes it is better to do things mainstream.
