Pathologic 2

The grim reaper reigns supreme in these glum streets.

$39 | PC, PS4, XB1 | WWW.PATHOLOGIC-GAME.COM

Pathologic 2 is “supposed to be almost unbearable” according to devs Ice Pick Lodge, who created the obtuse, nearunplayable original Pathologic, and purgatorial horror game The Void. Pathologic 2 challenges you to survive 12 in-game days in a town that’s going completely to hell. Disease, paranoia, mob justice, and paranormal happenings unfold in real time as you plod through brown, foggy districts, invading people’s houses for scraps and occasionally meeting important figures. It’s a deliberately exhausting experience. An egg is not just an egg in Pathologic, it’s an “empty illusion of

possible life”.

The survival systems constantly get in the way of a fascinating mystery game. When you chat to key figures in the town, they drop motes of information that form a growing web in your journal. Empty nodes imply there’s more to explore in a given line of enquiry.

It manages to be quite an atmospheric game, even in spite of rigid character models, static faces, sparse and repetitive interiors, and an extremely clumsy first-person combat system. The game is always pushing back against your attempts to explore, but there are delightfully macabre ideas hiding away in corners of the town, like gurgling tree roots that drink blood and give you herbs in return. As a surgeon, you can extract organs from any corpse and then sell them to a particular buyer for food and medicine.

It’s a slog, and that’s the point of it. The suffering of your character and the townspeople is reflected in the torment of ever-hungry survival bars that drive you to theft and murder. One character talks about how her client asked her to design the town’s layout to be deliberately confusing and annoying to navigate, in order to stretch people like a spring so that, in a position of distress, they might discover deeper wells of creativity.

Though I admire the way the game keenly rejects the idea that games should always be satisfying fun factories, I just don’t see the worth in wrapping a good mystery in layers of irritant.

Verdict

A gruelling mystery game that smothers its big ideas with dour survival mechanics.