Pathologic 2
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Each day is a mass of clashing schedules, blackening the map screen like spots of mould
Developer Ice-Pick Lodge
Publisher TinyBuild Games
Format PC (tested), Xbox One
Release Out now
Pathologic 2 is intended to be “almost unbearable”. That’s what it tells you in the difficulty settings, a feature reluctantly added by the developer after this magnificent, tormenting reboot struggled to entice players accustomed to the gentler ordeals of westernmade RPGs. It certainly captures our mood, a third of the way through, when we discover that we’ve caught the plague we’re supposed to be curing – yet another threat to our health bar, on top of thirst, hunger, fatigue, muggers and the occasional Molotov cocktail.
A budding haruspex (in Roman days, somebody who read the entrails of sacrificed animals, but here treated as synonymous with ‘surgeon’), we arrive in the slurrybrown backwater of Town-on-Gorkhan full of grand intentions. As we descend from the train, we’re set upon by thugs convinced we’ve murdered our own father. A few hours later, the plague escapes from its apparent bolthole in the town’s fortified abattoir. Deadly miasmas seep from district to district, night after night, killing off key characters at random. Houses are boarded up, water supplies run low, store prices skyrocket and whole plot threads unravel as those concerned succumb. After 15 hours of this, we’re little more than a beggar with a rusty scalpel, pitifully unequal either to the disease or the social dynamics of a setting that makes Silent Hill look like Kakariko Village.
Death is never further than a few moments away, and dying, in this game, is always the prologue to a greater nightmare. Each time you expire you are whisked away to a shrouded theatre, where a cane-twirling director welcomes you as though casting a starring role, only to saddle you with a permanent debuff. The theatre is the heart of Town, or more accurately one of its stomachs: it’s where the plague’s victims are kept for treatment and, in all probability, dissection. But that stage extends beyond the theatre; its malignant energy saturates the game. At one juncture a bell rings and the streets are suddenly full of extras in pantomime masks, pointing wordlessly. Elsewhere you’ll encounter orderlies, or creatures who say they’re orderlies, in macabre costumes of beak and bone.
It’s the first of many disquieting suggestions that the plague is as much a sickness of the soul and society as a biological pest. You can hold it at bay, brewing herbal tinctures to boost a character’s immunity levels, or determining which kinds of antibiotic to prescribe. But to seriously reckon with the curse, you’ll have to plunge your hands into the guts of a setting that isn’t just hazardous, but fundamentally wrong.
Even without the plague, the town’s layout is a work of calculated obstruction, almost adversarial in how it resists efforts to commit it to memory. The buildings range from squalid to otherworldly: on the outskirts you’ll find a glowing, gravity-defying structure called the Polyhedron, like a whirlpool recreated in glass. The populace are at each other’s throats – in particular, there’s trouble brewing between the townsfolk and the persecuted nomads who live out in the Steppes. Ominous traditions prevail: there’s a ban on digging holes, which may have something to do with the fact that, in certain spots, you can hear the soil groaning underfoot like a wounded beast.
These sights and sounds demand investigation, but between tending to your character’s basic needs and aiding the sick, you’ll barely have a second to spare.
Pathologic 2 is ferociously unforgiving about time. Each day is a mass of clashing schedules, blackening the map screen like spots of mould. Critical events unfold all across the town, some revealed to you at dawn, others discovered by chance as you hurry from district to district. The associated quests are usually only available till midnight, and there’s little indication as to which should take priority. The game’s guiding truth is that you cannot help everyone, and for every opportunity you seize, there will be a number that slip through your fingers. It’s in that impossible to-do list, above all, that
Pathologic 2 risks losing players otherwise captivated by the horrors of the setting. But this also lends choices a weight they seldom have in games, and forces you to reconsider your notions of achievement: often, victory is just making it through the night.
Pathologic has been a byword for harshness, of course, ever since the original game infected PCs in 2005 (the reboot features a sparkling new English script and is rather easier on the eyes, but plays largely the same). As with Dark Souls, however, to speak of that challenge in the abstract is misleading. Surviving isn’t just the means of playing out Pathologic 2’ s narrative but is itself a kind of surgery, of tracing the veins and arteries of a fascinating universe. Consider the quietly brilliant barter economy, and what it reveals about the townsfolk. Children often carry precious resources they’re happy to trade for items that are otherwise worthless, such as handfuls of nuts: this makes them an asset early on, when you’re finding your feet. But children are also the town’s hidden king-makers, alive to secrets and forces banished from the empirical realm of adulthood, and this comes across in the objects they value. In doing business with them, you’ll see a little further, understand a little more, get a little closer to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Grasping that distinction between challenge as mere obstacle, and challenge as a component of theme and intrigue, is the key to appreciating one of gaming’s greatest, grimmest fairytales. ‘Unbearable’ is definitely one word for Pathologic 2, but that hides a few others: engulfing, ingenious, profound, invigorating. From a certain vantage point, and with enough food in your belly, you might even call it astonishing.