Pathologic Classic HD Review

Now look, that happens to a lot of video game narratives - probably more often than you think - and most of the time it honestly doesn’t matter. Even if you don’t quite understand your motivations, chances are you know what to do and can happily go through the motions until your predicament is rectified. Even in the cases of the most ludicrously overwritten RPGs, it usually turns out that nine out of the ten church tomes they bury you under are so much fluff and character development, padding out the space between “go here, kill this, take that”. Pathologic is different; it’s intoxicatingly rich, like eating Vegemite by the spoonful. There are so many major characters - the Bound, they call them - and everything that comes out of their mouths is valuable. Allegiances and rivalries cover the town like an invisible web, dictated by ideology and circumstance, and as the tension mounts, that delicate web begins to morph. A single line of dialogue can grant so much insight into the town, its history, superstitions, ruling parties, current events and conventions, and it’s terrifying to think that you could simply throw that kind of insight into the winds with a single errant keypress, never to return. I want to know what’s going on. That alone is the kind of praise I have to take out of a glass case and dust off before presenting to a game, and it bothers me to no end that I can’t keep up because it has to be experienced through the medium of awkwardly-worded overly-verbose dialogue trees. You’d think a game this slow could at least throw in a codex or a conversation log or something.

No, I’m sorry: 'slow' doesn't even begin to describe it. Blatant timesink JRPGs are 'slow'. Ultra-realistic military simulators are 'slow'. Pathologic is slow on a level that defies belief. It is the shallow, shuddering, drawn-out gasp of a patient on a filthy operating table as the first incision is made. It is a ball of fish hooks being dragged through an overflowing cesspit. You'll walk and talk and walk again, maybe for hours, just for a chance at a sliver of progress, a single line of plot, and it's made all the more painful knowing that your time as a character is so precious. The days go by in not-quite-real-time - an hour doesn't last an hour, but it sure does last long enough for the bell tower chimes to catch you off-guard - so even when the pacing is at its absolute most glacial, every moment is filled with the kind of rising panic you can normally only get by leaving a programming assignment until the last minute and realizing you have no idea what the specification talking about.

The hours that seem to drag on forever will be gone long before you've cleared up the day's shopping list, and it soon becomes apparent that however much time Pathologic grants you, it really isn't enough. Plenty of games have gotten cheap thrills out of nodding at the clock and telling you that doom is coming for teatime, but it's usually in place as little more than an incentive to stop dawdling. Pathologic makes it clear, in unspoken words large enough to swallow the town, that there is simply not enough time. You can't finish every quest, you can't track down every loose end, and you can't save everybody. Even the strange, distorted, arrhythmic beat that permeates the interior ambient soundtrack brings to mind a grandfather clock at the end of a very long corridor, quietly counting out all the opportunities you missed. Every mundane task is charged with paralyzing fear, and all you can really hope for is that you're ready when the plot decides to advance.

That's what makes the town so fascinating to me, in spite of being about as lively and detailed as a concrete holding cell: it's impersonal. It's not there for you, the player; things just happen. There's a very real sense that the story could happily replace you with an NPC, and indeed, in the case of the two potential player characters you don't pick, that's exactly what happens. You are a zookeeper clinging to the back of a hayfever-struck rhinoceros, able to stay atop events and perhaps nudge them in a favourable direction, but by no means able to take control. The plague strikes on the [REDACTED] day because that's just when the plague strikes. Why should it wait on you? Because you’re the player? Don’t be silly. You’re just another actor.

I still don't know quite how to receive Pathologic. It's something of a critical darling, if I can somehow spin that phrase in a non-negative way; a game that's a lot easier to appreciate in terms of the ideas that went into it than in terms of the actual end experience. It's all very well going on about all the ingenious things it does to invoke desperation in a strange, constantly-changing town full of complex feuds that stretch back for generations, but the moment we take our heads out of the clouds and dip back into more practical territory, it all falls apart. It's as if the game had a head full of systemic ambitions, but the only one that really got off the ground was the town's economy, while the rest simply collapsed into piles of barely-functional mechanics. Every shining beacon of design is balanced by its own slapdash implementation. Burglary, for instance, would be thrilling if you had a functional stealth system and appropriate level design and complex enemy AI, but Pathologic doesn't have any of those, so instead you lockpick a door, get teleported into a generic house interior that bears little to no resemblance to the outside of the building, walk around openly while a bunch of copy-pasted NPCs make weak attempts at looking distressed, then open up a chest of drawers and stab anybody who chooses that moment to try and jump you. The game is full of moments like this, where the inherent crudeness of its construction all-but soils its elegant concepts, and whether or not you can deal with that depends on how willing you are to focus on what it's trying to be, rather than what's actually there. Because what's actually there, if I'm honest, is a lot of walking from house to house, a lot of dialogue, and a lot of managing resource bars. It's the ideal versus the reality, and unless you're ready to meet it halfway, the reality always wins.

No, even if you don't meet Pathologic halfway, it's more than that. We like to think we cover a fair spectrum of games here, all the way from the money-burning blockbusters to the cutesy indie curiosities, but the truth is that even that spectrum - the spectrum of games you can sell to people as things they can play - isn't so wide in the larger scheme of things. I can hop onto itch.io and download a dozen games with no end goal, no mechanics, no promise beyond the ability to momentarily serve up a unique experience. You're in an interesting place, doing an interesting thing, and sure, it might get old after ten minutes, but what matters is how it makes you feel in those ten minutes. Pathologic feels a little like those games at times, where all the sloppy mechanics are really just obligatory video-game-y niceties that make the experience - the experience of being trapped here, in this surreal town that makes no sense, trying to come to some satisfactory solution - presentable to the public.

Maybe it doesn't matter if Pathologic is about as much fun as a session of rebar acupuncture. Maybe what matters is the moment when it forever imprints the yawning mouth of the Abattoir on the insides of your eyelids. Maybe it doesn't matter if the story is impossible to follow, so long as you experience its loquacious dialogues first-hand. Maybe what matters is just being immersed in the atmosphere; not the thick, crushing, depressing atmosphere of Silent Hill, or the grim, gothic, ancient atmosphere of Dark Souls, but the kind of sickening, toxic, stale atmosphere where everybody's slowly dying and nobody knows what to do about it. Not death as we usually know it in video games, a binary change of state inseparable from the world of muzzle flashes and sharp utensils, but death as a yawning abyss into which every single person in the town, yourself included, is slowly being tipped into.

Ultimately, though, when the pretension wells have run dry, my job here is to give consumer advice, and my opinion of Pathologic is simple: I hate it. I hate its tedium, its clunkiness, its lousy presentation, its stubborn opacity, and its completely barefaced disdain for me as a player. It's so needlessly prickly on so many levels, caring naught if I'm entertained or satisfied, and my fascination with the story just can't overcome my distaste for the endless tedious, frustrating errands I have to carry out just to advance it.

But even if Pathologic doesn’t love me, and I don’t love it in return, I still respect it. Everything from the setting to the atmosphere to the story is so singularly unique, and the question of where it’s all going has haunted me for almost a solid fortnight. So much of the inherent awkwardness of video game storytelling stems from the drive to still be entertaining; to tell the player that they’re up against overwhelming odds while still providing a fair challenge, or to tell the player that they’re scared and alone while still having fun combat. Unintentionally or not, Pathologic frees itself from that drive, and in doing so it lives up to the agonizing, tedious, nerve-wracking experience it claims to be.