29.7 hours played
Written 5 days ago
Pathologic is a game that I have heard of for years now and only got around to playing when my “best” “friend” finally made me. But it is not a game, as a game implies you play it, and playing implies it is meant for enjoyment. It is not meant to be enjoyed, in much the same way as a Holocaust or Slavery museum isn’t.
In his video on Sonic Dreams Collection, Matthewmatosis describes artist James Turell’s “nonvicarious” artpieces. In this context, nonvicarious are pieces which can only be experienced in-person, or rather their original form. A picture of a Sunset, for example, conveys a different feeling, fundamentally, than seeing one yourself. I suppose if I were to come-up with a term that better implies its meaning, I would personally say “nonsubstitutable.” Pathologic is absolutely nonvicarious. You cannot grasp the full meaning of the game without playing it yourself. You can have it described to you, and those descriptions and videos by Hbomberguy or Mandaloregaming are very useful in seeing if you would actually want to experience this, much like how an art critic’s review or museum brochure can get you to see a specific piece, but they are not a substitute for that piece.
Are you willing to engage with gameplay that is mainly just walking, dumpster-diving, horrid combat and dialogue written by a high Fyodor Dostoyevsky? Are you willing to fail and have to live with it, else waste potentially hours of your time to undo it? Are you willing to have the game give simultaneously too much and not enough information to find out what you need to do? Are you willing to do horrible things to fictional characters for your own survival or, even worse, try to help people but only make things worse while still knowing it was the correct thing to do at the time? Are you willing to engage with a cast of characters who are doing the exact same things but are worse at it? Are you willing to walk across an entire city while just thinking to yourself? This is going to sound like I hate you, but I think you should play it if those questions sound terrible.
The town has its own isolated culture that is only now dying because of initially benign outside influence and itself. There are no solutions that will save everyone. But if you come-into it not expecting any specific kind of enjoyment, I feel like there will be a catharsis, that kind of catharsis Aristotle wrote about. A kind of horror that somehow makes you feel better about or at least more understanding of the shittiness of our real world. I think more people should engage with things that will make them suffer. I want more people to challenge themselves with a mirror that has someone unfamiliar in the reflection. Yeah, Pathologic 2 plays like a video game made for humans, but 1 is a meditative experience. But instead of finding inner peace, it almost resonates you with the chaos and confusion of our real world. It’s an empathy tester and demonstrator. I find Pathologic is a part of my soul now, even if I don’t think it’ll ever be a hyperfixation of mine. Because it’s one thing to see its story unfold in a video or to see a full lp of it or to see it in your dreams. But it’s another to place your fingers into the town and become an actor in its plays.
A lot of people talk about the big twists, but I honestly don’t really care about them. They don’t change the gameplay nor my resonance with it. If anything, they just enhance the themes of the game and my statement that it only allows one to better find escape in the real world. I could have encountered one of them, but I didn’t due to circumstance. If you know what the twists during Day 12 are, great, but they’re whatever to me.
Now that I’ve done little more than contradict myself, I want to go over my playthrough specifically. I started as the Bachelor, something you should always do, and it was the first time a video game has actually made me role-play and made me feel like I am really interacting with these people. Yeah, I’ve played tabletop, but my Danil was me. I knew a bit about the first 2 days, but almost nothing after that. In my mind my dialogue choices were more humble and like an ideal anthropologist: I did my job and talked medicine with those who I could talk medicine with, but when one of the Kains or Younger Vlad or Peter talked about fate, souls, gods and goodness, I listened. At first I asked more questions than accepted answers and focused more on actually helping the town. But every day I woke up and found that the accomplishments of the previous day didn’t matter, or there was a complication, or new problems arose. And then, at day 11, I found [spoiler] the source of the infection as well as discovering the properties of the Polyhedron. And even though I, the player, would have wanted to destroy the Polyhedron, I also had no more love or curiosity for the town or its culture. I would gladly let Maria become the Mistress of a new culture on the other side of the river, because I accepted the notion that she was the only one in the game who never lied to me. I accepted that the Polyhedron was the vessel for a new god and that the building, in its impossible architecture, was immune from the plague infecting the rest of the city. I accepted the solution to raze the town east of the structure not out of medical necessity or reason, but because I saw nothing but exhaustion, lies and wasted effort in the streets. I might as well save the one thing that made me not lose hope in my initial mission.[/spoiler]
This characterization of the bachelor is not how he is canonically. He’s more of a shithead in the other campaigns and in 2, but my role-playing of him is always more accurate to me. Those depictions are how he comes across or perhaps what he really thinks but says implicitly. But he and I, through our experiences, would likely come to the same conclusion. He would raze it out of arrogance towards what he sees as a barbaric culture. I would raze it because there’s nothing else that can be done other than let this new element try to grow into a better world.
