In 2005, Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge released Pathologic, a psychological horror adventure survival role-playing video game that found huge success in Russia and was all but ignored in the West. A mostly-terrible translation and a lack of advertising rang its death knell, and it was largely forgotten.
Pathologic infuriates me, inspires me, and will probably always be a small gremlin that nestles itself comfortably in the lower recesses of my anxiety-ridden skull. Quintin Smith of Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote about it in three parts (read these, savor them like small bits of meat stuck between your teeth) in 2008, the year I graduated high school. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to grow up to do, and writing certainly wasn't on that list. But Smith's dissection and keen observational perspective infected me, stayed with me, and convinced me years later that, hey, maybe I did want to try this. So I'll always appreciate both Pathologic and Smith for that.
But around this same time last year, a review key for Pathologic HD came to my e-mail doorstep, staring at me and daring me to live up to what I wanted for so long. I had never played it, but had dreamed of immersing myself into this uniquely Russian grimworld of pestilence and coming out damaged in a way that I could chronicle and share and earn a showering of praise.
Instead, I found a husk of game barely held together with digital sinew, and after fifteen hours of suffering through it (this sounds dramatic, but this game is nothing if not a close examination of suffering, futility, and failure), I began cheating my way through it just to see the end. I invalidated every theme of the game by making myself invulnerable and able to fly through solid structures just because I was so fatigued by jogging across the town ad nauseam. Eventually, my patience went from thin to death-starved and I began to enter console commands that allowed me to teleport from questgiver to objective in seconds. I essentially robbed myself of really playing Pathologic.
And I didn't even write about it! To this day, this is the only review I simply abandoned. There are many preview appointments I've had at events that I never ended up writing about that sit with me forever, enveloping me in an instant cold sweat when I think of the time that was afforded to me that I didn't capitalize on. I promise you, writers spend 1,000% more time thinking about what they failed to write than what they have on the horizon.
So fuck it, let's write about Pathologic: The Marble Nest, which Ice-Pick describes as "neither a demo (because it features a very limited number of mechanics), nor an alpha version of the real Pathologic (because it's a separate story with its own self-contained plot)."
via destructoid http://ift.tt/2i1uJL8