Pathologic

I started a new game of Pathologic, without any cheat this time – since my first game was in cheat mode from the beginning to the end, which allowed me to discover the history of the game and the evolution of the events day after day, and my expectations of a "living world" were not disappointed.

Without any cheat, which redefines heavily the way of playing and the priorities you have in the game; in this case, the quests will take a back seat, the goal being to SURVIVE, which is not an easy task. Few games are as punishing as Pathologic, where battles are settled – usually to your disadvantage – in three or four moves, and wounds don't magically heal after eating a slice of bread or sleeping for a few hours.

This being said, it's not its gameplay, nor even its story, that made me like this game and that I'm playing it again from the beginning, a few months after my first game. I realize, when I play it again, that wandering from morning to night, as well as at night, rummaging through the garbage, is enough for me; wandering through the small streets, along the walls of the cemetery, attracted by the pale light of the street lamps, in the middle of the dead leaves carried by the wind.

The settings are poor and repetitive, the scripts too (leaves in the wind, passers-by walking or staggering), the colors are dull, earthy; and it is precisely that which gives its charm, its fascination to the game, to the world it proposes; which gives it an identity. The world that one travels through is repetitive and insistent like a nightmare; wherever one goes, everything is the same, everything seems to run in slow motion, there is no one to talk to – the inhabitants of the city seem from the beginning to be lost in their own dreams – nothing seems to be able to ever really change; whatever events take place over the course of the days and justify the quests. We are in the "world of the grave" – whether this is a will of the developers, or the consequence of a lack of means...

I don't know how long I'll "enjoy" playing like this, with no goals, no discoveries, no new real events ever taking place and nothing really possible - but what is certain is that Pathologic has a poisonous, insidious charm; it's the kind of game, like Vampire: Bloodlines, that you keep coming back to, knowing that you'll feel bad about it and that it won't have anything to offer but sordid musings. Maybe it should have been called Neurotic?