Strange Holidays - 1 - Psychogeography of the video game : Pathologic

A few scattered notes, without much development, taken while playing Pathologic.


 

Arrival in the city is at night, or more precisely very early in the morning. In Zola's Germinal, Lantier also arrives in Montsou at the end of the night, after a long walk. This must correspond to some kind of archetype, the arrival in a new town early in the morning... but in fact it made me think of the beginning of a fiction (interactive or not, it's not decided) that I've had in mind for years, where a young civil servant character is assigned to a small town on the edge of his country, a kind of double novel of Saint-Mihiel and Blâmont, and arrives there precisely in the early morning.


 

There must be a childhood memory hidden behind it. Not so hidden, actually: I remember those sad little mornings when my mother used to take me and my sister to our nanny's house. It was still dark, part of the family was still sleeping, and I felt like a stranger arriving in a closed world, with its own rules, where I was not especially welcome. To arrive somewhere in the early morning is to find people in their intimacy; by extension, an entire city in its intimacy.

Anyway, in Pathologic, the first NPC we are invited to interview receives us in a kind of indoor bathrobe that he will not leave during the twelve days of the story. Windows closed, lights dimmed. Infantilism, voluptuous character, dirt hidden from the bourgeoisie. Many drapes, everywhere in the interiors of the city; curtains, draperies. It must macerate in there. The ideal place for dirt, stench, microbes.

*
 

I am visiting a house that was abandoned after the outbreak. Cold white light, neon type, on wooden furniture and old wallpaper. I feel like I'm at my grandparents' house. The tile floor, too.

This ubiquitous tile also reminds me of a slaughterhouse, hospital, mortuary decor. The town of Pathologic was founded precisely next to a slaughterhouse.

In the white, cold, artificial light, street lamps, some red brick houses look like... meat.

*

 

The rooms have something "folkloric" and childish; rocking chair, wardrobe and wooden bed.



All houses have the curtains drawn, or the shutters closed, when it is not wood panels that close the windows. A city of closed worlds, incommunicating, mute and blind.

*

The poverty of house models, infinitely repeated, is not embarrassing: it corresponds to the poverty of reality. The reality of working-class neighborhoods.

*

Low-furnished rooms, not spartan or uncomfortable, but minimalist. Their simplicity makes me envious. Great rest. Life immobile, silent, organic. Eating, sleeping. Time passing slowly. No past, no project.

Aberrant architecture. Three or four false landings, empty, before arriving at the first floor.

No coherence. Two living rooms, which give directly onto bedrooms. A staircase that leads to a bedroom, which gives onto a kitchen. Huge rooms, almost empty. And so on.



Back outside, two rats attack me, completely disinterested in NPCs. The universe is a machine dedicated to my destruction; me and me alone.

*

The sky, by day, pale and yellowish (pleasantly, I don't know why) evokes me the North Sea, Bruges, Ostend...

It also looks like the sky in The Dark Eye.

At the same time, all blue and golden it is, it has nothing light and springlike. It evokes only strangeness, that of a momentary sunny dream before plunging back into the dark, atrocious.

I think back to this fantastic title by Léo Mallet: Abattoir ensoleillé.

*

Strange, sharp, threatening wrought-iron motifs (along the walls closing the properties, or at the windows). Nothing floral as in Art Nouveau for example. These forms do not relate to anything in nature and their vision is, for reasons difficult to discern, painful.

A city with a strange refinement, difficult for a small village of breeders in the middle of the steppe.

*

At the corner of a street, the angle from which I see a few bourgeois buildings, dotted with trees and a playground with sparse grass, and all this under heavy rain, suddenly reminds me of my childhood; one or more autumn afternoons, with my mother, on the outskirts of the hospital where she worked.

Another personal memory: at 9:35 p.m. (in the game). Low luminosity. Grey and heavy sky. Red brick houses, sharp grills, autumn weather: I don't know why, I remember the dark and gray morning of my return to school in Sixth grade.

*

 

With its curtains, window patterns, etc., the city has something profoundly feminine about it. It is not at all masculine as a city of monumentalist or brutalist style could be. Despite its 19th century red brick houses, it is feminine.

*

By playing without music, I realize how silent the city is without it. No voices, no laughter, no or little noise; nothing but dogs barking here and there.

*

It is a city that has no center. We are everywhere in a sleepy, foggy suburb. This city is not built for life.

*

These factories (slaughterhouses?) along the rails. Black stone, tiles, concrete. Without windows, like tombs. They fascinate me, but no matter how much I look at them, I can't formulate exactly why.


 

Inside the cathedral: its complicated, excessive ornaments, which evoke a breastplate or various objects but unrelated to architecture. For a fraction of a second I feel like I'm going to remember another building I knew a long time ago. Then it disappears.

*

Rust, metal, hardness. Cold, dirt, discomfort. Modern, industrial barbarism.


 

It mirrors the barbarity, ancestral and foolish, of the people of the steppes that surround the city.

*

This strange red moss, a sign of the disease, grows on the walls of houses in infected neighborhoods, like red ampelopsis in the fall. Red as blood, too, of course.



"Blood was its Avatar and its seal –– the redness and the horror of blood."

Perhaps "nature" is itself a disease; perhaps the word has no meaning.

*

Pathologic doesn't interest me at all for the specific world it tries to set up (the factions, Slavic folklore, the Inquisitor, etc.) although it is quite nice, original, interesting in itself - but only as a fairly faithful reflection of my own dreams, and of other cities of fiction that have built my imagination, all of which are also similar to each other. Is there a common archetype that we all draw on, and that I don't yet identify?