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

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


 

The arrival in the city takes place at night, or more precisely very early in the morning. In Germinal, Lantier also arrives in Montsou at the end of the night, after having walked for a long time. This must correspond to some kind of archetype, the arrival in a new city early in the morning... but in fact, it mostly reminded me of the beginning of a fiction (interactive or not, I haven’t decided yet) that I’ve had in mind for years, where a young civil servant is assigned to a small town on the margins of his country, a sort of fictional double of Saint-Mihiel and Blâmont, and arrives there precisely at dawn.

 

There must be a childhood memory hidden behind all this. Not so hidden, in fact: I clearly remember those sad early mornings when my mother would take my sister and me to our nanny's. It was still dark, part of the family was still asleep, and I felt like a stranger arriving in a closed-off world, with its own rules, where I wasn’t particularly welcome. Arriving somewhere at dawn means finding people in their intimacy; by extension, an entire city in its intimacy.

In any case, in Pathologic, the first NPC you're invited to question greets you in some sort of dressing gown, which she won't take off during the twelve days of the story. Closed windows, dim lighting. A lot of drapes, everywhere in the interiors of the city; curtains, hangings. It must be festering in there. The perfect place for grime, stench, germs.

*

I visit an abandoned house after the epidemic has passed. White, cold light, neon-like, shining on wooden furniture and outdated wallpaper. It feels like being at my grandparents' house. The floor tiles too.

That omnipresent tiling also makes me think of a slaughterhouse, a hospital, or a morgue. The city in Pathologic is, in fact, founded next to a slaughterhouse.

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

*

The bedrooms have something 'folkloric' and childlike about them; a rocking chair, a wooden wardrobe, and bed.

All the houses have their curtains drawn or shutters closed, if not wooden boards sealing the windows. A city of closed worlds, disconnected, mute, and blind.

*

The poverty of the 3D house models, endlessly repeated, isn't bothersome: it reflects the poverty of reality. The reality of working-class neighborhoods.

*

Rooms are sparsely furnished, not spartan or uncomfortable, but minimalist. Their bareness appeals to me. Deep rest. A way of life that is still, silent, organic. Eating, sleeping. Time passing slowly. No past, no plans.

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 daytime sky, pale and yellowish (pleasantly so, for reasons I can’t explain), reminds me of the North Sea, Bruges, Ostend...

It also looks like the sky in The Dark Eye.

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

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

*

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, unsettling refinement, for a small village of herders in the middle of the steppe.

*

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

Another personal memory: low light, heavy gray sky. Red brick houses, sharp fences, autumn weather: for some reason, it brings back the dark, gray morning of my first day in Sixth grade.

*

 

With its curtains, its patterns on the windows, etc., the city has something profoundly feminine about it. It is not masculine at all, like a city with a monumental or brutalist style. Despite its 19th-century red brick houses, it feels feminine.

*

Playing without the music, I realize how silent the city is without it. No voices, no laughter, little to no sound effects; nothing but the occasional barking of dogs.

*

It is a city without a center. Everywhere feels like a sleepy, misty suburb. This city is not built for life.

*

These factories (slaughterhouses?) along the tracks. Black stone, tiling, concrete. Without windows, like tombs. They fascinate me, but no matter how much I look at them, I can’t quite articulate 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?