Pathologic Classic HD

I've become so addicted to playing this game I haven't seen my friends and family in days stop before it's too late

i played 5 hours without stopping

If you think about it hard enough, this game literally is a precursor to Death Stranding, except it isn't made by pretentious "genius". Game is not for everyone, but it is a unique one. Day 12 did the "nothing really matters you are a puppet" trope really well unlike some other games Dangan 3.

I simply cannot describe how absolutely incredible this game is. From the sound design to the atmosphere to all the unique ways the developers have subverted gaming tropes that still hold true today. This game (along with it's sequel(s)) has convinced me that video games are not only an art form, but the greatest art form. Truly a one of a kind.

However it's brilliance comes at a cost, it stands in defiance to what most people consider the point of video games: having fun. The gameplay is insufferable, consisting of 45% walking, 35% talking, and 20% loading saves, it's very easy to get screwed over by something you couldn't see and the game is as tough as it is unforgiving.

But that's the point. If the player doesn't feel the same struggles and triumphs as the character then can they say they've really experienced the story of that game? Ice Pick Lodge answered no.

I'm only on the morning of day 7, but yesterday I had an experience. I was trying to get to Little Vlad's from the entrance of the Termitary (IYKYK) with less than an hour before end of day, so I had to cut through a massive plague district. It took me thirty minutes of save-scumming between the plague clouds and this horrific situation I couldn't get out of. See, I was exhausted as hell, and I had coffee beans to treat this but also not much health to spare, and it would've worked out except I was chased through most of the district by three big rats. I think I died like ten times trying to kill the rats and take the coffee beans before exhaustion just killed me outright, or running too low on health and the coffee would kill me, or the rats would do the deed straight up or... Eventually I made a terrible discovery: I couldn't even make the journey, I would always die of exhaustion before reaching Little Vlad. The rats just kept me from realizing this sooner. I was too frustrated to understand there was no hope of salvation from the start. Even now, I've had a more horrifying epiphany: I had bandages, I could've used them! I thought of them too much as a source of money!

So I reloaded a save from some hours earlier, prepared better, made the same trek (only had to kill two big rats this time), and made it to Little Vlad's.

This game is not fun. 13/10

Truncated for character limits. Full review at Dragon Quill.

Pathologic is a survival horror/immersive sim… thing where you play as a doctor trapped in a rural village during the outbreak of a strange, supernatural plague. It is known for being incredibly grueling and punishing, requiring you to manage survival meters like hunger and exhaustion in addition to janky combat where you can die from a single hit, all while you must complete objectives under the yoke of a strict real-time clock that’s always ticking — think Majora’s Mask, but you can’t time travel. It flopped on release for obvious reasons, but became a cult classic among those of us who appreciate weird, deliberately counterintuitive games. Unfortunately, it ended up a bit too weird even for me; it felt like it tried to do too many things at once and as a result it’s hard to tell what the story was even trying to say.

During the tutorial you will learn about a particularly weird quirk of the game: Unlike in most games, dialogue trees rarely loop back to to the start. Once you pick an option, the conversation just continues along, and you won’t know what was behind the other options unless you restart. This is very explicitly deliberate, but to be honest I question the purpose. It ruins immersion because you have to quickload a million times to fully explore a dialogue tree, which of course players will do, because this is a story game, so of course players want to read all the text!

Your tutorial buddies don’t tell you the most important part of the game, which is how to make money: DUMPSTER DIVING. The town runs on a barter economy that allows you to convert this trash into useful items like food, bullets, and bandages. Dumpsters are regularly refreshed with random items, so as long as you remember to scrounge for trash on your walks about the town you’ll rarely ever want for money.

There is another complication to this: In a bit of realism, once the outbreak hits and the town is quarantined, merchants immediately begin price-gouging, with food prices multiplying tenfold on the very second day. You can start with a pretty sum, but it’s reduced to pocket change by the sudden inflation, which can quickly bankrupt you if you didn’t stock up on the first day. To make this even more punishing, prices abruptly drop on the next day, so if you justifiably believe the inflation will only get worse and try to buy up everything on day 2, you’ll find out you wasted your money. In a rather unrealistic twist, however, merchants will generously buy your items back at the new market rates, so you can still catch up pretty quickly by gaming the barter economy. Criminals also have their money drops automatically scaled to the new rates the moment the clock hits midnight, so you can get quick cash that way too.

But doesn’t everyone say the game is a super grueling resource management gauntlet? Well, it can be, but the difficulty largely relies on ignorance: You’re never told to dumpster dive, so new players won’t have a source of income until they figure that out. You’re never told prices will change or how, so it’s easy to get blindsided by inflation. And that will, in fact, render you pretty broke after a day or two! This is what most new players remember: The double whammy of their money becoming worthless with no way to restore it. That creates a strong impression. But the truth is, it’s a paper tiger. Once you figure it out, the economy is actually very easily gamed. The inflation rates are constant across all routes, so if you remember them from your first playthrough, then on the next you can easily dodge the price-gouging by buying low or selling high in advance. New wealth is injected into the economy from thin air via the dumpsters and enemy drops, so there’s never a feeling of truly finite resources. I amassed a considerable piggy bank around day 3 or 4 in every route and was able to comfortably coast on that for the rest of the game.

This is kind of a theme with the gameplay. Various quests will spice things up with intimidating setpieces, but they’re also paper tigers. As can probably be expected from an indie project cobbled together in 2005, the game systems are actually deceptively simple and very easily gamed once you see the wires. The developers tried to make up for this deficit by deliberately obscuring the wires as much as possible, but that only works for so long.

These paper tigers evidently work well enough for blind players, given the press the game has gotten… but I’d say the game doesn’t truly work on either end of knowledge. Because the game is so punishing of failure, you will have to reload a bunch and learn to game the system in order to progress at all. There are a lot of games that use paper tigers, but they usually avoid actual failure states, because that requires mastering the system and thus exposing it for what it really is.

Another aspect to the resource management is a reputation system: If it drops below a certain threshold merchants will stop selling to you, and if it drops really low townspeople will attack you on sight. It’s primarily affected by quest decisions but is also reduced by killing people, and can be restored through good deeds like treating the sick or uh… killing people. See, the game makes a distinction between normal townspeople, who it’s bad to kill, and criminals, who it’s good to kill. While the framing of calling it “reputation” means the game isn’t saying this is objectively right, the game never really interrogates this either, even when “innocent” townspeople frequently sympathize with the criminals and insist they’re only victims of circumstance. To further muddy this, criminals drop really good loot, so you will often be killing them for personal gain, which… is the exact same reason they’re killing people, so why are we any better?

Of course, since this is a story about managing a plague outbreak, there are also disease mechanics.

The disease first shows up on day 2, and from day 3 onwards entire districts of the town will become “infected”. The screen takes on a sickly green tinge, and you can see that the disease seems to affect the town itself, with scabs appearing on buildings and roads. If you are infected it’s extremely bad; the disease will slowly reduce your health over time, or not so slowly as it progresses. You can treat it with antibiotics, but they only reduce your infection by a proportional amount. The only way to cure yourself completely is through “shmowder”, a dubious mixture of random medicines that also reduces you to critical health.

…In practice, though, this is also a paper tiger. Every healer has a quest where they must test shmowder or panacea on themselves, giving you a guaranteed cure midway through the game. After that point, you have access to sanitary equipment that gives you enough protection against infection that you can actually completely nosell disease clouds. Even if you are infected, it’s trivial to accumulate antibiotics, and you only need to take about one a day to keep infection at negligible levels.

This is rather at odds with the insistence the Sand Plague is super ultra deadly and completely baffles medical science. I think I would have reduced the effectiveness of sanitary equipment and conventional medicine and made either the growth rate or the health reduction happen much faster. Additionally, we’re told the shmowder cripples people for life, but we can get back on our feet after a few bandages or a quick nap — it should have permanently reduced your max health or something.

this game just does not respect your time

If you're willing to push your way through a clunky walking simulator for tens of hours, there's a great reward waiting for you. This title has the greatest story and atmosphere I've experienced in a video game. The plot is mysterious and convoluted. Characters will lie to you at every opportunity, and even when they don't, their unique perspective will most often sound like gibberish. But don't be fooled, everything is connected, and it all makes sense at the end if you think about it hard enough. And you'll have a lot of time to think while strolling around the Town.

Coming here after playing Patho 2 many, many times. I really like the density of the writing and the mystery of it all, even knowing somewhat what happens. It makes me appreciate what they changed, but also what they didn't. Can't wait for 3!

DO NOT PLAY PATHOLOGIC.
Lots of PATHO, barely any LOGIC.
You are not ready for the way it will change you irreversibly.

I love walkable cities 🙏🙏😍😍

Pathologic is such a great concept for a game, very engaging and it manages to keep you on your toes throughout the entire game. I have yet to play a game that replicates this experience except for Pathologic 2, which I think is overall a more refined and more polished experience. However this one is a classic game and probably worth playing atleast once even though you played the sequel since in this one you can play the other 2 characters campaigns, those were left out in the sequel. Worth mentioning though is that this game is sort of slow to play, I think this is kind of migitated by interesting characters, engaging story and such, but it is still one of the reasons it took me so long to finish the first time around.

banger game 10/10

one of the best games ever

Cool setting and atmosphere but the "gameplay" is abhorrent. One or two interesting conversations or events an hour, if you are lucky.

yes

havent seen sunlight or gotten out of bed in so long playing this game on my laptop that i developed ricketsm now my legs are bent 180 degrees down the middle because of daniil. runs great on a laptop 10/10

a bizarre and confusing game, highly enthralling, full of intrigue

very good

pathologic 2 IS better, but thats kinda on the merit THIS game is 20 some years old

BEST GAME

this is the best game ever why is there blood in my mouth

Less of a game and more of a book with walking in between the pages. Don't listen to anyone who says this game is too hard, or unplayable, or you should skip it and play 2 instead (you should play 2, though). It's so much easier than people say it is, you just have to learn to speak the game's language, so to speak. The survival aspects really only matter for the first couple of days; once you have access to a gun and the burned out districts, things become pretty trivial. I would say that's a bad thing, but when the main focus of the game is the writing, it just lets you focus on that more. An experience that will live with you, mainly because you'll spend 70 hours completing it if you play all 3 paths, which you will.

Some general advice:
- Don't be afraid to savescum, it's fine, everyone does it. The game is janky as hell and F5 and F8 are your friends. Save before going through infected districts. Save before going into infected/abandoned buildings. Hell, save before talking to people; if you don't mind your manners or make the wrong choice, you can and will lock yourself out of things, or worse.
- Read your letters. You'll hear a little paper rustling noise every morning/afternoon, and see a symbol in the bottom left; press L (by default) to read them and start your daily quests (around 7:30 AM), or occasional side quests.
- Stock up on food on day 1. Sell whatever you don't need and buy food. On that same note, sell your medicine (except Feromycinum), Immunity is mostly pointless; see the first point.
- Entering a building despawns any hostile NPCs, and re-entering it refreshes the trade inventories of the NPCs inside. The latter is mostly useless, unless you find one of the blonde little girls, in which case you can reload her inventory to get Shmowders easily. You'll want at least 5 by day 12.
- Use a guide. No shame in it. If you want my advice, use it whenever you need it to point you in the right direction, but if you want to use it for the whole ride, that's fine, too. Whatever makes you experience the whole game, as long as you're reading.
- There are two great mods that I unfortunately can't link to, but are available on Nexus; 1080p Remastered HUD to make you not require glasses to read the HUD, and Better Map, which is exactly what it sounds like. People can say that the map is deliberately misleading, but after a few days of using it, it just becomes annoying.

Suffering incarnate. Recommended to anyone who enjoys the thought of eating glass.

Pathologic is a merciless first person survival RPG with psychological horror, FPS, and walking simulator elements. It is brutally hard, frustrating, janky, and strangely translated from Russian to English in the most theatrical and over-complicated manner. It's an ultimate test of your patience, perseverance, and potential masochistic tendencies.

The atmosphere truly is incredible which somewhat adjacent to Silent Hill in my opinion. Many people find it unpleasant looking, but I find the bleak, colorless atmosphere comforting yet overwhelmingly oppressive. The story is incredibly original and uncompromising, which can be played from three interesting and unique perspectives. The soundtrack consists of catchy, ambient electronic music which somehow beautifully contrasts with it's rural and early 1900's setting.

I'm genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed this game and can honestly say it's one of my favorite games now, 20 odd years after it's release. If you like it - you're prone to come to love it, but bare in mind a very small percentage of people even make it through the first day. Pathologic is an obscure classic and easily one of the most unique and unrecognized yet important games of all time.

I walked around at a snail's pace while getting randomly attacked and infected, helping npcs who all backstab me and each other and are doomed no matter what you do, and I was never even thanked for my 40 hours of meaningless effort.

10/10 One of the best games of all time, loved every second.

MMMMM GAME GOOD

.

Great game if you are pathological.

creepy looking survival game

MAN.

Dont play this

I didn't have fun for most of the first character, and I'm not sure when exactly the game clicked, but it was incredible. I wasn't sure if I'd be willing to play this game 2 more times after this from the other two characters perspectives, but at this point I can't wait.

10/10. Weird, dense, not particularly fun...but also engaging, smart, scary, unique, and despite the game not really being fun it kind of is at the same time. Super weird.

This game has done irreparable damage to my psyche, I can't, in good conscious, recommend it to anyone. Luckily for me, this game has also completely destroyed my moral compass, everyone should go play this game right now.

10/10 almost as good as 2

Worth it

i have never felt so miserable while playing a game before and i haven't even finished the bachelor's route yet

i love it! please help me!

Пиздец полный

Pathologic is exactly the game it claims to be: deeply weird, moderately unpleasant to play, thought-provoking, and janky in the best way possible.

I thought I would be prepared for the difficulty seeing as I play Lob Corp, but I was wrong. This game is hard in a confusing, we won't tell you the rules kind of way, but hey, "I'm not dead"

great game if youre autistic or possess any sort of unusual malady

serotonin

Everyone saying "this game is unfun on purpose" or "the game that hates the player" pisses me off so much to the point I just want to make a review to offset that.
This game isn't for everyone, but if it is for you, you'll love it. Each of the routes has amazing dialogue with a great standalone story, and they're even better working in tandem. The town really does feel alive through the great world, characters, dialogue, and music, so if you can get through the tens of hours of walking this game is more than worth it.

Gave me stockholm syndrome 10/10

A narrative so vapid the player must pour immense meaning into its void-hungry maw to draw and ordering thread between its feeble tacks. I believe this to be the intention, so in a way, the game is made well. I also think, generally, some types of stories and experiences are only suited to one type of media. Whatever the developers wanted to make, it would be better spent in a story or film, as it has failed in most aspects to provide a meaningful gaming experience.

Its only use is to waste time. And many games do that better. 4/10

The kinds of games one finds out by a bl drawing in tumblr

i'm definitely in the minority, i find this game to be both relaxing and fun. shooting people gives the player a mad rush if you ignore the fact that you're supposed to be a doctor oh god help me. i like that the game makes everyone who isn't the player really stupid at making decisions because that's exactly what working in frontline healthcare is like in my experience. The queer rep is pretty good too. wayyyy easier than patho 2. definitely play this game BEFORE you decide to become a doctor, nurse, social worker or serial killer.

What is morality? Shmowder at all costs

First of all, I only recommend this game if you played and enjoyed Pathologic 2 and want to explore other facets of its world and writing. If you have never played either, but have heard about the series through video essayists or perhaps the recently announced Pathologic 3? Play Pathologic 2 first, then come back.

Secondly, I think a lot of people oversell the difficulty of this game. Once you understand what you're doing it's not particularly hard so much as it is tedious, janky, and mildly annoying. If you can handle that and are capable of reading comprehension, you'll be fine. Don't let people steer you away from the game bc of its supposed difficulty. It's an experience worth trying to have if you are really itching to get your ass beat in the Town-on-Gorkhon some more after 2.

Enjoy your 60 hours of walking

not for everybody but if you like it you *really* like it. (i really like it.)

I planned to save the town but I faced the wall instead
10/10

Pathologic is a hidden gem in the horror genre, and despite being a bit old, it still delivers one of the molst intense thought-provoking experiences out there. The difficulty is no joke fr, this game is hard af. Its unforgiving, with its constant time pressure, survival mechanics, and moral choices that make every decision feel really heavy. The story is deep and unique, drawing you into its twisted world were nothing is at it seems. if you're looking that'll truly test your patience and your mind, Pathologic is an unforgettable journey.

10/10

really wonderful game, amazing story and atmosphere, people like to say this game is hard but i thought it was pretty easy gameplay wise, the only hard part was questing which this game doesnt have waypoints which is a good thing to me as it encourages exploration and reading to get you to know what ur doing but even then sometimes the next objective isnt outright said and results in you saving and talking to everyone to see wtf you have to do next. overall this game isnt as hard as people say theres tons of ways to exploit this game, reminds me a lot of fallout 1 where people say "games hard" despite being super easy if you know how to exploit games and are just good at video games in general. 9.8/10