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#lol my tldr review could be summed up as loved the game hated the devs
asleepinawell · 3 years
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hi Sarah, idk if I missed it but have you posted your thoughts on pathologic before?
hmm, I don't think I have. it was pathologic 2 specifically that I played. never tried the first one
I generally really liked pathologic 2. the atmosphere and aesthetic were completely on point and I actually bought it without knowing a thing about it after my friend sent me a screenshot of the plague doctor executors. I was just like ah yes a game for me. also playing it during a pandemic was, uh, quite something. but I like the tone of it and the mounting sense of desperation and how random and surreal it is. like the one part where you have to report to the town hall and the whole town freezes and you follow the trail of pointing tragedians was super cool. also the soundtrack was great and that opening where you walk through the doomed town gave me chills. and I loved the bulls! and artemy's snarky dialogue
oh also the mind map as the 'journal' or task page or whatever was a really cool system and I wish other games would try out something similar
on the flip side I had a low tolerance for some of the meta stuff with mark immortell which just felt kinda pretentious. I know a lot of people loved it but not my thing. to add to that I didn't like the very similar tone the actual devs took when they were finally convinced to add difficulty sliders for the game. that said something like 'we understand not everyone wishes to be enlightened by their experience' or something equally pretentious. their whole shtick has been making games so difficult and grueling that most people will never finish them. and no thanks, I will never think that adding accessibility options to games is a bad thing
on a somewhat related note, I had the misfortune to play it on console which I would really strongly advise against. the console versions crash constantly, corrupts your save files (sometimes multiple saves in the stack), has ridiculous load times to....walk down the street and while your game is trying to load the next area and you're frozen in place the rest of the game might start back up and oops you've been stabbed to death or caught the plague before you get control back. considering that each time you die you get a permanent penalty applied retroactively to all your saves, this sucks and makes the game even more miserable to play on top of the intended frustrations. so don't play on the console. (the pc version is much better). but yeah when you die because the game froze up briefly and then have to go listen to mark immortell, who embodies the devs, be condescending to you about your death that was caused by the shitty optimization of the game it's just like...fuck the entire way off my dude
my other sort of complaint was about the endings. I generally prefer the nocturnal ending, but I've done both and it felt kind of lame that there wasn't a middle ground ending. not because I wanted a perfect happy ending or anything like that, but because the conflict that was set up between the kin and the townsfolk mirrors a lot of real stuff in the world and it felt very lazy and unimaginative to be like well you can only ever have one or the other there's no other choice! it felt like it kind of negated some of the themes in the story too.
I've complained a lot in this post but I swear I really did enjoy it a lot and I'll probably play the other two parts if they ever come out (not on console though lol). I'd recommended it if you enjoy very challenging games with immersive narratives and high stakes and love the creepy surreal aesthetic. Also there is absolutely nothing wrong with turning down the difficulty sliders and just enjoying the story with the minimum amount of annoyance because it's (intentionally) hard to experience the full story on the intended difficulty, something I have opinions about that you can probably guess
I also enjoyed the marble nest, the dlc that went with it. it had more of the meta game stuff in it but I found it more tolerable and it was just a cool little game with those same great aesthetics
as a final note, I've seen very mixed opinions on the portrayal of the indigenous people of the steppe, the kin (who I don't believe are based on a real people but I won't swear to that), and I don't feel qualified to sort through that myself especially with only a couple vague tumblr text posts to go off of but I do think it's worth noting that there are some criticisms there and keeping that in mind while playing
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