Posted on: November 26, 2025
Krasnoludek5
Владелец игрыИгр: 112 Отзывов: 41
Tedious, boring and a chore
I’ve heard a lot of good about Pathologic before playing it. That it is very atmospheric, that it is deep, and maybe even profound. That it has stuff to say. So I came with rather high expectations in some ways. Let me start with the positives. The atmosphere in the game is good. The town feels forlorn and dangerous, there are some mysterious black stone structures dotted around... and the atmosphere of the plagued districts is great. The color palette changes to a sickly tone, there’s clouds of disease, and the condemnd houses are full of screams of the dying and half-rotten furniture. It made excursions into the plagued districts to feel dangerous and kinda spooky. And... ummm... that’s it, I think? After playing Pathologic to completion for the first time, using no guides or external strategies, I don’t think the game is very good. In fact, I think this is a bad game with a cult following that is, frankly, not something I understand. The game feels deliberetly obtuse. It features no tutorials whatsoever, leaving you to figure out everything yourself as you play. I understand little handholding and generally do not mind it, but I think Pathologic crosses the line by not explaining any of it’s systems to the player, and then punishing him severely for not adhering to it’s rules. I think the game goes so hard into “no handholding”and “being hard” that it ends up disrespecting the player and his time. If you want to create a game about sufffering you do not do that by making the PLAYER SUFFER. If you did, you didn’t create a “deep” “profound” work of art. Most likely you’ve just made something that’s not good. Case in point – I had to repeat the first day, because nowhere does the game tell you that you are on a strict time limit every day. But it gets better – even when it made me understood that you have to advance the “main quest” each day or you’ll fail, it never told me HOW FAR I have to advance the main quest, so in fact I had to repeat day 1 twice until I got far enough. But that’s not all. The game told me there’s several children I need to protect. Fine, an understandable objective. One of them died in the later part of the game. Regrettable. A mistake, to be sure, but the game continued, so I assumed it’s an “allowed” mistake, and may reflect with a “worse”ending or something, but not catastrophic yet. After all – the other children were still alive. So I continued playing for a few hours. And I got an “everybody dies, gg thxbai” ending. So it turned out that the difference between one of them dying and all of them dying was... nothing? You lose one, you lose the game, but the game doesn’t TELL YOU until you sink a few more hours to it. Ehhh. In terms of gameplay, the game is mind-numbingly repetative and boring. I think more than half of it consists of running back and forth through the town, looking into dumpsters for stuff. There just isn’t much to DO in the game, other than the occasional fights with the looters, and some trade. So that leaves the story. And it is just sort of... there? I got the feeling, after playing Pathologic, that the story is much more about the worldbuilding and telling you about the town and various characters, but less about an actual PLOT. Sure, some things do happen and change over the coumerse of the game, but I would lie if I said I felt the story was impactful or majorly fascinating to me. To add to that, the game’s dialogue system is a bit annoying, because you don’t know if a character said everything it had to say before you click on them to initiate dialogue several times, rather than them saying all they have to say at once.
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