So, I initally really liked this. You play as a revolutionary judge during the Terror in revolutionary France, and it's a decent, if not particularly in depth simulation of the madness of that time. Very quickly your priority becomes preserving your own hide rather than meting out justice, and it honestly becomes pretty chilling how coldly you find yourself distorting the very concept of justice for each trial. The verdict is almost always decided within a few moments of the trial beginning and you seeing how the various factions breathing down the back of your neck feel about the possible outcomes, actually giving the defendant an in depth cross examination is usually not even worth the time as it could influence the jury and put them at loggerheads with you. To add to this, the character you play as is, to put it nicely, a social climing viper, and as the game progresses the court cases almost fade into background noise as you get sucked into an increasingly high stakes series of intrigues with various other important personages in Paris. It plays out quite non linearly, it does tend to feel a little too easy and too simplistic, but you could say that for the game as a whole, on a whole it still manages to be very engaging and quite gripping. It also has a very nice art style and music. Sadly, towards the end of the second act, things begin to go very wrong. The intrigues basically solve themselves, and then a character who feels like the human personification of shadow the hedgehog randomly shows up and destroys the entire third act. He's secretly behind everything, although neglects to give a single detail as to why, and feels like he walked in out of a particularly bad anime. It completly ruined what was a flawed but pretty decent game up to that point.
I'll admit to being somewhat jaded and generally quite trepidatious towards remakes, it all too often feels like they are simply taking the name and a few token references for the sake of brand recognition, then make whatever the hell they want. I was worried this would be the case here, and the cryptic development didn't help. I am very surprised to say, it's really damn good. I almost want to call it a glorified remaster, but the game is as old as I am. Nightdive have brought a false 3D maze game with sprited enemies into the modern age, and it's entailed a ground up remake of the original game. They've gone out of their way to make it as respectful to the original as possible, as almost the entire original game is faithfully recreated. The UI is less overwhelming, but it still maintains the clunkyness that adds tension, and a few of the more redundant weapons are removed. They added a audio log about a nearby wormhole to link to the second game. It looks great, sounds great and was a clear labour of love for the developers, and I cannot emphasise enough how good it is.
I was expecting this to be a lot better than it ended up being sadly. It has an intially promising start, with you waking up on a beach, foreboding clues and some strange artefacts. Sadly it has a tentacle monster appearing on the beach within about 5 minutes of you starting, and what little subtltely there is dies right there. It's not even really a horror game, more an incredibly disjointed spooky walking simulator that takes you on a whirlwind tour of a lot of Lovecraft's work. Most of it consists of sections which are only a few minutes long, where you solve a brief puzzle or get chased as you wander through surreal dreamscapes. Most of it's not terribly well executed, and whilst there are a couple of really nice visuals, even most of them are sub par. However, the development appears to have mostly been done by one person, so I can't really get too mad at it. It really tries to work in as much of the wider mythos as it can, even if most of it is as meaningful in the scheme of the story as a random seagull you walk past It's well intentioned if nothing else. It's honestly not great, but I don't regret playing it. Would reccomend if you really like lovecraft and it's on a sale.
Pathologic is honestly one of the best and one of the worst games that I have had the good fortune and the misfortune to play. For the good, the atmosphere is top notch. The game draws you into the bizare world of a nameless town on the Steppe in Russia, roughly a thousand miles from anywhere else, a unique fusion of early twentieth century and steppe culture. The soundtrack is eerie, and the whole town manages to feel very distinctly wrong, although with no clear reason why. The story is fascinating, and I will say nothing about it here, go experience it for yourself. It's a very unique and memorable game, that I cannot reccomend highly enough. However, it is also a broken and barely finshed mess. The game will probably top out around 80-100 hours if you play all three characters, and the atmosphere can carry you maybe halfway through a playthrough before it starts to get really really dreary. You cannot run, and combat is a broken and barely functional mess of almost nonexistent player hit detection and enemy hit detection which almost never misses. The game is utterly terrible at telling you where you are supposed to be going or what you are supposed to be doing, to the point where I ended up playing through most of it with a walkthrough open on my phone to even know where to go. You can literally lock yourself out of progressing by picking the wrong dialouge options, and having characters clam up and refuse to speak to you. The Survival mechanics, which should be a core part of the game are very easy to break by farming muggers for cash (If you can survive their homing missile knife attack) or by simply finding a gun and murdering looters, at least until the gun's durability goes down and suddenly it has the effectiveness of a water pistol. Due to horrible broken design I cannot reccomend. See my issue here... I was entranced by the story, but hated the part where it actually had to be a game. So I both Highly reccomend and urge you to keep away.
