Tedious as fuck pacing, no actual gameplay, like a bloober game BUT! redpill after redpill including some damn awesome occult, political and theological exchanges. Art and architecture is AMAZING at points, decisions do make dramatic changes BUT lipsync is off, characters are ugly bastards, performance is horrid on gtx1060 or equivalent and lower, controls are okkk, pacing is fucked. Overall pretty poor game EXCEPT in its formula. Spending points, talking, conversations, and the general story is fantastic despite mediocre ending which leaves you satisfied though. I can recommend this game to anyone who loves smoking reefer and reading occult, esoteric and generally highly philosophical texts and literature like Kybalion, John Milton´s Paradise Lost as examples. The books in the game gave me enough to study already. Paracelsus was a weird motherfucker...... Redpill the game on top some rothschild based conspiracy about napoleon, washingtons freemasonry, "plottwist" and how easy it seems to some to imagine what the illuminati, bilderberg etc would actually behave like. Grown up children /Kappa. And this is where it crumbles, sometimes it´s serious, other times it´s execution turns out to be... comical. Some femi sentence here, some conserv sentence here, you can see I´m emphasizing this hard as it´s a pretty long game for it´s pacing issues and you really need some love for classic literature, philosophy, history and sadly some too comical fantasy elements. Recommended for any knowledge seeking based lifeform. Not recommended for the casual adventure player who wants to enjoy themselves in a lovely game.
Story, meh including weak plottwist built upon a lie just so the big interesting teased endmission really just sticks to some really petty weaksauce. Same turn around and again and now you move forweard and run endlessly meaningless towards nothing layers of twitch mindjack acid trip segments. Including some irritating framepacing, occassional random stutter and chromatic abberation, bad field of view, you gotta fix it in the cfg files, look up pcgamingwiki. What´s worst is the pacing from mid to end as it´s pretty strong in the beginning, very intriguing in fact, but the nanophage, just a tool to create some atmosphere, don´t expect much when you play the game and wonder what magic awaits you. Horror, that´s pretty strong in the beginning, especially basements parts, non acid trip exploration is what you 80% of the time do. No puzzles, well maybe one.... no gameplay except two segments of hide n seek against a outlastish monster but even worse because it follows a set path routine. So who enjoys this game? Me, when I´m stoned out of my mind just chilling and tripping. You? Only if you, like me, love this amazing 70-90`s lofi paradigm eastern european polish low tech meets super hightech neonoir cyberpunk setting with rutger hauer. It´s a cool and AESTHETIC walking sim with horror segments. That´s about it.
Spritework? MASTERFUL and STUNNING Movement and input latency? BEAUTIFUL and RESPONSIVE Weapons? Only a few, but all make sense have abilities you gcan rock your balls off to and man the ebst weapon since the invention of sliced bread, SHOOT PLANETS and BLACK HOLES. Sound? FANTASTIC Soundtrack. HEIL DEM GROßMEISTER ANDREW HULSHULT! Level Design? Can I for just one second not shout how brilliant it is? IT´S BRILLIANT Story? That´s where it crumbles. Kinda, I said in its genre, not in comparison with Rollercoaster Blockbuster Number 0948948#, but the esoteric "magickal" makes it unique like hexen did once. Spookingly atmopsheric worlds inspired by all kinds of Acid trips and the occult. Ever heard of Melchizedek? Theocracy and government systems you were unaware of? There´s a star of melchizedek and it made me google it, and go down the rabbit hole of western and middle eastern abrahamism. Brb gonna continue my occult studies into freemasonry, rosecreaux, thule, bahai, scientology, anthrosophy, theosophy and charles manson at this point Kappa. I love this kind of little droplet that, through self action and research goes on deus ex levels of knowledge seeking in video games even if it´s just triggered by a single symbol of meaning that was once forgotten in certain belief systems. It can get kind of tedious after a while, but ít´s always entertaining. boss fights are bit unbalanced with the mace (don´t know if already patched) and well, recycling one boss once is a bit of a shame. But in total, barely anything I´d hate except maybe that combat is too simplistic. Some of the songs though, I fell in trance and studied with it. I can´t even tell you how immersed I got into this games world once I smoked a fat blunt and just lost track of time. All time favorite together with dusk!
4 out of 5 because it´s mostly a too harshly unbalanced fight against bars and stats, fetchquesting and generally if you go pacifistic, which you will unless you use the custom difficulty sliders, you will realise it´s a pure walking sim most of the time. The Original was just that. Mostly walking and trading. PLG2 is just that too MOST of the time, but with reduced walking times and with sprinting and more way more combat. PLG2 is a reIMAGINING of pathologic 1. EXTREMELY atmopsheric story, world and philosophies, intriguing characters and a still beautiful hobo with a shotgun style hobo economy. Item spawns are smart as in, the game at certain days helps you give you enough water flasks/bottles when you need them, other items you still have to scavenge. this game, in it´s own terms without referencing pathologic 1 from now on, does many things better than most games, but also poorer than some others. Combat, is way improved but still janky and too stamina based. the thing about decisions decisions, decisions is a bit of a fluke in the endgame, but it does have many branches within the days from 2 to 11. Pathologic 2 plays within 12 days, each day 2 real life hrs. It is generally built with a starting point, many paths towards two/"three" endings. What this game does best is the world building, the mystery, the art, the sound (except weapon soundmixing), the general feeling of dread as you grow a personal attachment of these transcendental decisionmaking processes, and some characters. The economy is unforgiving and brutal, combat still does too. You will probably save often. You will walk alot, you will read a lot, you will hate your decisions alot . This game does one thing perfect, letting you feel like a microbe in a cosmos of fate. Immersive Sim? 100% in my book. It´s tedious, it´s beautiful, entrancing, torturous. So is framepacing, performance sometimes and the ressource grind. Exploration isn´t as rewarding as you´d expect either. Unique!
Runs decently actually, technically fine for modern OS´s but one shit game I played as a kid. Still hella fun to just get high and play some deeply atmospheric early 2000 jank. Jank your wiener and get janked by enemies with aimbot and foliagewallhack and expect massive resistance from all sites so don´t suffocate on the thicc branches of then jungle, you in NAM BOY. Only thing that helps here is to lower expectations and prepare before taking this piece of software too serious. Like a fine B movie, this game entertained vietcong fans a bit, before we realized, there will never be anotrher vietcong.
I expoected 640x480 only as this was still a CRT only era game, no fix but intense altering of game files, check pcgamingwiki. gog won´t bother and shouldn´t. you should though. Same tens of issues if not played or emulated on win xp and a monitor that cvan handle blurfree upscaling like CRT´s. I have to stress this, just like no one lives forever and the janky as fuck lithtech engine in its early days, this game needs massive amounts of work done by yourself. Don´t expect something that works out of the box. Just for having this on gog, which is a goddamn wonder in itself, I recommend shooterfans of early the 2000´s to just get drunk, play this game 4:3 and go full crusty CRT and enjoy. Indie Jank Hidden and Dangerous meets Medal of Honor Allied Assault in some deep atmopshere wrapped up in wonky af technical skeleton.
I did not notice anything game breaking so far, having leveled up henry for 50 hrs and almost finished the main quest and many side quests and activities. Except for the sloggy and slow tedious fetch questing here and there in the middle fo the game, it´s a remarkable RPG with satisfying combat mechanics and an atmopshere at night and day rivaled by almost nothing on the market. Balancing is very well done, better than bethesda/ some bioware titles from what I have played in trading, difficulty and generally mechanics. The stealth is sensitive and requires a lot of learning just as every other aspect in the game, but once you level up, get rich, get suited and learn the mechanics patiently, you will raise hell and become truly a cuman and bandit slayer. The Story is epic but also pretty average at points, it´s a slowburner until the end, which I see will be more of what has already been given in the few epic moments. Try and buy. What hurts is performance and occasional ai bugs, due to a very well optimized, but sadly outdated Cryengine 3.4+ which had bad LOD and drawcall issues and severe pop in. My i5 9600k on 4.8ghz smashes the game cpu wise but it can get heavy on utilization from 40 to 80% on alll 6 cores and in towns you either have to slide object draw distance and texture detail distance from 20/20 down to 5 or 10/20 to minimize the stutter. That´s only heavily NPC and AI path routined areas which are rare, mostly rattay the big city or sasau a bit.´ Outside in the wild this game runs stable 60 in 1620p on medium/high settings with a 1080ti. I highly recommend leaving shadows on high though as medium disables grass contact shadows. Lighting and generally other settings barely change from ultra to medium, so play with high and medium around a bit. 0.5 off for repetitive and lengthy tasks which destroy pacing a bit too much. 4.5/5 RPG, very forgiving hurdles and a lot of hidden and dangerous 2 similiarities. Czech games as always I need more of!
