Before Dishonored, Arkane Studios had been quietly making solid immersive sims like Arx Fatalis, their very decent Ultima Underworld homage, for around ten years. If Dishonored 1 was their first game which felt fully featured and distinctive, then Dishonored 2 is their masterpiece, a culmination of a decade of experience toiling away at one of the most difficult genres for any developer to realize well. (Arkane Austin's Prey, hopefully soon also available on GOG, is their very good version of a modern day System Shock.) The average level in this game is intricate and layered, with many secrets and nooks waiting to be discovered by a patient and methodical player; the exceptional levels here - one involving a mansion with moving walls made of clockwork, another allowing the player to see and shift back and forth in time - are among the best I've played in any game. Dishonored is a series that prizes player choice, flexibility, and power above all else, playing a bit more like a superpowered Deus Ex than the challenging stealth of Thief to which it is often (misleadingly, I think) compared, but this time through there is an explicit option to reject powers which the game is balanced around just as much as a "normal" playthrough with Emily's or Corvo's powers. I've now run through it three times with each of those playstyles and there's still more to see and do I haven't done - odd as it seems for a title with a stealth focus, for example, the game has a very robust combat system for people who like to play a little louder. As for weaknesses, the narrative here is an oddly unengaging rehash of the DLC for the first game - playing them back to back makes that unfortunately apparent. And while Karnaca is beautifully designed with a rich Mediterranean feel to the art direction, it lacks the weird quasi-Victorian charm of the whale-based society of the first game. (In-game, whale power is being phased out.) But what it does well it does without parallel.
Pathologic is a game about games, and a game about theater - about /playing a role/ in both senses of that word - which asks you, the player, to embody one of three key parts in the grim play Ice-Pick Lodge has created for you, represented by three different healers with three different philosophical approaches to life and medicine in stopping a plague in a small town in the great grass steppe of Eurasia. Each player character has a wholly different part to play than the other two, with non-player characters of different classes and social strata reacting differently to each protagonist. The many and sundry characters of the town are so memorable I think I'll never forget some of them, as each has a distinctive voice and personality and philosophy which comes through rather brilliantly in the excellent new translation presented by this "Classic HD" version. Pathologic is often called a horror game, although I think it is most accurately described as an adventure - there is a truckload of dialogue, and walking around town and talking to people are the core mechanics - with a first-person perspective and survival mechanics, wherein everything is stacked against you, and any upper-hand you might transiently have can be quickly worn away on a bad in-game day. NPCs will lie, manipulate, and conceal information; prices for vital supplies will spike; and the town will consistently become ever more dangerous to traverse day by day until you find yourself desperately running through an orchestrated simulation of chaos in its latter third. It is forbidding, difficult, and even oppressive, yet unimaginably rich and rewarding, thoughtful in a way that video games rarely ever are, if you can get used to its scrappy combat and occasionally poor quest design.
