I usually enjoy games with interesting stories and atmosphere, huge emphasis on exploration, unconventional design, etc. No matter how hard I've tried I couldn't force myself to enjoy Pathologic though. While there actually are a lot of intriguing ideas going on in the game, I think despite all the good effort, it just turns into a confusing and hostile mess. My last effort of finding some enjoyement in the game was when I started to use console commands for a playthrough (and thus skipping all the annoying walking), but didn't matter because I got lost in the chaos of annoyingly overwritten plot anyway. I recommend watching video essays and reviews covering the game instead, those may probably be much more fascinating than trying to achieve anything meaningful by playing the game.
This game is surprisingly tricky I can tell you - because it seems like an ordinary puzzle game for children with colorful and cute characters (which is partly true indeed) but it's so much more actually! Not to mention that there are some challenging (and fun) puzzles in the second half of the game. Yono and the Celestial Elephants has surprisingly lots of really interesting topics about life and death, freedom, politics(!), artifical life, responsibility, etc. so get ready to be blown away how smart and mature a game made for kids can be... well... sometimes. For me the most enjoyable part of the game was the human city because of the optional social quests, so I was a little bit disappointed when it turned out the game'd focus on the puzzles and platforming later on. And there are a lot of them which could be tiresome here and there. Another thing is altough the level designs are creative and adorable indeed they don't really make sense sometimes - but I'm not really sure if it's intentional (the prison dungeon levels was almost surreal) or not. Unfortunately the game has a few semi-serious problems what could be a little bit frustrating (some puzzles could be failed and you have to reload the level from the menu) but I don't want to nitpick here. The game was created by almost one person entirely and it has a pure hearth and soul - I definitely recommend you to check it out (especially if you have kids because it's amazingly cute)!
