Something dreadful at the corner of the eye, just beyond vision
The blood is tainted
Three healers, one unavoidable death. Twelve days left until....
Pathologic plays with death, shows us decay and tempt us with fate. Are you puppet for some unseen hand, the executioner send to a town final breath or a copious healer seeking his own salvation?
Everything bleeds...
An array of emotions
Paranoia is your best friend.
Dread, fear, urgency, distrust, claustrophobia. This and much more is what you feel when you play Pathologic, the first masterpiece from Ice-Pick Lodge.
You play as one of three characters, The Batchelor, The Haruspicus or The Devotress, each with the same seemless objective, each in the same place at the same, but under diferent circustances.
Pathologic plays as a survival game where everyday is a survival fight against hunger, infection and exaustion. Although the engine might look outdated it ends up beeing perfect to deliver a feeling of desolation and isolation. The dread and fear when entering the Silent House, the rush of blood when entering a infected district, slowly you will uncover this small, isolated town dark secret, or should I say dark secrets?
The art direction is up to par with The Void (or should it be the other way around?). Every street is carefully though out, the city layout, the buildings, the raw emotions that the city itself give away as some developer cataclysmic fore shadowing, taking its slow pace to embrace you, welcome you and suddenly plunge you into an abyss of raw madness laughing at your as your conscience slips away at an enervating pace, as unwinding cascades of decay swirling to you direction.
The mechanics and concepts of the game are simple, survive, It is as simple as that, but not as simple as it sounds.
An impossible building, a building full of blood and a building full of madmen, all ominous sculptures overlooking the landscape as you walk about the city streets, crawling, holding your breath as you strive to survice a few more minutes in the vain hope of finding that medicine you need. The walls start to close, chaos breaks loose, all around you, reality is crumbling as your sanity starts to sip away due to hunger and you are forced to choose sides in the power struggles the rule the city.
Sound wise, it sits up there on a high degree scale to convey those feelings, to make you feel unease at what is happening to the town, up to the shocking revelation that awaits you at the end.
It is hard to review Pathologic as there as things that mere words cannot be used to quantify what you see and ear.