So I'm right now very immersed into the world of Pathologic 2, which is the newest game by Ice Pick Lodge, a avant-garde game developer from Russia who's also made games in the past such as The Void, Knock-Knock, Cargo!, and of course, the original Pathologic from 2005.Their games are huge love it/hate it games which are not easily accessible to the average consumer, often being games of purposeful challenge and contesting game design to experiment with a type of game that is not often seen and does not focus on the positive emotions of humans, IE the games are not fun, they're not about being a hero or a power fantasy, they're not even about win states (we'll get back to this point later on). However, they have amassed a cult following over the last 15 years because while there's a huge barrier of entry of acceptance of non-standard and sometimes very frustrating game design behind their games, their mechanics often have a place deeply rooted in the actual themes and the feeling they're going for with the games they craft. Often alongside this these games have amazing stories (like legitimately some of the best stories within the industry), nail their atmospheres and intrigue, and provide an experience unlike anything else of the market because they're daring enough to break what so many consider to be "good" game design.
Now Pathologic 2 doesn't have much mainstream attention yet as it's just released on PC, and as most game coverage sites are primarily focused on the console space and only the PC games that make a scene elsewhere, it'll probably only get a boost in popularity of media coverage once the game hits Xbox One and (possibly) PS4 down the line. There still are a number of reviews that have sprung up, and most of them have been what you can expect. There's been a lot of 6s, 7s & 9s. So for what it is, the game isn't reviewing badly. And maybe this thread is best saved once Pathologic 2 hits the console space.
So why am I making this thread?
Pathologic 2's most notable major outlet review at the time of writing is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Pathologic 2: Wot I Think, which has been causing a lot of stirs within the cult audience for the game. Now thankfully this audience while expressing some disappointment haven't gone to attack the author, even though the review chooses some unfortunate choices in passages like comparing the game to Dark Souls to talk about difficulty in games. A lot of people were disappointed since Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a previous writer who wrote an amazing three part analysis "review" of Pathologic which is what got many people to try the original game in the first place.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun doesn't give review scores, but used to. They gave the original game a 6/10, but published this piece from a different writer, the original review writer even writing this about Pathologic to open the piece:
Quintin then presents a very strong understanding of what Pathologic thematically was about, why the game had to not be fun, what it does right, why it's a game that might not appease most audiences, but why a title that needs to be condemned was so important. Now while obviously different people/writers will have different takes on a game, and what Quintin thinks of Pathologic isn't what everyone on the site will think, there's some disparity from the reader side between the excellent series of articles they published on the original game, and the recent review of the sequel. In big part since a lot of the review of the sequel is spent criticizing the very things that the article understood, which shows a misunderstanding of the game they're playing, and the reviewer even admits they just stopped playing the game about a fourth of the way through the game and wrote their review from that.
This has lead to an interesting effect with this being a niche title in having other reviews from more niche sites talk about this very point, and it being something discussed around the title. One such example is IndieGame.com's review they published today of the game, which their opening passage actually inspired me to make this thread:
There's more pieces offering their bit here, but there's something becomes immediately clear when you begin reading the various different outlet opinion pieces on Pathologic 2: Game reviewers are not equipped mostly to deal with a game like Pathologic 2.
Now that might sound a bit pretentious, but funnily enough this was also talked about with the original Pathologic game by reviewers at the time. In fact, the situation with Pathologic 2 so closely mirrors the original game's reception and these comments being passed around, and reviewers looking at each other in how to tackle such an unusual game, that it's interesting 15 years later it still doesn't seem like the scene is ready to review a game like Pathologic.
Pathologic 2, and indeed the original game, are games about failing. That's something that makes Pathologic a really hard to talk about game, because the thing is "Winning" is what universally almost every game is about. And if not about winning, it's often about "Creating your own fun." Pathologic is not fun, and it's not about winning, it's about accepting your failures. The game gives you impossible odds to contest, it shows you information of you failing on screen all the time. One heavy point that people criticize for the game is that your hunger diminishes too quickly, so they constantly had to be finding food. The thing is, if the reviewers had spent more time with the game, they would learn that this is definitely the intent. In video games, we're trained to not let gauges empty out, game UI makes use of gauges to often show progress, and the higher the gauge is, the "better" we are or in EXP, how close we are to the next little victory. Pathologic does the opposite of this, it purposefully distresses the player to make them panic. Many will view your hunger bar diminishing and emptying all the time as a negative, but there's two complicated sides to this:
01. The game wants to stress the player for food, it wants to make the player value food even over your own weapons, so that finding a loaf of bread is more valuable than finding a gun, and that you might actually give up and trade your weapons for a loaf of bread and milk, as was famously cited for the original game even.
02. Though there's a bar that empties and is purposefully trying to stress the player out and make them scourge for food, the penalty for making your hunger bar go empty is actually very lenient. You do lose health when you're hungry, but you lose is at a snail's pace. It does add up especially as healing items are a rarity in Pathologic, and in fact most healing items also have negative effects within the game to other aspects of your character, but when starving if you're on full health you most likely won't die from starvation in a single day. In fact, you're SUPPOSED to be starving, you're in a plague-ridden village which is poor and barely has food that isn't rotting or being stolen by others also struggling for food. Many people get stressed out in a survival game when a "survival" bar empties, and so having hunger reach zero and be such a struggle to maintain is viewed as a negative. But that's assuming the bar is supposed to be full and the game's survival mechanics are failing because it's hard to keep yourself from going hungry. But the game actually WANTS the player to be starving most of the time, to be struggling with food, and in fact most of the game is designed with you starving and losing health really slowly in mind.
Pathologic 2 is a game designed so everything is stacked against you. You have freedom to do as you want, it's one of the only games where the story of the game is not waiting for you. If you miss story, you miss it for good in that run, and the story will continue without you. NPCs will lie and try to scam you for their own benefit. Just because you do something for someone doesn't mean they owe you anything. You are constantly managing various micro systems, while trying to both save people and yourself. Ice Pick Lodge themselves have talked about this being a game about accepting failure, to roll with the punches in a situation that is progressively more and more dire, to simulate a bleak hopelessness of a village dying of plague.
To quote the IndieGame.come's review again:
Even the negative reviews of Pathologic admit there is some absolute brilliance in the game especially as an art piece, but they get too stressed out/frustrated by the mechanics and surviving to push through, because it's not fun. And that's fair, I'm not critiquing people with this mindset. I'd even say it's very understandable, and also it makes sense to critique that in a traditional game review.
But Pathologic 2 is trying to be a frustrating game and not fun, so how does a reviewer tackle a game that is actually brilliant at what it's trying to accomplish, just what it's accomplishing isn't something that traditional games go for, and moreso maybe something most players aren't looking for at this point in time? If reviews of other mediums were purely about how enjoyable an experience may be, that'd be a huge limiter on these mediums. There are films you will go to sit down and watch which may make you repulsed, frustrated, hard to watch, but have brilliance in it's bleakness. These films are not made to be easy watches, but they most certainly do have artistic merit. If every film was trying to be "fun" or easy to watch, the medium itself would be greatly restricted.
Games still haven't fully gotten out of some design things we've had since the beginning of video games. They exist and will continue to exist for good reason, but I also personally don't think that means every game need pertain to these design philosophies. I cannot think of game other than Pathologic where the game isn't always edging the player to win, that many view good game design to be pushing players to win, and failure is just a fail state. Pathologic is a game that's designed for failure, when you fail in Pathologic, the game continues, you don't restart any mission, the story doesn't wait for you, the world moves on without you. Even when you die in Pathologic, the game takes you to a weird world where you receive punishment. But actually, dying in Pathologic 2 leads you down a very cool alternate path through the game, every time you die the game actually makes it harder to live, giving you more and more debuffs making it harder to survive (less max health, faster depleting hunger, madness, as brief examples), and starts taking you down a unique path of failure. In fact, the path of failure is incredibly interesting and unique in Pathologic 2, and is worth experiencing by itself. On top of this, even if you get yourself into a corner in Pathologic 2 (as there are definitely situations you can end up at death's doorstep and unable to survive to Day 12 of the plague), you will have almost guaranteed gained something from your time to greater prepare yourself for the next time you take on the hurdle of surviving the 12 days of the plague.
The game is designed not with the player winning in mind, but with the player failing. I cannot think of another game where that's the case, we are conditioned so heavily by games to always aim to win, failure means to just try harder, and games handhold us to winning conditions. So to have a game that not only actively spits on you trying to win and make you struggle if you really want it, but prepares for your inevitable failure and provides a path and things gained from accepting failure and rolling through the punches, is really hard to grasp since it's something we really don't see prioritized in video games.
In most of the negative reviews of the game, they say there's brilliance but they gave up after frustration made them want to quit due to pressing issues the game had for them. Most of them even admit they didn't complete the game and don't want to go back to it ever again because it's so stressful, frustrating, and not fun. And that's completely fair, in fact that is critique I think most can take to heart because it speaks true to gaming experiences of frustration we've all had before I'm certain. However, because they quit, they never really learned that failing in Pathologic 2 is okay, and actually the game has interesting design if you'll let yourself fail gracefully. It is literally a game about coming to accept failure and clawing to survive with what you have.
But it's a game for a niche audience, most may not want that experience. Yet are reviews supposed to be about the mass appeal of something? Then it is a personal player's experience and perspective on the game. But what if the review doesn't represent the game itself well, because the reviewer had a fundamental misunderstanding of what the game was even about? In a famous example, there was IGN's review of Football Manager, where the reviewer and the site took down the review and apologized because they reviewed the game as something it wasn't and misrepresented it badly. But can they really be blamed for something like Pathologic and not "getting it" if it's something that's so against the norm of what we understand game design to be about?
The video game medium is still growing, and there's still a lot of signs that our medium is still finding itself. One of the biggest signs of this is the current state of game reviews being unable to really fully embrace something non-traditional, due to instilled understandings of what's good and bad in game design due to how game's have been designed to this point. But as the medium grows, we will see more experimentation and breaking down and deconstruction of game elements to make new experiences with entirely different focuses and types of design. The field will adapt with the times as they change, but the question arises of how the public and critics will perceive such non-traditional games when they're so strongly conditioned to a certain type of design with win-states, progress guaranteed, or game design about challenging the player to succeed.
I feel there's aspects of all of this I have failed to cover here, like the difference between a game like Pathologic and a rogue-like (one of the biggest being Pathologic is a narrative driven game of time and resource management rather than a game you have a single life to run through made to be infinitely replayable and fun through it's gameplay loop), and I'm almost certain someone will bring a really good argument to the points I've made either due to something I've overlooked, a basic truth, or something I spaced on mentioning while writing this up. But I want to get this out there, and see if stirs anyone enough to respond because I want to talk about this: What Pathologic 2 highlights about game reviews for non-traditional games. That we should have a discussion about games that begin to really break from traditional design philosophies, and how the medium is still teething with a basic understanding of what it can be (though growing more and more aware each day and experimentation), and how those sort of experiments can exist in this day and age. Moreso, how to take games not aiming to be fun, games made to break you down and experience negative emotions, and if we can accept games that aren't meant to be traditionally pleasant but achieve with brilliance (which again, even the reviews who got frustrated and quit the game cite there's brilliance they do see within it) by providing the sorta' unpleasent experience they want you to? Should you critique a direction simply because it makes you experience negative emotions even if it's brilliant in what it sets out to do, and that includes the negative emotions? Are games different from films or books or any other artistic medium where fun and pleasant consumable experiences are not the only type of work to exist and have merit?
Let's talk about this Era. What do you think?
