Update #21 - Pathologic (Patreon)

If you haven't checked it out already, the GOG Winter Sale is currently on. They're selling most of the games I've covered in videos pretty steeply discounted, along with a ton of other older games. In fact, Pathologic HD is a little over a dollar which is well worth it considering it can net you 60-70 hours of playtime if you go hard into it. It'll likely be going on sale on Steam during their own sale if you want to wait for that too. The company is having financial trouble, and I'm hoping they do alright after what I've played.

Anyways, I've completely finished Pathologic HD. All three characters. All of the endings, secrets and all. It's a good thing I got started on it early since this is by far the most playtime I've needed to put into a game for a video. I know that some people will use set times to record games for videos, around the lines of "10-20 hours then I'm done". This is definitely an efficient way to do things, and it makes sense for a lot of games that stay the same all the way through. In my case I've played every single player game to the end no matter what, and Pathologic really pushed my commitment to "no matter what".

Most of Pathologic's gameplay consists of walking . . . and walking. Walk some more. Keep walking. The term "walking sim" is now meaningless to me after completing this. Before this, most "walking sims" I had played were generally very short, linear, and fairly on the nose story wise. In complete contrast, Pathologic is long, tedious, and punishing but good lord are the story and themes something else. Despite the tedium, it really captured more strongly than any other game in recent memory when everything started clicking together. It gives me high hopes that the remake/reimagining while do it justice so that more people will be able to play it themselves someday since this is still firmly inside a wall of inaccessibility. Not from people being too dumb to understand the story or "too casual", but rather just a test of patience and sanity. Pathologic pushes those to my absolute limits, and I don't think I'm going to play any game that someone tells me is "slower than Pathologic". That being said, I do think that simply playing the Bachelor character in a specific way is enough to get the most out of Pathologic without playing the Haruspex and Changeling, though they do illuminate a lot more about the story and world. From what I understand their characters were more rushed in development, and even the restored Changeling content from the Classic HD version didn't put it up to the same level. 

In case you couldn't tell already, the video is going to be very story/themes focused. More so than any other video I've done so far to the point it's bordering on being an "analysis". I typically stray away from going deep into this territory, since ideally I hope that people are going to play the game themselves and come to their own conclusions. With something like EYE I'll go more into the nuances of it if I figure "very little people will play this but be curious", and Pathologic meets that criteria a hundred . . . a thousand times more than EYE. The remake is also going to have some changes to the story, so I'm not going to feel too horrible about revealing so much of what blew my mind in it. The beefiest bits will of course be inside a spoiler section, but at the moment I'm seriously wondering if it's going to end up longer than the rest of the video. It's too early to tell since I'm still editing the usual presentation/gameplay parts. Time will tell.

The video is going to be out before Christmas. Nearly ever waking moment will be devoted to it, and I'm aiming for the usual release time Friday. Failing that it will simply be "when it's done sometime before Christmas". It's just such a complicated beast than my usual shittiness at predicting video length is really going haywire here. I have more recorded footage than ever before, with the blessing that I've got it all categorized and named and I can tell them apart from thumbnails. Aurora 4x and Cultist Simulator were REALLY bad in that regard. Before the year is over I'll have a post hammering out the plans for the coming year similar to the one I posted a few weeks ago just more refined. I can't think too far ahead about that now since I'm trying to retain all the batshit things that happened in Pathologic.

Thanks for backing me, I hope you'll enjoy the video!