Pathologic 2

This is a game unquite like any other. It bills itself as a survival thriller, but it is so hard to describe with just broad stroke and genres without going into detail about how the game actually plays. The first thing you are likely to notice upon playing the game is the framing device of the entire game. Central is the theme of the theatre, and play. It does not try to make you believe this is all real, instead it makes you believe it is a game, and what you will get out of it is how you choose to play your character. This is a role playing game, not in the jRPG sense, but that you must inhabit your character to get the most out of the game. This is not a sandbox game where you can have fun out of killing NPCs and destroying stuff. You are a doctor, and if you don't play your role as a doctor, you will not have fun. The game itself if about tackling the plague spreading through the small town you've just arrived to. There are survival elements such as thirst and hunger that you must manage as you traverse the town. Resources are limited, but the primary obstacle won't be food, or even the disease. It will be time. Every action you take spends that most precious of resource. You only have 12 days, and each day has to count. That brings us back to the idea of fun. What I was feeling the most playing this game wasn't "fun", it was "stress". Stress that I don't have enough time to visit someone who needs help, stress that I have to make a side trip to pick up herbs, stress that the person on the other side of town might have the key to solving this plague, but I'd have to devote so much time to making the trip. That does not sound like a lot of fun, but the stress is a necessary part to make the reward worthwhile. You know those mobile games where it is literally impossible to lose a battle for the first 5 hours because everything is so easy? Those bore me to death. There's no planning, no decision making, no execution required for "victory". That's not fun. You will struggle in Pathologic. You will fail, but you will also succeed. If you had perfect knowledge, you could probably do better. But you don't and you won't. You will do the best you can because you are human, and you make choices. I believe this also ties back into the role playing aspect of the game. If you don't really care, you can skip tons of things. The city and the plague will progress without you. You don't have to try to save peoples' lives. People will die, but they're just characters in a game, they're not real. You won't get stressed because it's not a big deal. But you also won't have fun. If you don't have that drive to do the best you can, you won't like Pathologic. You don't even need to be a god gamer or anything. I would not call it a "hard" game. There is only one part near the end of the game that I would say is actually difficult in terms of combat, but the pattern can be learned without too much trouble. And you can always reload saves. I absolutely recommend anyone else play Pathologic. I find what makes a game fun is the possibility of failure, and the choices you make to avoid failure. In Pathologic 2, you will make a lot of choices that lead to both failure and success. And the failures make the successes even sweeter.