Ice-pick Lodge give a playful peek at Pathologic 2's progress
Before the sand plague came the glitches
It's been a good long while since Ice-Pick Lodge turned to Kickstarter to fund a remake of Pathologic, their award-winning survival adventure, but it seems that 2017 has been a busy year for the studio. It's now being developed under the title of Pathologic 2 and the developers have opened their doors to give us one last peek at the game before the year's end.
The development update is largely told through a gallery of animated GIFs found here, showing off various aspects of the game that have received special love and attention over the past year. For more proactive players, combat looks markedly improved, with fists landing with convincing weight, even if neither combatant seems especially good at throwing a punch. Interestingly, Ice-Pick aren't quite satisfied with how gunplay feels at present, and feel they need to record many more horrifying screams of death to make the gun-murder experience authentic.
Among the most interesting new features is the Autopsy screen. Rather than just looting bodies of their organs as you did in the original game, you can now examine individual body parts for damage and infection, given the right tools, or even extract them outright if you wish to perform ethically questionable acts of Haruspicy upon them. Finding the plague isn't just a matter of poking around people's guts - it seems that at least one of the playable characters will receive the power to see the plague itself, allowing for easier quarantining of infected buildings as the campaign drags on.
Not everything is turning out perfectly, of course. In typical fashion, Ice-Pick are honest and open about the difficulties they've experienced, even sharing a few of the more spectacular bugs with us, several of which seem to revolve around animation rigging and movement constraints. A swamp-witch beckons to the player with her prehensile chin before phasing through a wall, and a child decides to just hover five feet in the air after finding their favorite swing-set haunted by poltergeists.
As we reported earlier this year, The Marble Nest - a standalone playable demo for Pathologic 2 - is available now for all to play via Steam. It doesn't seem to include all of the improvements shown in the gallery above, but it should give you a taste of the weird, bleak cityscape that you'll get to explore in the final game whenever it launches.