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The ever-unpredictable Ice-Pick Lodge, the Russian studio behind Pathologic, have announced their next game. Know By Heart is set in a provincial Russian town and, as far as I can see, this one is not stricken by a plague so we shouldn't end up desperately rummaging in bins for bottles. Looks like it might just be a touch melancholy, a game about childhood friends reuniting…
Feature: A game about struggle
“Nikolay, right now, what do you think about Pathologic 2? Was it a successful experiment?”“Oh yes, of course! Certainly it was! Moreover, due to the conditions in which we constructed this game, it was a miracle that we released it. But I wouldn’t say it’s the game we wanted to release.”Even now, over a year after Pathologic 2’s release, Nikolay Dybowski and Ivan Slovtsov have…
Plagued village Pathologic 2 is expanding, with a DLC called The Marble Nest opening its doors before the end of the month. It’s its own story, putting you in the shoes of a new doctor, this time of the PhD variety. Scientist Dr. Daniil Dankovsky will only be on town for one day, so you’d better make the most of it.
Feature: The sense of an ending
Pathologic 2’s easy mode lets you soak in the dread of an unwell town
There’s a woman wailing in that house. I keep walking. I walk until her screams are out of earshot, then I look at my map. I can see the noisy house drawn here, a square box with a little circle around it. I look closer. “You can hear wailing,” it reads. I close the map. I keep walking. I need a cog - a rusty…
Feature: It also has scary children
“It is canny to conceal that one is uncanny”, Pathologic 2’s Mark Immortel offers in the game’s introduction, promising artifice and detachment before you’ve had a chance to ground yourself. At first, I take this as the game warning me about the duplicitous world I'm about to enter, but then I think it's something else. You’re the misfit here, it’s telling me. It’s smart not…
Feature:
They just keep coming don't they? A lot of games were announced at E3 2019, things that we didn't know about, as well as stuff that's previously announced, or expansions to already released games. Now, to the casual outsider, what we're doing might seem absolutely nuts, but we thought we'd put together an alphabetical list of all the PC games that have been confirmed to…
It's no secret that poetic plague survival sim Pathologic 2 is hard. Developers Ice-Pick Lodge even say that the experience is "intended to be almost unbearable". Unfortunately, 'almost' is a very fine line for many, and was just too much for some, including Brendy, who bounced off the game's starvation systems, despite noting he enjoyed appreciating its writing in his Pathologic review. While I've had…
Pathologic 2 update stops players cheating food into their pockets
Pathologic 2 is a toughie. It’s a gut-churning doctor ‘em up about hoking through the neighbourhood bins for some buttons to trade for a lump of stale toast. The survival meters were a little too punitive for my tastes in our Pathologic 2 review, so it was heartening to learn that the developers are adding a difficulty slider in the coming weeks. However, in the…
Pathologic 2 is quite hard, but it may soon become more welcoming. The revamp of the surreal first-person survival dread ‘em up is a game of grimly rummaging through bins and trying to keep a voracious hunger meter from filling. There’s an unusual and fascinating town to amble through, but you’re often too busy fighting the survival meters to appreciate it. The developers have noted…
Feature: Children's games are scarier than any hunger meter
The children of Pathologic 2 teach you about dread on a derelict train track
I gave up on the plague-doctoring of Pathologic 2 after suffering from its punitive survival meters and tedious food-getting. The place has so little grub I spent my brief visit wrestling with a frustrating hunger. Yet for those hardy souls willing to overlook constant death and harsh restarts, there are some excellent scenes of unease and disquiet in this grey, decaying town. One moment, more…
Feature: Plagued with difficulty
Pathologic 2 is cursed. And me too, because I’m saddled with reviewing the follow-up to a cult favourite. Pathologic was a first-person plague doctor simulator that was badly broken and refreshingly unusual. Depending on your sensibilities, you’ll be glad to learn that this reboot is also a godforsaken mess littered with interesting ideas, none of which will be appreciated because it is hobbled by a…
Fancy a little taste of surreal plague-ridden hell? Well, even if you don't, you should give the new Pathologic 2 demo a spin, because it's a dreamlike experience. Despite the number in the title, Pathologic 2 is more like a complete re-imagining of the original survival adventure. It's been delayed and possibly split into three releases, but developers Ice-Pick Lodge are in the final stretch…
Horrible plague-ridden fever-dream simulator Pathologic 2 will be stumbling into stores on May 23rd, presumably before letting out a gurgling cough and keeling over. Despite the '2' in the title, this new game is less of a sequel and more of an expanded re-imagining of Ice-Pick Lodge's cult 2005 horror-survival game. Set in a surreal industrial town inspired by turn-of-the-century Russia, you've got to survive…
Pathologic 2 - Ice-Pick Lodge's grim plague survival adventure - is to be released in parts. Originally just Kickstarted as 'Pathologic', implying a remake, as with the original game you play as three different characters, each with their own stories, abilities and vast swathes of dialogue. Thanks to a multitude of pressures detailed in their dev blog here, they'll be releasing the Haruspex's story first in…
Feature: There's something behind you
The eeriest places in games are the ones where the environment is the monster
Whilst raw forms of horror work through shock and disgust, the eerie is felt more as a threat. Perhaps something seems to hover over or follow you -- there’s a rustling just behind you, or a shimmering in your peripheral vision. Usually eeriness pertains to places rather than people. Places that seem to move, shift or even act when they really should lie still. This…
Steam’s spooky Halloween sale slashes prices and makes wallets bleed
As we plunge into the end of Skeleton Appreciation Month, we enter Sales Season, a far more perilous time for anyone with poor impulse control. Steam's inevitable Halloween sale is now live, and while it's not as sweeping in scale as the inevitable Christmas discount-a-thon due in December, there's some good deals. You can see the official sale page here with horror, zombie and vampire collections,…
Live three days of surreal plague-stricken hell in Pathologic 2’s free public alpha
Bleak, harrowing and frustrating are the first words I think of when Ice-Pick Lodge's Pathologic springs to mind - followed quickly by entrancing, alien and compelling. Originally Kickstarted as a remake, the now-reimagined plague survival immersive sim Pathologic 2 is shaping up to be something special. Not convinced? If you don't mind some bugs, you can try it out today.Earlier in development, Ice-Pick released The Marble Nest, a…
I await Ice-Pick Lodge's alternate-earth plague survival adventure Pathologic 2 with equal parts excitement and dread. The original, for all its technical (and translation-related) flaws was a systems-rich game where you juggled allegiances as much as personal stats and resources. In their latest development blog post, Ice-Pick Lodge detail some of the interesting new systems that you'll have to worry about, on top of everything…
Ice-pick Lodge give a playful peek at Pathologic 2’s progress
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.
Pathologic remake confusingly renamed Pathologic 2 ‘to avoid confusion’
Ice Pick Lodge's remake of Pathologic, their wonderfully unpleasant 2005 horror, has picked up a publisher and a confusing new name. The crowdfunded full remake is now named Pathologic 2 [official site], though it definitely is not a sequel. New publishers Tinybuild say that the name is, somehow, "to avoid confusion". Right-o. Accompanying today's weird news is a gameplay vidblast showing sickness, autopsy, and purification…
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