Found a dead rat in my inbox this morning. When I examined the entrails it spelled out the following: PaThoLoGiC 3 aNnOuNcEd ToDaY. Ah, I see. Developers Ice Pick Lodge are working on a sequel to their infamously oppressive plague town simulator, only this time the follow-up will feature "a time-travel mechanic, allowing players to go back and see how their decisions change the lives of the townspeople." It will also put you in the fancy-schmancy shoes of the Bachelor, a doctor fond of quoting Latin phrases, who will have the ability to order quarantines and request patrols of entire areas of town. There's no firm release date yet, but we're told it'll be ready some time next year.
]]>“What’s with all the meat everywhere, anyway?” my Death Trash alter ego Mildred asks. “It’s just there. Grows.” the meat merchant replies. “Maybe we’re living on a planet full of flesh and right now we’re standing on a crust of stone and dirt. So, do you want a piece of meat now?” I really don’t. But Mildred does. After all, this mystery meat is the main healing item in the game. It’s what keeps you and the world around you alive. It’s harvested from the ground like precious stones, the literal blood flowing in this grotesque world’s barebones economy, eaten raw and served in meat bars.
But where does the meat come from? Whence the amorphous flesh blobs and pools of blood? From another planet, another dimension? There are no animals in this strange ecosystem apart from Fleshworms. The strange meat seems to be linked to another mystery, the advent of the flesh titans (which are exactly what the name suggests). Soon we discover that we are able to commune with the meat and, through it, speak to a enigmatic being called The Oracle. The meat is a kind of universal consciousness, a flesh and blood information highway, into which those who are attuned to it can plug in. Whether the meat and the flesh titans are good or bad for humanity is up for debate, and there are factions that deify and others that hate them, vying for power. The clot thickens.
]]>Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077's humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn't want to bring up your children in.
]]>“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 differing opinions about the surrealistic survival game they played leading roles in making. In fact, they’re still unpacking their thoughts about what they created, particularly in light of the changes they made after launch to its difficulty setting, a system which lies at the centre of a game which sets out to express the struggle in death and life.
]]>When the historians of the future cast their cyber-eyes over the deluge of stupidity we encrusted upon the primitive internet, they will see that our fables, our moral storytelling, was mostly conducted with flashing colours and double-jumps. Yes, videogames have adopted the moralistic finger-wagging of fairytales and Victorian novels, for better or for worse. They have taught us a lot about ourselves and our place in the world. Here are 13 of the "best" moral lessons from PC games. Yes, you may take notes.
]]>Children, life’s great copy-paste. Adorable, drooling idiots with no self-control and a habit of yelling embarrassing facts to the entire supermarket. In our everyday lives, human children are a snotty emblem of hope, vulnerability, and aspiration. In videogames, they are a cursed harbinger of escort missions, narrative roadblocks, “cutesy” voice acting, and precocious dialogue. They are annoying. But hold on, that’s the point. Many of them are meant to be that way. So here is a list of the 10 most annoying children in PC games. And perhaps, the best annoying?
]]>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.
]]>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 cog, a clean cog, any cog. All the water pumps in town are broken, I only need a cog to fix one of them. You can hear wailing. I need the water to make medicine. It’s getting late. The thugs will be out soon. You can hear wailing. I need a cog. I haven’t met anybody with a cog in days. Where are the godforsaken workmen? You can hear wailing.
Shut up, no I can’t. Shut up. There’s nobody in that house. And even if there was, they can take care of themselves. I need a cog. Shut up, Pathologic 2. I need a cog.
]]>This is the shipping forecast; the synopsis at 5pm. Solid Snake just west of cloak room, expected to move towards Sam Fisher on dance floor before midnight. Wrecking Ball from Overwatch, mild at 1am, becoming rabid with lust at 3am. Agent 47 from Hitman: confused, occasional peeping, becoming horny later. Red Prince: cyclonic, mainly drinking alone, peering at Steve from Minecraft with questionable motives, occasionally licking lips.
(Yes. We did a podcast about romantically matchmaking game characters.)
]]>“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 to let on exactly how weird you are. How unsuited you are - with your expectations of a clear divide between real and imaginary, tangible and intangible, audience and performance -- to navigate this place you now find yourself in.
]]>If you're interested in the making of your gamesausage, do have a look at Gamedev.world this weekend. Starting today at noon, it's a new free game developer-focused conference with 35 talks over three days in multiple languages, all streamed online. Subjects on the schedule include Pathologic 2's questlog, designing multiplayer games to avoid awfulness, the making of Gris, tools, the faux-2D art of La-Mulana 2, free-to-play monetisation, collaboration in audio design, local independent development scenes, how to set up a games studio... a whole lot. For free. By professionals. That's neat.
]]>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 a better time (mostly due to accepting death), today's big update should make some people happy, as the game is now practically wriggling with difficulty options. Below, the developers and my own musings on the game's challenges.
]]>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 meantime some players have been happily cracking on with the help of cheats. This basically involves bringing up the console and typing “give me some fish please” in cheat language. It’s sneaky yes, but it's also a stop-gap for players who want to keep exploring the creepy town and aren’t waiting around for an easy mode. Or, it used to be, because a recent update took this particular command away, leaving poor cheat hobos hungry once again.
]]>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 complaints about the permanently rumbling belly and harsh meter management, and they're going to add a difficulty slider to let players fiddle with the toughness.
“[We’d] rather give people a tweaked experience than none at all,” they say.
]]>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 than any, sticks out. The evening I went to a train station, where the kids hang out after dark. There, in the dimness, they play a children’s game. They call it “train summoning”.
]]>You can’t play everything. Trust us, we’ve tried. You can’t even take note of all the games that come out in one week. Our mushy human brains can barely keep track of why we’re standing in the dairy aisle. Was it milk we're low on? Or butter? Yoghurt? Hang on, I'm vegan. What am I doing here?
Anyway, you’re bound to have missed a few games this year. Luckily the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is here to mention a few puzzle games and town builders that might have flown under your radar. Let's fire some thick opinion-bullets at them. How else are we supposed to bring them down, so you can play?
]]>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 pervasive crappiness. After only nine hours, I’m on day three of a twelve-day story and my character is dying. I’m infected, I’m starving, and I’m exhausted. This isn’t a description of a tough-but-interesting time I’m having in a bleak world. It’s a reference to the three meters in the corner of my screen (infection, exhaustion, hunger) which have convinced me that, despite a townload of spookiness and intrigue, those nine hours are more than enough. Thanks, Pathologic 2, but no thanks.
]]>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 of development, gearing up for a May 23rd launch. Now they're ready for you to take your first steps into its unsettling world, and meet a few of its players and stage-hands. Grab the demo here.
]]>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 for twelve days as a seemingly supernatural plague tears through the population. Below, an unsettling trailer featuring the children living in this bizarre, impossible place.
]]>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 the second quarter of 2019, with the other two characters coming later, although the exact method is yet undecided. Below, developer Nikolay Dybowski explains the situation in a (subtitled) video.
]]>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 self-contained short story set within the world of Pathologic 2, available via Ice-Pick's FAQ page. Today's public alpha is far larger, and a slice of the final game, giving you three days to explore its diseased city as one of its three playable characters. It's free for all and available here. Below, a new video glimpse of what awaits.
]]>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 the cult favourite demanded of you.
]]>Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it’s episode 1 again. We’re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We’ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there’s just a sad man saying “Sonic the Hedgehog” over and over. We’re confident you’ll like it.
]]>BAM. A sound captures your headphones and holds you hostage. It's the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We've been lying in wait for the past three weeks, consolidating our strength and preparing to kidnap you by the ear canals. "Listen up, 2018!" we shout out from atop this metaphor. "We have a list of demands and we're not releasing this poor listener until you've delivered! Or until the one hour playtime is up, whichever comes first!"
]]>As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework that exploded in the many midnights of New Year's celebrations was stuffed with games and they were still raining down across the world this morning. We cannot stop them, we cannot contain them, but we can attempt to understand them.
Hundreds of them will be worth our time and attention, but we've selected a few of the ones that excite us most as we prepare for another year of splendid PC gaming. There's something for everyone, from Aunt Maude, the military genius, to merry Ian Rogue, the man who hates permadeath and procedural generation with a passion.
]]>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.
]]>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 in the diseased and dying town. Observe:
]]>
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