2019 was the year of Eurojank, and this was the best one of all. Some mechanical jank, and excellent art direction, writing, story, and especially themes.
Given we're in the middle of a pandemic it's the perfect time to play. Plague breaks out in a small town far East on the Russian steppe, in the vague anachronistic past. In this installment, you play as the local surgeon-shaman. The combat is uncomfortable. This is because you're not supposed to get into fights. You're the doctor for fuck's sake. You'll be busy researching a cure and trying not to die. If you're tired of games either revolving around combat or being walking sims, here it is.
Strong themes of settler-colonialism; how that influences class conflict under capitalism; failure and powerlessness; religion in conflict with industrialization; the social collapse that accompanies a deadly epidemic, food shortages, and hyperinflation. You'll have moral choices that come from the gameplay and your own desperation instead of dialogue wheels. You won't have time to do every quest and you'll have to prioritize. This can also be a moral choice.
Characters are excellently written. The assholes will even lie to you. Big lies that ruin your day and little white lies, too.
Many of you know about Hbomb's 2 hour epic, but that one's about the original. Under no circumstances should you play it. Here is a 27 minute video that's actually about the remake.
I've so been meaning to. I bought it... I'm not even sure when, but I do have it. I just worry every time I think about it that I'll just get frustrated, like genuinely frustrated and unwilling to play the game, given what I know of the original, despite what I hear of 2. I swear I'm going to play it eventually.
So I guess I have to ask, how much more so would you say it's traditionally designed like we often think of video games?
What do you mean by traditional design? It's definitely a lot more playable than the original. There's a really innovative quest log for one.
I guess I mean accessible and generally enjoyable. Not having some of that is one of the draws for me, but at the same time I need a little more than 1 has lol.
Yes, way more accessible, in terms of story presentation AND difficulty. I say this as somebody who bounced off the original at least 4 times over the course of 8 or so years. The most granular difficulty sliders you're likely to see. If you're so frustrated you want to quit that means you need to turn it down, and you can. You can be very specific about what's giving you a bad time. The quest log makes sense now. It's presented as a mind map so you can see connections between different plot threads. It's not ugly anymore. The characters don't all talk like philosophy undergrads anymore, except for a few that are really full of themselves.
The thing I don't like that gets in the way of accessibility is how they punish you for dying. I cheated my way out of that.
The mind map is so good, you guys. Quests and such are presented as your own idea instead of instructions given by an NPC. Sometimes a thought will just pop into your character's head. See at a glance how various story beats connect.
Gamasutra did a great article about it. Pathologic 2 Mindmap: a Questlog People Actually Read
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Ohhh that really does sound pretty cool. Thanks for the info on difficulty too, but could you elaborate on death penalties? In the video, he says something that sounded to me like they apply to all saves, which just sounds crazy.
It means you can't go back to an old save on the same profile to undo the death count. If you're starting a new game on a different profile, you still start with zero deaths. Aaaand if you know your way around your AppData folder there's a text file where you can manually reset the count to zero every once in a while. That's what I did. You can't tell me it's against the spirit of the game either. One of the endings in the Marble Nest dlc breaks the fourth wall and tells you cheating is good. Just be aware that you'll miss out on some of the story if you opt out of the death count this way.
Alright alright, I think I'll try it legit first but definitely remember that. :winking face: Definitely going to start the game sometime soon.