Computer games as they’re designed today are noticeably very mechanical, formal systems of interaction between players and a machine. In their simplest forms, they’re little more than Skinner boxes, time sinks designed to keep people in front of the screen simply by the virtue of having some form of risk vs. reward system. But every game developer that matters has worked to build beyond the really basic stuff that perpetuates the stereotype of games as simplistic addictions. Granted, there are plenty of great games that can addict you without remorse, but their developers don’t rely on replay value alone to get the job done. A truly great game takes its formal, computerized systems and makes them more dynamic; it makes the challenge more complex; it adds scope to the area of play; it expands the concepts it introduces in synchronization with player progression; and so on. Conventionally, we see this sort of devotion in shooters with level design and AI that necessitate constant movement and dexterity, puzzle games that introduce entirely new concepts and form a challenge by mixing them with what’s already been established, and strategy games that provide a hell of a lot tactical options but make every decision risky and precious, just to vaguely describe a few examples.

But those are all pretty regular occurrences in gaming, and they’re mostly designed to elicit feelings of enjoyment or accomplishment or, at their most challenging, tension. Our spectrum of emotions is much broader than that, but so few games try to engage emotions beyond the few that we’re familiar with in relation to computer systems. And I think that this is a damn shame--the interactivity found in gaming is exclusive to gaming, and it has been able to involve us in what’s happening unlike any other artistic medium because it makes us more than just observers of what’s happening. A few generous handfuls of games want to provoke sadness, despair, fear, love, spite and all those other naughty, non-computerized feelings, but there’s not yet a firmly established way to do that in games, so the large majority veers away from forming its own complex manner of expression and elects merely to copy the simpler means of expression found in uninteractive media.

Most people are complacent with simpler manners of expression, too. But I’m not. There should be more games that don’t only tell a story or build a world but also involve me in an appropriate way. There should be more games that focus on horror or drama or mystery and don’t spoonfeed me down a path. There should be more games that present mature subject matter and actually fortify it with mature interactive systems. There should be more games like Pathologic.

Pathologic is that unconventional kind of game, the kind that takes you out of your electronic comfort zone, perhaps more than any other game out there. At face value, it has more than enough problems that will keep most of you who watch this video from liking it, and if it was just about any other game, you would be in the right. It isn’t a game ever to be taken at face value--after all, all you see at first in raw game footage is walking and god awful combat, but the underlying challenges in the game are something exhausting, strange, and remarkably complex. Pathologic is a game about critical decision making and overcoming a seemingly inevitable demise. With the extreme detail and care taken to express the unconventional premise comes the best--and best told--story in all of gaming, and with the uniqueness and intricacy of the unconventional challenges it delivers comes one of the best games ever made.

Pathologic is a game about surviving and dealing with a plague, so it can perhaps best be considered a survival horror game by the very definition--after all, it’s about surviving in a pretty dangerous world--but it’s not at all like the most famous titles in the genre. So what exactly does everything horror-themed have in common that could be avoided by a supposed outlier like this? But take for example, in the Silent Hill games, you enter a town that turns out quickly to have been almost entirely replaced with grotesque, twitchy things that try to kill you; in Penumbra, you stumble into an abandoned mine and research facility overrun with violent creatures; in Doom 3, you land on Mars only to have nearly everyone turn into a zombie in about ten minutes; in Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason, you seek refuge from a sled accident on a Soviet icebreaker that has gone mad because of how Russian their situation has become. In these games, among myriad others, the worst to happen has already come and gone and it’s your job to set things right now that society has somehow screwed itself over completely. Pathologic is the only instance I know of where you don’t begin with an immediately sinister setting; instead, it’s a game whose world is presently dying. It relies on an entirely different kind of terror, straying from everything widely established in horror games, whether it’s the genuine, overwhelming immediate danger of Amnesia or the flimsy jump scare tricks in the likes of Condemned. It’s slower, larger and infinitely more threatening than what any other game has attempted. In any other game, you are fixing what doom has left in its wake. In Pathologic, you are facing doom.

And given the nature of the game, Pathologic faces you with a much more brooding form of horror. With immediacy comes mad animal fear, whereas with gradual decay and the threat of inevitable demise comes oppression and exhaustion. Because it has the intention of oppressing and exhausting you, the game doesn’t focus on immediate threats, and it does a whole lot of things in ways that would have been undermined completely if it did. It’s a survival horror, but it’s set in an open world, it has a wealth of character interaction, it features quite a bit of combat, and it faces you with a lot of resource and stat management.
The game takes place in a small, unnamed, isolated town somewhere on the Russian steppe whose connection to the outside world is limited to a very lucrative meat exporting industry, eccentric theatre and some supernatural stories about its architecture and its seemingly immortal leader. When you arrive, as you’d expect, something goes horribly wrong as Simon Kain, the leader, is found dead, and most people become quite panicky, wondering what to do now that their centuries-strong figurehead is fallen. The wealthier families all want to have their way with the place, and once it’s revealed that disease has struck the town, their disagreements shake its foundation.

The villain of the story, for lack of a better term, is this sand plague itself. It’s the manifestation of absolute evil, and it works with the story as it really enhances the depth of the characters, something ignored commonly enough in gaming. The plague is an unbiased, deadly force that acts against the best interest of everyone it affects, so the goal for everybody in town is to stop it or to survive it. Everyone you meet has hopes and fears and ideas about seeing to the end of the disease. But just because there is an absolute, objective force of evil doesn’t mean there is an objective force of good--it just means that nobody wants to die. Instead, all of the characters are rich, layered human beings with diverse attitudes who reflect all walks of life, all of whom are designed to do more than merely continue the plot. Aristocrats, businesspeople, officers, artists, merchants, housewives and even children--wealthy and orphaned alike--all play considerable roles in society and hold their own perspectives on matters, and of course, they all have conflicts with one another.