Pathologic preview

When you look at the trailers for M. Night Shyamalan’s recent movies, like Signs and The Village, you become aware after actually seeing the films that they are in fact somewhat misleading. The trailers represent these films as your run-of-the-mill horror movies, while they are better classified as suspense or drama movies where the director puts emphasis on building the story gradually and setting the mood. The same thing applies to Pathologic, a game developed by Ice-Pick Lodge and published by Buka Entertainment - both from Russia.

While Pathologic may appear to fit the genre of survival horror, judging by its first impression it’s actually more concerned with telling a story rather than trying to make you jump out of your seat, hence my M. Night Shyamalan comparison (not that I’m a huge fan of his, mind you). The other thing they have in common is the use of an invisible and seemingly omnipresent supernatural “enemy”, which in the case of Pathologic is an inexplicable epidemic. Although the game does not fit any one genre, being comprised of first person shooter, role-playing game and survival horror elements, its closest fit would have to be as an adventure game.

Once upon a time

The story takes place in a town that has been contaminated by the aforementioned lethal and mysterious epidemic. Three outsiders arrive there in order to help out, but each has their own agenda. One is a highly educated scientist called “Bachelor”, hired by the provincial authorities. Another is a surgeon in search of his “father’s terrible heritage” called Ripper (with a name like that he must get a lot of patients) and the last one is a girl with mysterious healing abilities and a haunted past. You start by choosing one of these characters and the story progresses from there. The goal of the game is to try to understand and find a cure for the epidemic in the course of twelve days.

The game is described as more art then entertainment and influences range from David Lynch movies to Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe. It has been in development for around two years and the developers have high hopes for the game, promising a unique game experience.

From Russia with Love

The game description has this to say among other things: “A bizarre combination of first-person game, role-playing features, non-linear plot and real time flow”. When games claim to be non-linear it usually means that you can do some things out of order. True non-linearity in a game is a huge challenge for game developers, but these guys have some interesting concepts in that area. At first you pick your hero from a pool of three, the two that you didn’t select act on their own throughout the game, plotting against you, which essentially means that there are three approaches to the same story - or three campaigns. The behaviour and the dialogue of the non-player characters within the game world changes constantly; reacting to your actions and reputation and also in a random fashion.

In terms of quests, which seems to be the way you progress judging by the demo, there appears to be more than one way to solve at least some of them. Other key features include actual photo portraits of the main characters (by that I mean a photo of a real-life actor) which is interesting, but breaks the immersion somewhat for me since I just see them as photos taken of actors. You can’t really transfer this actor to the gameworld in your imagination because there is a conflict of graphical styles; a black and white photo and computer game graphics. There is however a possible storytelling benefit linked to this since the game takes into account how these actors have approached the subject dramatically, in a sense it makes the game feel like a play, which I guess might be the effect the designers were going for.

Playing the demo

As mentioned before, the game progression is split into days and the demo (which is an alpha demo) takes place on the fifth day. The first thing you notice is that it plays like a first person shooter, the camera is in first person and you can see the weapon you are holding (or your fists) but you can also choose to be in a non-combat mode. Appearances can be deceiving however because this is not a shooter, it takes a more realistic approach because in a town as poor as this one, and because of the epidemic, weapons and ammunition are rare and expensive and accidentally killing innocents will hurt your reputation rating. It’s up to you whether you want to be a gung-ho type participating in the skirmishes you witness or attempting to avoid combat when possible, but chances are you will have to defend yourself at some point.

Some of the tools at your disposal are a map (which you will use a lot), a diary and a flashlight. You can also see player statistics which shows you, for example, how infected you are by the disease and your health. The graphic engine was developed in-house from scratch and does the game justice - they’re not the best I’ve seen but they are not bad either. What you hear of the music score is very impressive (mixing classic and modern elements) and sets the mood along with other ambient effects such as the occasional stumbling or blurry vision which reminds you that you are racing against time and the disease is constantly affecting you (there are however some pharmaceutical items to combat these effects).

One to watch for

It’s hard to get a feel for how the game pace will be with a small alpha demo but the environment is interesting to explore and the village is of a convincing size with a lot of inhabitants and houses without being overly large. It’s also difficult to measure how the nonlinearity factors will work in the finished version, since it’s a short demo where you only get to play as the Bachelor character. The overall impression from playing this short alpha demo does however make me optimistic about the completed game.

Pathologic has the potential to be an immersive and original game just as long as you realise that it isn’t solely a first person shooter, or your typical survival horror, but a mix of genres. What is intriguing are the storytelling methods with the clever and well written dialogue. The developers have promised some interesting surprise twists and that your character has some secrets that reveal themselves in time and even affect the ending. The music score is quite impressive, as is the overall mood of the game, and it will be interesting to see how the non-linearity will shape the final outcome. At the very least I think it’s safe to say that this is a game worthy of monitoring in the near future, for those interested in trying this type of game.