11:35 pm. You are walking
down a dimly lit stone-paved street, listening to the monotonous
sound of your footsteps. From the surrounding
houses, you can make out the sounds of babies crying and moans of
people suffering from the disease. Suddenly, a brown wraith-shaped
cloud of illness floats towards you, appearing out of nowhere. Quickly,
you turn to run, only to see that a bandit has caught up with you
and is wielding a knife in his hands, smiling menacingly. Panic sets
in as you rush in the first door you see to your left. In horror
you realize
that the disease hasn’t left this house untouched, creating a sight that
would make the toughest of men cringe. A few steps down the hallway, a woman
lies on the floor, curled up in horrible pain. You walk up to her, bend over
and use your last bottle of painkillers to bring her some relief. You realize
too late that a purple cloud has surrounded you, filling your lungs with tainted
air. Your vision blurs. Your breathing becomes heavy. You know that if you don’t
leave the house and find some treatment immediately, you will die.

You just had a brief experience
of what it feels like to play Pathologic, a game that does not
fit neatly into any genre and cannot be compared
to anything that has come before. Imagine a game that blends in elements
from Adventures, RPGs & Action/Stealth games in a mixture that
is based on survival and horror. Survival horror then? Not quite.

Pathologic is a 1st person, full 360 degrees 3D game, where you
play the part of 1 of 3 different characters and try to survive for
twelve days in a small town that is slowly being eaten away by a
terrible epidemic. By the end of those twelve days, you will be required
to decide the fate of the town, according to what you have learned
about the disease. If you are still alive that is!

All characters have six
very important status bars. First is the reputation bar. According
to what you do in the game, your reputation
will go up or down. If you kill a bandit or help someone in pain,
it will go up. If you kill an innocent person it will go down. Reputation
is very important when dealing with other people, especially shopkeepers,
who will refuse to do business with you if it’s low. If it
gets too low, people that see you on the street will attack you!
The second bar is the health bar, which is self-explanatory. 0 health
= game over. Healing items will help you maintain this bar on high
levels. The third and sixth bars are directly related to each other:
Immunity and Infection. Roaming around a severely infected town is
a dangerous thing, and you’ll need protective gear and medicines
to prevent from getting infected. The more precautions you take,
the higher your immunity bar will be and the chances to get infected
will drop. Getting infected will, as expected, have a direct effect
on your health. Finally there are the hunger and exhaustion bars,
which are also pretty self-explanatory. Eat and sleep regularly and
you’ll live a healthy life.

Before the game starts
you will be asked to select among the three available characters:
Daniel Dankovskiy, aka The Bachelor, Artemiy
Burakh, aka The Haruspicus, and Karla, aka The Devotress. Daniel
and Artemity are more medically inclined, while Karla is more towards
the supernatural side. Karla’s character is locked in the beginning,
and unlocks after the game is finished once with one of the other
characters. Each character has their own little special characteristics,
for example Karla can hit someone with her hands from afar, without
touching them, and also use her hands to heal, while she cannot carry
any heavy weapons. Knowing the pros and cons of each character will
prove very helpful.

Each character also begins with their status bars at preset levels.
For example, Artemiy starts with low reputation and health, hungry
and exhausted. For that reason, I strongly advise you to make Daniel
your first selection, since he starts off with all stat bars in perfect
condition making initiation to the game easier and the learning curve
smoother.

Starting on day 1, the
town is in perfect condition, but you soon find out there’s
something unusual going on. During the next days the town will
be sinking deeper into the epidemic, and this
will be portrayed in the most morbid way. The progression from a
healthy, fully functional town to a dying one is the strongest point
of Pathologic. Sections of town start closing down. The air turns
into a sickly blue and infected clouds float around. Bloody bodies
covered in sheets lie on the streets. Rats carrying the disease run
around, and will infect you if they bite you. Ill people walk helplessly
in hooded robes, and will come up to you for help, but only to infect
you with their diseased breath. Guards are posted on key sections
of the closed down areas beating to death any infected person who
tries to leave. And when the sickness finally leaves an area, almost
everyone is dead, the air remains a putrid yellow hue and bandits
start roaming the streets. That beautiful area of town exists no
more!

Each day is divided into one main quest of the day and a few side-quests.
The side-quests are optional, but can offer great rewards, while
it is very important to successfully complete the main quest. Each
day has, of course, 24 hours, an amount of time that will relentlessly
go by no matter what you do. Time management is crucial in order
not to hear the bell strike midnight before you are done with the
quest of the day. If that happens, you or one of your adherents may
die. Who are the adherents? The adherents are a group of important
people who must survive at any cost. If you lose any of them, then
expect the game ending not to be the most heart-warming one.

Time management is challenged
by the arrangement of the areas involved in each quest. To be a
little clearer, imagine the map of Europe
as the town. If a quest involves Spain, Italy, Norway and Finland,
more often than not you will be required to travel (and by “travel” I
mean walk) by the longest possible route; for example starting in
Spain, then Finland, then Italy and finally Norway. Not only is this
unfairly time consuming, but also tedious to the point that it made
me call it a day a couple times, when I actually wanted to continue
playing – oh, how I wished for some of the vehicles from 80
Days! My advice is to play the game once without taking on any quests – which
will result to game over at the end of the first day. Walk around
the town, find out where everything is and the shortest ways to get
there, and then restart. This will make the first couple of days
easier to deal with.

Walking around in the town you will come across all kinds of other,
more or less important, characters. The highest level of importance
is held, of course, by your adherents, which you must protect no
matter what. Along with your adherents, there is a group of very
important to the town and its management people, with whom you will
have to deal a lot, and who will be giving you most of your quests.
All those characters have unique looks and dialog lines. The rest
of the inhabitants of the town are divided into certain groups of
clones. Each group bears the exact same looks and dialog lines. Though
this mars the image of the game, it is also very helpful as each
non-unique character has something to offer. Children have things
to trade, certain women can mend clothes, certain men can fix broken
weapons, drunkards carry bandages, etc. Being instantly recognizable
saves time when looking for certain people to deal with.

Trading is very important
in the game. Knowing who wants what and what they can offer in
return is key to increase your inventory of
food, medicine and ammo supplies. Children, for example, love junk
items, like needles or fishing hooks, and can offer you bullets and
medicine in return – when an epidemic strikes, no one has the
time to control what their children are carrying in their pockets!
Guards will trade good food for medicines, and so on.

Trading offers plenty
of items, but is limited so you must use two other methods to acquire
useful items: finding and purchasing. The
items that can be found, either on the streets or in trashcans, are
mainly junk items, but they are very useful for trading. Finding
a couple of needles in a trashcan may mean that you have found some
rifle ammo! So always check out everything. Useful items can also
be found inside houses. The most major items though, like good weapons
or clothes, can mainly be bought at the stores, although sometimes
they can be found on certain dead bodies. Prices are not what you
would call a bargain though, and you are not made of money. Each
day prices will fluctuate, sometimes severely, so finding out the
best deals and managing your money is crucial if you don’t
want to end up walking in your underwear flailing a rusty scalpel
for a weapon. Money can be found by selling items to shopkeepers,
or on dead bodies of people that you kill, preferably bandits – remember
your reputation! But the big bucks lie in some side-quests, so always
try to take them all on and complete them cause you never know how
much richer you’ll be in the end.

Just like with people,
buildings also have different levels of importance. There are buildings
that play a major role in the game, usually homes
or hang out places for the important people, which you will be visiting
very often. Then there are the stores, with their cloned storekeepers,
which are divided into food, medicines and clothing stores. Finally,
there are the common houses. Those appear in three different states.
They start off as regular houses, where people reside. Those are
locked and can be opened with the use of a lock-pick. Once inside,
stealth is very important, since the residents will attack if they
notice you. Now why would you want to break into someone’s
house? But to steal their stuff of course! Just as long as no one
sees you, you’ll have no problems! The second state of the
common houses is the infected state. At that point the houses are
unlocked, and inside there is chaos. Furniture is turned over, people
lie on the ground in pain and clouds of disease are everywhere. There
are a couple of quests that require entering such houses, but other
than that there is no other reason to risk entering an infected house,
other than a need for a quick reputation boost, achieved by relieving
the residents’ pain. The final state of the common houses is
the “aftermath” state. The former residents are apparently
dead, and now those houses are inhabited by marauders. Marauders
are very agile and tough, and almost impossible to kill without a
long range weapon. But they also carry lots of money and have plenty
of useful items stuffed away. Regardless of the type of building,
as long as it’s unlocked, it can also be used to elude anyone
or anything that is hunting you outside, like bandits or rats.

Fighting has its place
in the game, but the amount of fighting is almost entirely up to
you. There are a few quests where fighting
is mandatory, but other than that, you can go through the entire
game with the peace sign tattooed on your butt-cheeks. If you decide
to dip your hands in blood though, you will definitely be rewarded,
as long as it’s the blood of enemies. Killing bandits and marauders
will not only reward you with money and other goodies, it will also
boost your reputation – something that you will definitely
need in the Haruspicus and Devotress scenarios. But fighting in Pathologic is not exactly a piece of cake. Besides Karla and her magic hands,
all other kinds of fighting are either close combat, using fists
or scalpels and knives, or long range combat, with all kinds of firearms.
Close combat is very hard to master, and doesn’t inflict too
much damage. Moving forward, striking and backing away is the best
strategy. There is however the option to sneak up from behind and
kill an enemy with one stab in the head. Long range combat is easier,
but bullets don’t come a-plenty. Keeping up the good trading
is the solution to that. Also, keep in mind that all weapons start
to wear out with usage, and the more worn out they are, the more
likely they’ll be to miss and the less damage they’ll
inflict. Same goes for the clothes you’re wearing, which are
used to protect you from infection, blows, fire etc. As they wear
out, their protection will not be as strong. Certain people found
on the street can work on your weapons and clothes and make them
good as new, but, as expected, everything has a price.

The game’s AI is not a very strong point, and fighting sometimes
is performed in a very funny way, while other times it becomes excruciating.
All enemies get a “focus point” and will not rest until
they have killed what they have focused on – or until they
rest in peace. If their focus point is somebody else, you can easily
walk up to them and stab away. They won’t even know you’re
there! On the other hand, if you become the focus point, you will
never be left alone, unless you enter a building or kill them. You
can run around town for the rest of your life and they will stay
on your tail! Another case of bad AI is how stealth is implemented.
There are times that you can practically dance around someone and
they won’t notice you as long as you keep the stealth button
pressed! Very helpful of course, but it does distract from the realism.

Visually Pathologic is
of high, but not the highest, standards. The town and its buildings
are beautifully designed, inside and out,
with colors that set the depressing mood perfectly. The characters
are very detailed, although during close-ups they sometimes look
like disarranged puppets. This happens because there is no speech
(besides some random comments) and their expressions try to follow
the mood of the dialogs, which doesn’t work too good when you
read instead of listen. What really stands out though is the music.
Pathologic features some of the most sublime music I have ever heard
in a game. With tunes varying from low-key to frantic, the music
works wonders for the overall atmosphere. Even the music playing
in the infected areas has a “sickly” sound! If there
is one game that desperately needs a CD soundtrack, Pathologic would
be it. Hats off to the game’s musicians, who I cannot praise
enough!

Whatever I have written
up to this point of this review may or may not sound appealing
to you, according to what you want from your
games. There is one thing in Pathologic though that is really unappealing
and I cannot believe that the game was actually released in that
state. I am talking about the ugliest, the most awful and outrageous
translation I have ever seen in my gaming years. Yes, I have played
non-English games that were poorly translated, but Pathologic creates
a league of its own. It feels like a person with no English knowledge
whatsoever grabbed a dictionary and started translating word-by-word.
There is no sense of syntax or grammar anywhere, there are words
used in an entirely wrong way (another sign of dictionary overuse)
and there are also words I don’t believe even exist! I mean,
what the hell is an “oinon” and why does Artemiy keep
calling me that way, when I play as Daniel? Should I be offended
or what? This horrible translation not only makes the dialogs laughable
and the characters sound like they are mentally challenged, thus
having a negative impact on the atmosphere, it also makes the story
hard to follow at times. If you know Russian, which is the game’s
native language, then I strongly suggest you play the Russian version.
I don’t know Russian so I cannot comment on the level of the
dialogs of that version, but I am positive they are better than this
mess. For the rest of the world, a patch is urgently needed.

So,
you have hacked your way through hordes of zombies, survived mansions
haunted by all
kinds of ectoplasms, and lived through towns
that make hell look like Pee Wee’s playhouse. That means nothing
when you start playing Pathologic. The
horror that it creates is a horror that strikes the most sensitive
nerves. It tells a story
of something that can happen to you, and it tells it in the most
gruesome way. Seeing a zombie ripping somebody’s head off can
be fun, but seeing somebody writhing on the floor in agony, surrounded
by clouds of an epidemic that could appear in your neighborhood needs
nerves of steel not to be disturbing. Overall, Pathologic has
its little problems and nuisances but it also performs greatly in
the
areas that are the most important for this kind of a game. Unfortunately,
the atrocious translation takes away a good chunk of the fun. If
though you are a lover of the macabre, this problem can and should
be overlooked, and you will enjoy one of the gloomiest games ever
created.

System Requirements:

• Pentium 1 GHZ
• Windows Me/2000/XP
• 256 MB RAM
• 4X CD ROM
• DirectX 9.1
• DirectX 9 Compatible 3D video and sound card (32MB)
• 2GB Hard Disk space