HORROR MONTH #28: Pathologic, by Ice-Pick Lodge (2005)

Type of Media: Video Game

In most games you play as a hero. You're there to do good, save the day, and bask in the glory of an adoring populace and a happy ending. Realistically, though, heroes are rarely given the respect and thanks they deserve. Especially if they're foreign, they're more likely to be treated with suspicion. They'll have to work to do the good that should be so easy to do, without getting swept into disaster themselves. Sometimes, it will feel like they're the only person who wants to help.

In Pathologic, you play as one of three healers trying to save town from a plague: the Bachelor, a man of science; the Haruspex, a mystic who divines answers by reading entrails; and the Changeling, a woman with seemingly magical healing powers. While you play as the character you chose, the other two characters still exist in the town and affect it. And they aren't your allies. Quite the contrary, you'll probably distrust the two other healers even though they supposedly have the same end goal as you.

The game consists of doing quests to gain information, and surviving. That second part is not at all trivial. You have to eat, drink, rest, and keep clean of the plague yourself before you can even think of helping other people, and that takes time either gathering supplies or buying them using the town's incredibly unfair and constantly shifting barter system. None of your supposed 'friends' you're questing for will help you much with this.

At some point you'll be so desperate you will almost certainly think about killing someone, maybe to take their possessions or look for answers in their organs. Surviving is something you need to lock down quickly, because there's only so much time in a day, and if you don't finish a quest in time your information sources can get infected. Then they die, as does some of the hope you have to ever cure the plague.

While the desperation of the gameplay puts you on edge, the town itself is what will unsettle you. Since it's been under quarantine for a while, the town has developed into its own strange little world. The Abattoir, the center of the town's meat industry, has been locked up along with all of its workers, who have formed an animalistic cult. Gangs of children control an architectural nightmare called The Polyhedron, from which they conduct raiding and scavenging missions. The dead are all piled into the Termitary, an insane asylum where bodies are dragged away for some unknown purpose. And watching over all of this are Executors, people in bird masks who stand outside the houses of plague victims and who no one in town seems to question.

Pathologic is highly-regarded in its home country of Russia, and won a lot of game of the year awards when it released in 2005. In the West it remains obscure, though its cult of fans is fervent enough that it got rereleased with HD graphics and updated English translations. It even successfully Kickstarted a full remake that's due out late next year. If you're looking for a strange, dismal, haunting game experience, Pathologic HD is on sale on Steam for under $5 until Halloween ends.