Pathologic Review Response

From there he goes on to more or less lament how most games are merely trying to be fun, and don't go further try to rise above fun, and provoke emotions like "sadness, despair, fear, love, spite" and so on. After all, games are interactive, and no other form of art is interactive, so games should be really good at this, right?

I hear stuff like this all the time. This shows a misunderstanding of what games are. http://www.whatgamesare.com/beyond-fun.html Games are the systems of challenge and mastery, which is broad, but also limiting. And that's fine.

I am not saying that a software product cannot have these things included in them, you can create a media experience that provokes emotions like films or books do, I am saying that is separate from the game. It is not the game that is provoking those emotions, it is something else. I don't think an interactive game experience can provoke those emotions in much the same way I don't think a luxury 3 course meal at a 5 star restaurant can provoke those emotions. I don't think anyone is going to eat a meal and have this type of reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXPlzdTcA-I And I don't really expect the same from a game.

Of course I've had a lot of positive or negative experiences in relation to games, but I've had those in relation to cars too, because good and bad things happen around nearly everything. That doesn't mean that cars are some sublime emotional art form. I don't think that Games, or Cooking, or Cars really have that capacity, those things come from without these mediums, and I don't think the mediums themselves have the ability to create these feelings from within (though you can certainly make sweet, salty, and bitter).

"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."
It's an amateurish notion to think that this is a particularly unique position, especially when the majority of game critics say the same thing.

I feel like I'm 6 minutes into the video and it's finally getting to the point. Other horror games start with shit getting fucked up, pathologic is about the process of shit getting fucked up. I guess I need to wait another 6 minutes for it to plod into what the game actually involves other than walking around an eastern european town, talking to creepy people, and maybe trading things with them.

Alright, plot description. Lots of vague purple prose without any evidence. "their disagreements shake its foundation." "it works with the story as it really enhances the depth of the characters, something ignored commonly enough in gaming." "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." "all play considerable roles in society and hold their own perspectives on matters, and of course, they all have conflicts with one another." "The narrative is harrowing, filled with twists and turns" "Every character has strong connections to other characters and parts of town and is influenced to act in their supposed best interests."

Also calling a plague the villain is weird as hell. As is bothering to tell us that a plague isn't a character that can do things. Like, no shit?

"When something happens that harms a character’s agenda or the life he follows, he’ll go to great lengths to reaffirm his own ideas through pandering, lying and using pretty much any kind of rhetoric.  And the best part is, if and when all of his efforts fail, he will change and develop into someone who is regretful, proud, disillusioned, grateful or whatever--but always relatable." Does literally every character follow this arc? Do a bunch of them follow this arc? Prove it to me, instead of just saying it.

The description of the game continues this way. It keeps going over generalities without presenting evidence for his conclusions. I still have actually no idea how this game is supposed to play, or how it's structured. I have no idea if anything he said is actually true, or if he's actually making all of it up. I'd like it if he described how the game actually does anything he alleges. How the choices are structured, and what the dialogue trees look like, roughly. How many paths through the game are there? How do these dialogue choices allegedly challenge you? What are some particularly tricky or interesting examples? Right now I have nothing but his word that, "it's good, trust me." For all I know from everything he's said, this could literally be another Mass Effect 3.

"As part of your character’s own development, you become involved in the goings-on of a few different groups of people throughout the course of the game.  You gain a reputation as a certain kind of person, and you can choose not to, but most likely you run with that reputation."
Is there a reputation score, overt or hidden? How do your choices actually accomplish these things?

"They offer arguments for their own cases that are just about as strong as you can make yours, and because everybody is just so worth interacting with and listening to, and because there is no objectively right answer to anything, figuring out what to do becomes a genuine challenge."
Understanding what the fuck this game is from this review is a genuine challenge. What are their cases? What are the answers? What the fuck are you even doing 90% of the time? What are your goals? How do you pursue them? What does a standard sequence of interactions even look like? I have no idea what he's even talking about!

"This kind of interaction with the game world is the exceedingly unconventional kind of challenge I was referring to in my wordy opening; it’s competition with a formal system, like in any other game, but it’s something complex and previously untouched."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_system
The opening wasn't the only wordy part! What is the actual challenge here? What the fuck do you DO? What's complex about it? How is choosing the right dialogue choices complex or difficult? How is this challenging? What do people in this game even talk about? What the fuck is "competition with a formal system" supposed to mean? I have no actual idea what a formal system is supposed to mean in this context. This is a LOT of hot talk for clicking 1 out of 2 buttons.

"The developers at Ice-Pick Lodge consider this kind of competition a sort of “co-authorship,” as it revolves around entering a story whose situation is largely out of your control and working with the characters to change that story to your own wishes."
Cool, too bad it'll still only ever be their story, because SOMEONE has to write the lines of dialogue.

At this point I'm 10 minutes in and I feel like I'm delving deeper into inanity. I still have no fucking clue what goes on in this game besides picking dialogue choices. I have no idea how those choices are structured relative to one another. I have no idea how many characters you need to interact with. I have no idea what affects what. I can't believe that someone has spoken to me for 10 minutes and told me so little actual information.

This is like a review of skyrim that tells me it's a game about fighting dragons, where you need to make difficult political choices in order to save the world from a flood of dragons, and your decisions will shape the fate of the world. It doesn't tell me what those things actually involve, or how they work, or what happens along the way. This is not a review, it's a promise, "This game is good, this game is all these things I am telling you." It's not reviewing the actual contents of the game, it is asserting they fit a certain generic structure that from all the flowery language he uses that cannot possibly literally describe a game, is inferred to be good.

At this point, fuck it. I quit. This is too draining for me to continue. I skimmed most of the later sections of the review and he eventually does get into gameplay, but I can not be bothered to go that far, and his descriptions of the gameplay aren't any better than his descriptions of the story. Maybe I'll eventually play pathologic myself to give it a proper review, but shit, this review makes me want to stay the fuck away, and only gives me the sense that it cannot possibly be the things he is failing to describe.