The remake of Pathologic, renamed to Pathologic 2 last year to avoid confusion with the HD remaster of the original game, looks appropriately weird and disquieting in its new gameplay teaser. Strange is Pathologic’s bread and butter.
If the teaser leaves you craving more of Ice-Pick Lodge’s ‘narrative driven survival thriller’ then you might also want to point your eyeballs at the alpha teaser from last month’s PAX West, revealing more oddities.
I still can’t quite believe this bizarre, janky game is getting the sequel/remake treatment, though I couldn’t be happier. It couldn’t be coming at a better time, either. The survival formula increasingly feels like it’s set in stone, making Pathologic’s take on the genre, which didn’t really exist when the original game came out, is impressively novel.
As a doctor investigating a disease that’s gripped a surreal town, you’ll need to feed yourself and try not to get too exhausted, but instead of wandering around in the wilderness, searching for berries and chopping down trees, you’ll have to rely on the town’s unusual inhabitants. Making friends, stealing, murdering—they’re all options.
There’s an air of urgency, but it goes beyond filling your belly; there’s a time-limit. You have 12 days to cure the disease and also solve a murder mystery (your father’s, in fact), which isn’t very long at all. This isn’t a leisurely holiday in a bucolic town.
No release date yet, but you can sign up for the Pathologic 2 alpha.