Review [Quickie Nr. 003] Konjad and Pathologic

[Balor]

This is indeed not an adventure, horror or RPG game.
In fact, the developers said that this is no GAME at all. Games are supposed to entertain - and entertainment never entered their plans. It is mostly about messing around with the player, indeed.
Anyway, if someone ask you - "Are games art?" - you can say: "At least some are" and point at Pathologic.

 

[Pike]

This doesn't look like a game I would really want to play and the reviews are certainly mixed... but yours really made me want to pick it up. Considering it is only $10 on gamersgate I think I will try it out.

 

[Pike]

After playing a little while I would say I'm happy with the purchase. Starting as the haruspex I feel like I'm in a zombie game though. Those slavs are vicious creatures.

 

[Malpercio]

Ahah, Pathologic.

What a shitty game. Enjoying walking sloooooowly and slooooooowly from NPC to NPC with no clues most of the times while fighting a clumsy implemented food and money system.

 

[Konjad]

Ahah, Pathologic.

What a shitty game. Enjoying walking sloooooowly and slooooooowly from NPC to NPC with no clues most of the times while fighting a clumsy implemented food and money system.

 

[Malpercio]

Apart from the fact i don't like ME, even the ME games are better than Pathologic.

Gotta love how most reviews just use pompous words to make the game world sound deep and the game system incredible engrossing, but forget to mention how boring is walking to NPC to NPC over and over, or how simpling buying a piece of bread is a chore and a challenge worth of finishing DS on SL1.

Inb4 "You don't get, it supposed to be a chore!"

The whole game is a turd.

 

[Johannes]

You don't get, it supposed to be a chore.

 

[Harold]

Ice-Pick Lodge are the only studio I know of in existence that had the guts to not care about making their 'games' entertaining and instead push the medium forward. That may sound like pretentious hipsterfag bullshit but it's actually troo. While not fun by a long stretch, both Pathologic and The Void have been some of the best experiences I've had in front of a computer and some of the very few offerings of this medium that I'd class as artforms (though the label is meaningless). I haven't played Cargo yet, but from what I've seen/read, it doesn't seem half as interesting as their previous work.

Also, good review Konjad, considering it's a very difficult 'game' to review in the classical sense.

 

[Average Manatee]

It's worth noting that Ice Pick Lodge made Pathologic and The Void with not even a dozen people. Kind of puts the complaints about "bad graphics" in perspective, most mod groups have larger teams than that.

I skipped out on Cargo as well. Interestingly, their next game is some kind of haunted house survival with a sanity mechanic. Also interesting is that apparently it had a kickstarter? Did anyone see this?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1535515364/knock-knock

 

[Gragt]

While not fun by a long stretch, both Pathologic and The Void have been some of the best experiences I've had in front of a computer and some of the very few offerings of this medium that I'd class as artforms (though the label is meaningless).

Depends what you mean by "fun". The Void is not fun in the way you'd expect a typical game to be fun, but it's compelling in its own way which is, well, fun. The game is hard and you have to put some effort to understand the mechanics, and that's fun. There is very little handholding and most of it is misleading, and that's fun because it challenges what you took for granted. The story isn't fully visible from the start but you can piece it together little by little by learning about the characters and separating truth from lies, and that's fun to do. To make an analogy with movies, take Terminator 2: it's an action movie and also a great movie, and it's easily accessible by pretty much anyone; you can see the characters, who they are, how they react to the action, how they evolve, etc. It's very fun with a fair amount of shooting and explosions, and it got a great script that is very fluid and keeps you guessing what will happen next. Now take something like Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni: it's very slow, at times a bit cryptic, and it doesn't hand you information on a plate but it's there for the taking if you do the effort and the movie considers you, the viewer, as someone intelligent who will pick it up; an exemple would be the famous scene of the film when the main character sees something on the picture he took and then prints that part closer and closer again until he finds out there is a man with a gun hiding in a bush: there is no musical cue to tell you that is important, the character doesn't tell aloud to himself and the audience that it's a guy with a gun, the camera doesn't zoom in, etc., that is it doesn't do all the kind of stuff you'd find in your average thriller to make sure that the audience picks up that important detail, instead it just assumes that you paid attention and picked it up. And that's fun! It's fun to see something different than what you're used to and be challenged in what you take for granted. And that's what The Void does with video games. I admit that it's not the kind of stuff I want to play every week-end, but it's also the kind of stuff that I need to play every once in a while because it gives me something I crave, and it's fun doing so.

 

[Murk]

The Void was incredibly fun to me. I have never felt like an actual "stranger in a strange land" anywhere near as much as I did in The Void. Everything was familiar yet alien at the same time. The rules were explained, and often I didn't realize the things being told to me -- things I thought were fluff text and ambiance -- were actual information on how the game runs, on the mechanics, on the system. I loved how the metaphor and the literal interpretation of things would criss-cross and run parallel to each other in waves, showing how some things are both true figuratively and physically while at other times they are just colorful interpretations.

The whole thing was a William Blake poem. And by that, I don't mean it was an allegory or a metaphor or an analogy. I mean the entire fucking thing WAS a poem. It was stupendous, and absolutely beautiful. I don't care how the graphics were dated technically, it was absolutely fucking gorgeous.

 

[Konjad]

Maybe someday I'll make a Tension The Void review too... but first I need to finish the game and that's a challenge, because every time I play sooner or later I fuck up my management and run out of colour supplies. This game is difficult. I know there are mods that lower the difficulty, but I refuse to use them.

 

[Murk]

It is for the best, Konjad. Survival, mein freund, it is all about survival. I do not think I could do a review of it -- I am definitely somewhat of a fanboy, and so I would either excuse away the downsides or I would force myself to be so sterile in describing the game that it would be a dull representation.

I would, however, not mind doing a write-up ala RPS in a "why you should play the game" type of not-review.

 

[Castanova]

I was disappointed with The Void. I didn't like how they introduced a "strategy" element in the whole time/farming/color management thing but then they don't actually do anything with it as the game progresses. As you unlock more nodes, the color mini-game is no different or more complicated or more interesting. It's just that you have some new nodes to go to where you can farm color. I think that part was poorly designed and implemented (perfectly from a mechanics perspective). As it stood, the game felt like a series of difficult boss fights combined with a boring/repetitive strategy element.

In Pathologic, resource management is important but it's not 75% of the game and it changes as the game goes on -- the city changes and your own access to supplies/weaponry changes. In The Void, you quickly have access to all colors and the ability to farm all colors. Filling up your body with certain colors to access the color-based bonuses just doesn't make that all much of an impact, especially when you lose random colors when you get hit. They used a band-aid fix to make the individual colors more important by making the bosses more vulnerable to certain colors at different times in the fight. That's not compelling gameplay though. It just means you need to have access to all colors at all times and, after you inevitably fail a boss fight, you need to re-load and make sure you fill up on the correct colors for the second try.

 

[Murk]

Dude, having 100% gold when feeding sisters is HUGE, as is having 100% crimson when fighting bosses. Could easily be the difference of winning/losing if your luck doesn't match up with the color-wheel.

Likewise, purple for planting color is great as is blue for speeding you up. I felt the difference of the buffs IMMENSELY.

As for the color wheel -- you have to be patient with when you attack, you can't just spam colors, but each boss has a preferred color that you will encounter mostly and, when they get to their third ring, entirely.

 

[Konjad]

Idk... I can find a lot of reasons why Tension The Void is a better game and yet... Pathologic was still more enjoyable. Tension The Void is a bit too strange in gameplay I guess, in Pathologic you don't do anything you never did in any other game, while in Tension most of the game is quite "original", which not necessarily means better. The casting spells in Arx Fatalis quite reminds me using colour in Tension, except in AF it was more of a clusterfuck (it rarely recognized what I wrote, even though I could swear I do it correctly. Fortunately it's a rare case in The Void). The colour harvesting and in general managing it is quite nice, but indeed it asks for being a bit more game-like and less artsy... I mean it's not bad, but might be sometimes really weird in an kind-of annoying way. Well, I'm a bit too drunk and don't know how to explain this, but probably it's impossible to so without telling just to play the damn game. What I want to say in general is that Tension The Void is much more original and interesting, but somehow less enjoyable than Pathologic.

 

[Kane]

Konjad, you need to review a more controversial game and not just the Codex' darling, otherwise you'll never be taken serious.

 

[Konjad]

It's not Codex's darling, when I made a survey about what game I should review, most people said Pathologic because they didn't know about that game.

 

[LeStryfe79]

!NATAS SI DAJNOK

 

[LeStryfe79]

!RECNAMORCEN

 

[Kane]

It's not Codex's darling, when I made a survey about what game I should review, most people said Pathologic because they didn't know about that game.

it scores high in codex goty 2012

 

[Konjad]

It's not Codex's darling, when I made a survey about what game I should review, most people said Pathologic because they didn't know about that game.

it scores high in codex goty 2012

It was released in 2005/2006, how could it be GOTY 2012? I guess you mixed up games?

 

[Kane]

It's not Codex's darling, when I made a survey about what game I should review, most people said Pathologic because they didn't know about that game.

it scores high in codex goty 2012

It was released in 2005/2006, how could it be GOTY 2012? I guess you mixed up games?

hmm.... you might actually be right