Pathologic 2 – Ice-Pick Lodge’s grim plague survival adventure – is to be released in parts. Originally just Kickstarted as ‘Pathologic’, implying a remake, as with the original game you play as three different characters, each with their own stories, abilities and vast swathes of dialogue. Thanks to a multitude of pressures detailed in their dev blog here, they’ll be releasing the Haruspex’s story first in the second quarter of 2019, with the other two characters coming later, although the exact method is yet undecided. Below, developer Nikolay Dybowski explains the situation in a (subtitled) video.
Pathologic 2, like the original, is a story told from three unique perspectives: The Haruspex, the Bachelor, and the Changeling, each of them trying to solve the mystery behind a strange plague that's devastated a strange small town. Today developer Ice-Pick Lodge announced that the game will be divided into separate parts for release, one for each character, so that it doesn't have to delay the launch any further.
Developer Nikolay Dybowski explained in a video (thankfully dubbed in English) that there are several reasons for the extended development, including the economic crisis in Russia that caused a crucial investment deal to fall through. The team has been going "full-out" with far less funding than expected, and "the fact that we're this close to completion is an achievement in and of itself," he said.
"And so we've made a tough decision to not prolong the wait even further, and release the game in parts. First, we'll publish the Harupsex's story, while the Bachelor and the Changeling will come out later."
Dybowski acknowledged that some fans will be disappointed but said that Steam statistics show that the vast majority of players take the game slowly and methodically—"First one story, then the next, and much later, the third"—rather than powering through all three of them one right after the other. "We don't think it would be right to force into waiting the people who will play this game slowly, steadily, iteratively, step by step," he said.
Another factor behind the decision is the fact that Pathologic 2 is the first game Ice-Pick Lodge has developed in the public eye, and that's changed how it approaches the process. Feedback has "seriously changed our understanding of how modern gamers approach videogames," he said: A large portion of players aren't prepared to sink as much time and energy into a single game as they were back in the day, and so new games "must become somewhat more comfortable to play than we'd like."
As a result, Ice-Pick Lodge has decided to dial things back a bit on Pathologic 2. The game as it was planned was "back-breakingly hard," with an "unbearably steep" learning curve, but based on feedback the studio has decided to make it "slightly less obscure, more convenient to play, and accessible."
"It does not mean we've abandoned our original vision. Not at all. It's still an experiment, still novel. We really hope you'll appreciate it when you play it and learn the underlying ideas. But we need to modify our approach to presentation a bit," Dybowski said. Releasing the Haruspex chapter first will with that by enabling Ice-Pick Lodge to see how people play and react to it, and then adjust the subsequent chapters accordingly.
There's still no release date, but Ice Pick Lodge said in a "state of Pathologic 2" update that the Haruspex chapter will be out sometime between April 1 and June 1 of 2019.
The Long Dark - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Ewan Wilson)
Whilst raw forms of horror work through shock and disgust, the eerie is felt more as a threat. Perhaps something seems to hover over or follow you — there s a rustling just behind you, or a shimmering in your peripheral vision. Usually eeriness pertains to places rather than people. Places that seem to move, shift or even act when they really should lie still. This sense is just as likely to be found in an empty room as an open moor. Sometimes, however, this sense manifests, becoming a force that can reach out and grip us. (more…)
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.
Bleak, harrowing and frustrating are the first words I think of when Ice-Pick Lodge’s Pathologic springs to mind – followed quickly by entrancing, alien and compelling. Originally Kickstarted as a remake, the now-reimagined plague survival immersive sim Pathologic 2 is shaping up to be something special. Not convinced? If you don’t mind some bugs, you can try it out today.
Earlier in development, Ice-Pick released The Marble Nest, a self-contained short story set within the world of Pathologic 2, available via Ice-Pick’s FAQ page. Today’s public alpha is far larger, and a slice of the final game, giving you three days to explore its diseased city as one of its three playable characters. It’s free for all and available here. Below, a new video glimpse of what awaits.
This will be the "Alpha" build of the game that'll first go out to Kickstarter backers, then Beta Backers, and finally people who sign-up for the Alpha at http://Pathologic-Game.com
Ice-Pick Lodge has released a fresh Pathologic 2 progress report for June, detailing some of the tweaking and tuning that's been done to the game's systems, including trading and bartering, street-level autopsies, lockpicking, and infection. "Many game systems have already been locked in place, and most of our resources go into content creation these days," the studio said. "Still, we keep fine-tuning interfaces and experimenting with sub-systems!"
Most of the changes seem relatively minor: If you can't meet a merchant's price for something, for instance, some of them will accept other items in trade but will probably gouge you deeply. There are also numerous animated gifs demonstrating how certain game mechanics work, like lockpicking, or how parts of it have evolved: The autopsy screen has been changed to more clearly indicate how organ damage works, for instance.
But there are also some interesting insights into how Pathologic 2 will actually play. Games can be saved manually, but only in certain places, a "compromise" solution intended to give players flexibility while preventing "abuse". Save locations "often host important characters, so if you strongly need to reload a heartfelt conversation, you will be able to do so, while save-scumming an action sequence in the street is discouraged." And aside from that, it may not work quite as you would expect anyway.
"Are you absolutely positive that loading a save just turned the time and erased the unfortunate event from in-game history completely?" Ice-Pick wrote cryptically. "Are you sure no one remembers?"
The update also covers work in progress on autopsies, violent encounters with the locals, lockpicking (yes, there is a lockpicking mini-game), infection, diagnostics, healing, lucid dreaming, and more. It sounds weird, but that's Pathologic for you: Intensely strange but really good, if that's your cup of tea. (Those links are for the Pathologic remake rather than the sequel, but it's a fair bet that the weirdness will hold.) A release date still hasn't been announced.
Pathologic Classic HD - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dominic Tarason)
I await Ice-Pick Lodge’s alternate-earth plague survival adventure Pathologic 2 with equal parts excitement and dread. The original, for all its technical (and translation-related) flaws was a systems-rich game where you juggled allegiances as much as personal stats and resources. In their latest development blog post, Ice-Pick Lodge detail some of the interesting new systems that you’ll have to worry about, on top of everything the cult favourite demanded of you.
After playing an early demo of Ice-Pick Lodge's Pathologic remake in late 2016, I genuinely couldn't sleep at night. I loved the open-world survival horror original—which has since been remastered—and admired the creepy and equally dysfunctional direction in which the devs were steering this one. Now named Pathologic 2, the game's latest progress report teases its new combat mechanics, smarter AI NPCs and some of the nightmare-inducing locations that are set to feature in the final game.
Throughout this blog post, Ice-Pick Lodge underscores the importance of resource management in Pathologic 2. Like the 2005 original, crucial items have many different uses in different precincts—"Do you drink water or use it to make a tincture? Do you drink that tincture or use it on someone else to detect early plague symptoms in them?"
With this in mind, a dynamic district-by-district dynamic reputation system has been added—which means you'll be shunned by the communities you've failed to save/gone on a murderous killing spree within, but will be treated with indifference elsewhere.
The team are also working on non-lethal fights and AI that can surrender.
"Let’s face it: while the mood and the role-playing of Pathologic 2 may not be about fighting, sometimes mugging people makes fiscal sense," explains Ice-Pick Lodge. "There are several systems in the game precluding you from abusing this, like the aforementioned reputation and armed NPCs reacting to your violent actions… but some players will still be tempted to resort to violence, especially in self-defence, and we want to provide a middle ground for them. If an NPCs feels threatened enough, they will stop fighting and let you mug them. No blood will be shed."
Naturally, NPCs will probably put up more of a fight if you go after their organs, but I guess that's to be expected. Those who do wish to get dirty should know melee fights have gone through "several" iterations since January of this year, and that stamina management and movesets have been tweaked to ensure human NPC opponents react as expected.
No matter how aggressive Odonghs get, though, I can't not find them cute. Check out those encounters for yourself here—where you'll also find more on the above and the multiple other areas Ice-Pick Lodge is actively improving.No hard release date as yet, but I for one am looking forward to/terrified of Pathologic 2.
