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Steam does its "Midweek Madness" sale thing and one of the items on sale this week is Pathologic 2, a remake of an old low-budget atmospheric horror game by Russian developer Icepick Lodge.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough to anyone who enjoys video games as an artistic experience. To me, it so thoroughly outperforms the games so often praised as "art pieces" that are generally just a CGI-rendered on rails cinematic experience like Heavy Rain that it feels wrong to compare it.

Despite the "2" in its title, it is a remake, not a sequel. not playing the predecessor makes the game a better experience as you avoid many story spoilers. It is an open world survival sim set in a mid-century Russian/Mongolian inspired soviet era steppe town, in which you primarily scavenge and navigate a barter economy that develops during a period of hyperinflation caused by a plague, as you work as a doctor to try and mitigate the disaster.

If you enjoy intensely challenging games where the primary difficulty comes from strategic resource allocation of your time, your health, and the interplay of power between various political factions and influential people, rather than your reaction time and ability to hit a button at the right time to kill the bad guy, Pathologic 2 is going to be a game that you'll enjoy. If video games are primarily an escape and power fantasy for you (and there is definitely no shame in that at all) then you'll probably want to look elsewhere. You play as a doctor, and the probable outcome of taking on a mugger with a knife with your bare hands is a bit more realistic than in most video games.

Wrong subsection, you may get more/better results there:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/forums/show/25.page

Ha, that's funny. Just yesterday I was rewatching hbomberguy's video on Pathologic.

It's very long but really good and goes into why the game is so good and so different to many other games of its "genre". It does have spoilers for the story, so if you want to go in blind then do not watch (but definitely bookmark to watch afterwards).

Harry's video is excellent, though is basically made of spoilers for Pathologic 2. While there are some changes between the original and 2, it mostly has to do with new characters, interactions, many more optional quests/less linearity, much smoother and less exploitable gameplay, etc and not necessarily major story beats.

Pathologic is kind of a "Groundhog day" scenario where there is a fixed series of events that will occur if you do nothing, and you are the sole variable element in the mix - where you go, what you choose to do, and how you choose to interfere in the events is what leads to the various possible outcomes.