Pathologic is a game where you take on the role of one of the three different healers who are trying to curb an outbreak of a deadly plague. It’s a plot-driven survival open-world adventure.
Fighting tooth and nail to survive, facing the harsh realities of a collapsing society, making tough choices and often finding yourself in lose-lose situations, you are inevitably going to come to a simple realization: the plague is more than merely a disease. It happened for a reason. And it can’t be cured unless that reason is uncovered.
In Pathologic, nothing is exactly what it seems. Although capable of saving lives, none of the three healers is an honest-to-god doctor: the Bachelor is rather a scientist; the Haruspex, the son of a pellar and an amateur surgeon; the Changeling, a blessed thief girl. The behemoth Abattoir looming above the Town is an ancient temple. The most prominent features of the local vistas were designed by opticians. The orderlies wear theatrical costumes. The children easily trade bullets for nuts. Inanimate objects like walls form blisters, and roots in the ground remind you of veins.
This is an odd place.
Get to know it, winning the affection of the locals and gaining allies, or try to carve your own path alone. Explore the Town, its inhabitants, and their traditions; fight both the plague itself and its victims; try to make a difference before the time runs out.
Just remember: you can’t save everyone.
[list] [*] 12 days in an odd town ravaged by a deadly disease.
[*] Three protagonists with three completely different storylines.
[*] Time is of the essence: if you don’t manage it carefully, it’ll simply run out. You’ll have to choose how to spend the priceless minutes you have.
[*] Social survival thriller. You’ll have to manage your bodily functions, offsetting hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and so on. But it doesn’t boil down to scavenging resources. Surviving on your own is hard; you’ll have to win over allies.
[*] An uphill battle. Managing your bodily parameters may seem bearable at first, but as time goes by, it becomes harder and harder. Your own organism is only waiting for an opportunity to give up and betray you. Things are changing from bad to worse and the odds are stacked against you.
[*] The town is completely free to roam at your will, no artificial boundaries barring your way. Knock on any door, enter any house… and be prepared to face the consequences.
[*] A duel with an enemy you can’t kill. Your main foe is the plague itself, an incorporeal and malevolent entity that you have to defeat… without having the means to. It’s more powerful and more treacherous than you can imagine.
[*] Loot, murder, mug, steal, barter, beg… or don’t. You need resources to survive, but it’s up to you how to obtain them.
[*] The fights are short, ungraceful, and vicious. They don’t have to be lethal though. Many people—yourself included—would prefer to exchange their wallet for their life.[/list:u]
Last edited by lolozaur on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 22:49; edited 2 times in total
Pathologic is a game where you take on the role of one of the three different healers who are trying to curb an outbreak of a deadly plague. It’s a plot-driven survival open-world adventure.
Fighting tooth and nail to survive, facing the harsh realities of a collapsing society, making tough choices and often finding yourself in lose-lose situations, you are inevitably going to come to a simple realization: the plague is more than merely a disease. It happened for a reason. And it can’t be cured unless that reason is uncovered.
In Pathologic, nothing is exactly what it seems. Although capable of saving lives, none of the three healers is an honest-to-god doctor: the Bachelor is rather a scientist; the Haruspex, the son of a pellar and an amateur surgeon; the Changeling, a blessed thief girl. The behemoth Abattoir looming above the Town is an ancient temple. The most prominent features of the local vistas were designed by opticians. The orderlies wear theatrical costumes. The children easily trade bullets for nuts. Inanimate objects like walls form blisters, and roots in the ground remind you of veins.
This is an odd place.
Get to know it, winning the affection of the locals and gaining allies, or try to carve your own path alone. Explore the Town, its inhabitants, and their traditions; fight both the plague itself and its victims; try to make a difference before the time runs out.
Just remember: you can’t save everyone.
12 days in an odd town ravaged by a deadly disease.
Three protagonists with three completely different storylines.
Time is of the essence: if you don’t manage it carefully, it’ll simply run out. You’ll have to choose how to spend the priceless minutes you have.
Social survival thriller. You’ll have to manage your bodily functions, offsetting hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and so on. But it doesn’t boil down to scavenging resources. Surviving on your own is hard; you’ll have to win over allies.
An uphill battle. Managing your bodily parameters may seem bearable at first, but as time goes by, it becomes harder and harder. Your own organism is only waiting for an opportunity to give up and betray you. Things are changing from bad to worse and the odds are stacked against you.
The town is completely free to roam at your will, no artificial boundaries barring your way. Knock on any door, enter any house… and be prepared to face the consequences.
A duel with an enemy you can’t kill. Your main foe is the plague itself, an incorporeal and malevolent entity that you have to defeat… without having the means to. It’s more powerful and more treacherous than you can imagine.
Loot, murder, mug, steal, barter, beg… or don’t. You need resources to survive, but it’s up to you how to obtain them.
The fights are short, ungraceful, and vicious. They don’t have to be lethal though. Many people—yourself included—would prefer to exchange their wallet for their life.
Finally some concrete infos about this Pathoremake Forever, it was about time
It should be a faithful one from what I can tell, one big difference is that the events/quests system doesn't rely on simple letters anymore, but ideally it's less guided and informations come directly from interacting with people in the streets (which is good).
Emm.. This is really interesting, but i do hate being rushed. I hate it intensely. How forgiving is the timer? does like 15+ hours go down the drain if you screw up something and it runs out?
The timer is pretty damn harsh, especially if you plan to complete all the quests, save many characters, and do what the game world has to offer. There is always complete freedom, so if the situation is dire, you can focus on surviving and/or doing the main quest only and carry on till the last day without major problems (assuming that you get the hang of the trading system and survival elements).
There are some (brutal ) occurrences that give instant game over as far as I remember, though generally not saving people or doing extremely evil stuff only give you a different ending and not a game over.
Alpha access backers should now have access to a short playable story called "The Marble nest". It's an early build, used to test their method to build the game, to show the game to the press, and a way to gather feedback from the fans. Their youtube channel has a few "vignette" videos showing places of the town: https://www.youtube.com/user/IcePickLodge/videos
Hey everyone! My name is Alex Nichiporchik, I’m the producer of games like SpeedRunners, Party Hard, Punch Club, and Hello Neighbor. Today I bring some good news to the backers of Pathologic. I’ll be producing the game from tinyBuild’s side, as we’ve partnered up with Ice-Pick Lodge to help finish this gem.
This has been a while in the making, and we’re finally ready to take the curtain off from where Pathologic is heading as a franchise, and what this means for the game you’ve Kickstarted.
First, the drill-down
What we referred to as Pathologic is now Pathologic 2 to avoid confusion between the original game, Pathologic Classic HD, The Marble Nest, Mor. Utopia, and so on
tinyBuild partnered up with Ice-Pick Lodge to bring Pathologic 2 to market in 2018
All original pledges are still in effect
We’re changing the development methodology to become more open, similar to what tinyBuild did with Hello Neighbor — allowing in-development access to game builds to fans who support the development
12
Full game is coming in 2018, alphas are coming sooner
In the good old days of game development, typically you’d get a publishing deal in place — receive funding from a publisher, and lock yourselves in for a couple of years until you ship something. Repeat every few years. It’s clear this work method no longer works, not for us or for the industry as a whole. Releasing The Marble Nest gave Ice-Pick Lodge an insane amount of feedback, and after seeing what tinyBuild was able to achieve while being completely open with their fans about games like Party Hard, SpeedRunners, and Hello Neighbor, it was clear the dev process needed a change.
To be clear: tinyBuild is coming on board to help produce Pathologic 2, acting as a publishing partner.
Being Kickstarter backers, soon you will receive the first Alpha build of Pathologic 2. The build will have a slightly smaller town and a few systems in place to demonstrate the atmosphere and some of the upcoming gameplay mechanics. We will gather feedback from fans, and adjust the direction of development based on this feedback.
In the old structure, we would spend months on getting complicated systems in place, and hope everything comes together in the end.
Today we spend shorter sprints on accomplishing smaller tasks, and playtest what we’ve accomplished — figuring out if the direction is still the right one. This empowered us to come up with a few fun mechanics that’ll be playable this weekend at PAXWest in Seattle.
If the reception of the PAXWest demo is positive, that’ll be the first alpha we release to you guys. Stay tuned.
Take a look at the PAXWest demo in action. This is all live gameplay.
What an Odyssey of gaming development, practically (yet) another failure of the Kickstarter formula since they had to call for help and involve a publisher in order to accomplish something. At least the game might actually see the light this way..maybe!
ixi tbh in most cases its mostly just help with marketing and retail/consoles ... which is imo better to left for specialist and not devs themselves (case in point NMS)
IMO TinyBuild is nice fit for project like this ... better than assholes like Gearbox that screws thinks up
ixi tbh in most cases its mostly just help with marketing and retail/consoles ... which is imo better to left for specialist and not devs themselves (case in point NMS)
IMO TinyBuild is nice fit for project like this ... better than assholes like Gearbox that screws thinks up
Haha yeah, that's true. The fact that TinyBuild is involved instead of one of our usual suspects is fairly reassuring all things considered, they have a nice track record when it comes to publishing indies.
With Gearbox we'd have the Pathologic Pestilence Edition sold for $60 with the 30$ Full Psychosis Season Pass already available for preorder, including exclusive fully voiced Duke Nukem lines for Bachelor along with a rocket launcher to facilitate the journey.
Their blog post isn't very clear on it, but it looks like it's still a "remake". It's still taking place in the same town, with the same time limit and general story, but since there are already 2 games called Pathologic (the original + the recent HD version), they're calling this one Pathologic 2. Changing the name might lead to more confusion than the original one.
In regard to TinyBuild, this is what the developers said: "We are fully in charge of creative choices. tinyBuild help with management/production/marketing (i.e. being efficient in reaching goals)."
Hopefully their next kickstarter update will tackle the questions people have as a result of this one.
Access had been extended to backers with Beta access. I gave it a shot and completed the alpha, it contained the first 3 days of the Haruspex.
It was incredibly buggy, but quite good. I think fans of the original will find enough new elements to justify playing this remake/notremake. Some of the changes will be controversial, such as moving toward a checkpoint save system.
With that said, I'm not convinced they'll be able to release the game in 2018. I think it'll get delayed again. They have 3 days out of 12 ready, for one doctor out of 3, and it's REALLY buggy. Really, truly alpha-buggy.
Even if they have a content-complete version, I think the amount of bugs will take more than 3 months to fix.
New development: game will be split in three parts, release date delayed from 2018 to Q2 2019.
Instead of releasing the full game all at once with the three characters playable from the start, the game will now begin with the release of the Haruspex character, followed later on by the release of the two remaining characters. It's also possible they'll tweak the game a bit with the release of each character.
Quote:
To sum it up, this decision did not come easy to us, but it had to be made for the following reasons:
We want to watch you play the Haruspex’s story just as much as you want to play it—and it will also help us fine-tune the other two.
It would just be wrong to prolong the wait even further.
Your feedback to the Marble Nest and the alpha confirmed some of our suspicions, but also gave us new food for thought. We realized that we need to tweak the game—not its core ideas, but the presentation—some more. Some of our ideas are not what you would call extremely accessible; but that only means that we need to put extra work into making sure only those parts of the game that we want to be confusing, are.
The economic crisis in Russia, that happened just around our KS campaign, seriously hindered the early development. It came out of the blue for many people, and, looking back, we still can’t see how we could have avoided it. We invested our personal savings into the game, worked for free sometimes, and in the end, overcame the issues. But it came at a cost—namely, of development speed.
In this era of soft launches and Early Accesses releasing a game in parts does not have to come as a shock. Some projects choose it do this deliberately. It was not our original intent, but we do think it works fine with the game’s concept.
They lived happily ever after, and horribly ever before. #Pathologic2 by @IcePickLodge is coming to Steam on May 23 Let's celebrate with the most bizarre game trailer of the year
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) occurrences that give instant game over as far as I remember, though generally not saving people or doing extremely evil stuff only give you a different ending and not a game over.
