Tag: pathologic

Feature

Stop calling Eastern European videogames pessimistic

It’s been 30 years since the Chernobyl disaster. There’s no denying that the explosion joined the gallery of horrors that haunt our collective imagination. As such, just like the images of concentration camps or the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, it has been fueling the anxiety on which popular culture, including videogames, thrives. Even to most Eastern Europeans Chernobyl is a post-apocalyptic fantasy. It’s why accounts of the Chernobyl disaster and its effects, even from those closest to it, usually employ conventional narrative schemas. Typically, these are borrowed from the media and globally-consumed popular fiction, and so before worrying too much…
Feature

Pathologic and the disease of language

Boredom is usually considered to be the death of a game. You play, you get bored, you switch off. Popular thought demands that videogames be engaging at all times, whether through direct action or intellectual thrill. It matters less as to how it’s achieved as long as boredom is avoided. But Pathologic, a game by Ice-Pick Lodge released in 2005 but re-released in HD last year, goes against this thinking—it forces its players to get bored and for good reason. Pathologic is a game about an epidemic. However, it does not follow the clichéd narrative of a crisis revealing the…
Article

The year in boardgames

“2015 is the year of the board game,” I told everyone I knew. I wrote it out in emails. I typed the words out in text messages. I casually said it over the phone. If friends or family wanted to get me something for my birthday, a PlayStation gift card would not do: I had a manicured Amazon wish list pruned with all the games I wanted to play. Sure, I occasionally played games on a screen. But people know, now: when they invite me over for dinner, they better be ready to play Love Letter or Netrunner or whatever…
News

Pathologic Classic’s new trailer is how videogame trailers should be done

Pathologic Classic HD, the remaster of Ice-Pick Lodge’s classic horror game, is out and along with it, a brand new trailer. It’s exactly what a trailer for a game like this should be: a long, slow montage of people and places, monuments and landscapes recognizable to loyal fans, but foreign to those who have yet to step into its world. It’s ominous, inviting, it shows, but doesn’t tell, it raises more questions than it answers, and most importantly, it makes me want to play. The HD remaster was announced earlier this month as a separate game from the Pathologic remake…
News

Cult classic horror game Pathologic will get an HD remaster before its remake

I’ve only ever met people who love or hate Pathologic. The strange Russian game about a diseased town (to put it simply) won several awards, but English-speaking players criticized it for its poor translation. Its recently crowdfunded remake aims to solve this issue, among other things, but Ice-Pick Lodge has also announced an HD version of the original game that will fix most of what made the original “bad,” while still maintaining what made it good. Ice-Pick Lodge lovingly refers to this in a blog post as “Pathologic Classic HD: Now Comprehensible.” It’s effectively a remaster of the original game,…