Sulphur on 15/10/2024 at 09:14
No one's mistaking Ice-Pick Lodge games for anything other than developers of Brechtian video game existentialism, which is a hard sell all on its own even if you want them to do better despite their home country.
Renault on 15/10/2024 at 13:44
I got an email on this. If you backed the 2nd game on Kickstarter, they're giving you a copy of this third game for free. Pretty generous. I have the first two games in my library, but have never taken the plunge on either. Maybe it's a good time to check them out.
Kamlorn on 15/10/2024 at 17:30
Quote Posted by Sulphur
No one's mistaking Ice-Pick Lodge games for anything other than developers of Brechtian video game existentialism
This is the first time I see such a definition for them.
No, second to be honest, first time was probably here, and the author was probably you.
So even 'everyone, who knows about Brecht, Pathologic and existentialism' would be a sample too large, let alone your generalization.
Would be happy to hear some elaboration behind such a statement.
Sulphur on 16/10/2024 at 03:17
Not entirely sure what the question is, but I get the sense you mean that very few people would describe them that way? Let me put it this way - if you didn't know about Brecht and epic theatre, you'd probably just wave away elements of Pathologic like the characters talking about what's happening in the game outside of the narrative itself as weird fourth wall breaking for the sake of it. But if you did know what the point of epic theatre was, you'd immediately see the intent and inspiration behind why Ice-Pick Lodge does this sort of thing.
Now, do many people know about this stuff? Probably not. But people who dig deeper into what Pathologic is doing will generally agree that it's Brechtian in nature (here's one of the earliest (
https://www.eurogamer.net/r-pathologic-pc) reviews mentioning that), and things like The Void can only be Nietzsche-inflected existentialism.
Thirith on 16/10/2024 at 06:28
The Pathologic games have long been on my list of games to play, but somehow it's always been too daunting - but perhaps they're the right thing to follow from the Saturday morning cartoon that is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Does it make sense to play the original Pathologic before Pathologic 2? During development it always sounded like the latter was something of a remake or reboot, but its exact nature seems a bit nebulous to me.
Sulphur on 16/10/2024 at 12:07
I haven't played much of 2 past the demo. As far as I can tell, you've got it right - it's a reboot and a remake all at once for one of the character paths, so it exists in that interstitial space between the two. It's very Pathologic.
wycha on 16/10/2024 at 15:51
I'll try to clarify the muddy waters:
Pathologic or Мор. Утопия - 2005. A Game, The Game for enjoyers of hilariously awful localization. It is very first game of every person in the studio.
Pathologic Classic HD - 2015. Remaster. Making the game look and be playable on modern pcs, proper localization.
Pathologic 2 or Мор - 2019. It is remake of the game, revision of the ideas after years of experience. The publisher is TinyBuild and it forced english name to be Pathologic 2. Pathologic 2 initially wanted to have all of the player character routes but due to many turbulences* in 2018 studio released only one character route and promised other character routes to be published later.
Pathologic 3 - It is under Publisher of HypeTrain Digital. I can only speculate the amount of changes is too much and different to be part of another game. Besides, it would be unmarketable to sell a game under the same tittle after few years. Making fertile ground for Skyrim references. 3 is to keeping consistency and not messing further, thanks once more TinyBuild.
*I've heard rumors the work conditions were awful, included working under alcohol influence, and not paying people their salaries. Due to language barrier and vague posting I am not able to source this. I can say Meethos, the art director left the studio.
TLDR: You don't need to play Pathologic Classic HD to play and understand Pathologic 2.
Kamlorn on 16/10/2024 at 16:49
Quote Posted by wycha
.
*I've heard rumors the work conditions were awful,
included working under alcohol influence, That's not a bug, that's a feature!
