I have never experienced a game like Pathologic 2. It's harsh, unforgiving and you constantly need to manage your limited resources. Confusing too because you're not spoon fed with information and dialogue/quests you go through just spins "the truth" even further.

It's a game where time isn't on your side. You have twelve days to find a cure against a plague in your hometown, solve a murder of your father and among other things. So much to do and you need to think carefully which quests you want to tackle first because you can't do them all. And most important of them all, you can't save everybody. And the slav jank gives the extra oomph and charm. For most part.

Before I started playing, I knew the game's reputation for being hard. The first four days were brutal for me. Just pure survival because you need to keep searching for resources so you can buy/trade food etc. I even had to go back to the older save file because I made one grave mistake which set me on a path of nothing but dying. Yeah, it was one of those two hours worth of play time down to the drain kind of mistake which was a whole day in game time. Lovely.

I kept playing. I understood pretty early that maybe everything what was happening in the game wasn't real and I was in a theatrical play. A meta play. The director said it to me blatantly during one of our conversations in the theater and I even met my successor at one point. Now that was a mindf*ckery at the best.

On day nine, I noticed a feeling I experienced with the game for the first time. I started to enjoy it. I later discovered the cure and in the middle of this... madness or mayhem, I used all the learned skills of barter and scavenge to my advance and the plot started somewhat of what sense to me. One point I even thought that I found a way to escape the town with a train but no, something bad happens and the game tells you to go back to town to finish your journey. By foot. Soothing ethereal music starts playing and I ponder my choices and what awaits for me in the town. Just inhale and exhale. Just couple more days of survival.

Recommendation? Sure. If you call yourself a gamer and all you do is play Call Of Duty etc, this game isn't probably for you. If you like to dip your toes to the grinding experimentation where you suffer at first because you take your time to learn the mechanics of the game but it's never-ending chase because the game itself constantly changes the rules but you learn to enjoy it slowly. Somehow. The first playthrough will be one of a kind experience which is roughly 25 hours and most likely will give you a strange fulfillment you won't get from anywhere else. For me it's also leaning towards The Witcher 3 type of territory where many days later after finishing the game, I think about all the choices I made and if I really made the right calls (in The Witcher 3 my first playthrough was with the bad ending). Yeah, it's one of those rare games where I am still processing what happened to my character/the game world and I need to compress it internally before I can restart a new game. And while doing so, I need to play something else. I'm not ready to return.

All in all, Pathologic 2 is full of jank, the ugly washed up textures, weird design choices (ie. have some spoken dialogue but it's 99% text) but with the abnormal writing style and continuous rule bending, it still manages to rise towards a 9/10 game. Not perfect in any means but very unique.