More and more these days, I find myself recommending games that aren’t perfect.
Or, more accurately, I find myself recommending games that aren’t smooth.
You know what I mean. Smooth games have checklists of objectives that pump serotonin directly into your receivers with a ding and an achievement notification. They have 3D cameras and detailed player-controlled character models taking up a third of the screen and chug along with consistent framerates.
And I love smooth games; I’m not not recommending them, that is, but I’m just playing a lot more games that don’t quite fit that mold, and I’m finding things in those games that I want to share with other people.
Pathologic 2 is a perfect example.
It’s certainly a buggy game; there are framerate hiccups, crashes, and long loading times that constantly wrestle with the game’s otherwise carefully constructed sense of immersion. All those things are enough to crown Pathologic 2 a decidedly not smooth game, but there’s another specific element that lends it such a deep friction.
It goes back to that checklist point. Pathologic 2, much like Ringo Ishikawa, a game I wrote about last December, is built on addition by subtraction. It tracks your progression in its weaving story with a mind map, a diagram laying out the leads your avatar can chase as he works to uncover the mystery shrouding his father’s murder.
In a game bereft of mechanical polish, the mind map stands out as a piece of incredibly smart design. Pathologic 2 is more or less a remake of Pathologic, a game notorious for its deliberately frustrating and obtuse mechanics and narrative.
The mind map is an attempt to reduce Pathologic’s inherent friction while still maintaining its sense of discovery and, most importantly, its insistence on player autonomy. You have, more or less, a journal keeping track of all the important story beats, and you must reckon that with a day/night timer that keeps pressure on you to move at a brisk pace. You are free to proceed as you see fit, pursuing the leads that interest you, and crafting your own story from the bricks and beats the game scatters on the floor.
Outer Wilds, also released in 2019, had a similar mechanic, and I’d argue that Disco Elysium’s mission log operates in much the same way. Both games, too, balance this approach out with a timer (however forgiving it is), placing pressure on the player to be economical in how they pursue leads.
There’s always a longer lineage to these things, but arguably the grandparent to this system is, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
And this system stands in stark contrast to the smooth way of doing things — that perfectly crafted checklist, with items that can be summarily crossed off in any order, with sidequests that, by their very nature, cannot hold any substantial narrative weight beyond, in the best case, contributing to the themes, however obvious they are (Red Dead Redemption 2, as an example).
When I first opened the mind map in Pathologic 2, I was intimidated, much as I was looking at the journals in Outer Wilds or Majora’s Mask for the first time. To a brain trained to look for a checklist, something so complicated coupled with the pressure of time is exhausting.
But in reality, this system grants a freedom and autonomy that you cannot get from a smooth game. You have no fear of seeing all the Content. You have no fear of missing out. There is no omniscient right answer to pursue, beyond the feeling in your gut. Letting go and trusting that part of yourself is absolutely freeing, as you cease having an obligation to a menu.
But building a system like this takes an immense bravery, a confidence that some of your greatest work as a game developer might never be seen by a player. If you’ve ever run a tabletop roleplaying game from a prewritten module, you might be familiar with this conundrum. Paragraphs and paragraphs of text must be shucked and thrown away so your players can pursue a weird narrative beat that you were completely unable to anticipate. Long, winding campaigns are narrowed down to a natural 20 and a little quick-talking from a charismatic bard.
To give in to this change would be to erase hours and hours of work and planning. To resist this change would be to rob your players of their autonomy at the table, that magic feeling that this fantasy world is impacted by their influence, and thus completely defeat the power of the game.
Imagine that, but also you’ve poured years and thousands to millions of dollars into building the experience. You can see why this choice is so courageous, then, and why it’s one of the many reasons I think Pathologic 2 is so deserving of praise.
I sing those praises for Pathologic 2 a lot, and I always have to stop short of saying it’s a masterpiece. It’s certainly not. It’s not polished, it’s not refined, and it’s certainly not smooth. But it is unique. It’s powerful. It’s frightening, and touching, and prescient, and, most importantly, it’s deliberate. It does not set you down a road so much as it shakes you awake in the middle of a field.
In doing so, it casts off the burden of perfection and instead embraces its own messy, rough-edged experience to take you to a certain time, place, and mood to tell a certain thematic story. I love it for its friction, and I love it for its imperfections. I love it, above all else, as something to discover.
