i am playing pathologic 2. so far i have made friends with some street urchins, saved a guys life by surgically removing a knife stuck in his abdomen, and gotten curbstomped by some random people because a rumor suspected me of my fathers murder
whoever wrote this game was on some shit, i don't think i've played anything that showed such cohesive themes this early on
all i ever heard about this game was how bizarre and incomprehensible it is but i find the dream-logic of the game allows it to be extremely direct if that makes any sense. there are a lot of theatrical stage-play metaphors in pathologic 2 and the way the introduction skips through time reminds me a lot of how a play is able to skip through time without it being disjointing to the audience. metafictional characters will just show up and "directly" explain things to you like they would in a greek tragedy
the average video game is very obsessed with mimicking literary and film forms but i like to think of games as close to theater, with the player as an actor inhabiting a character and their scripted or unscripted actions causing the other actors to respond in kind
this isn't remotely a new idea, hell, super fucking mario brothers 3 has an obvious stage-play motif
@dankwraith oh shit, that's some hedgecrossing shit right there
@Manurweibling yeah the hedgecrossing stuff is quite explicit actually, your character is also able to communicate with earth-spirits who teach you to give blood to the earth so it will sprout healing herbs for you
@dankwraith i feel like jrpgs have understood this since the beginning
@dankwraith isn’t it fucking gorgeous
some observations so far: this is a game clearly interested in divisions and existing between them. the regions of the city are named after cuts of meat. your character half-belongs to an ethnic subgroup and has complicated feelings about it. your character is a surgeon, a profession which rescues people from the edge of death. your character is seemingly able to converse with spirits and the judges of the dead