I’m always up for seeing what Ice Pick Lodge is doing with its Kickstarted surreal horror-adventure remake Pathologic, in which you play a plague doctor trying to combat a strange disease working its way through the population of a remote town.
The latest update post from the team reveals the return of the heroic Sir Trash Bin (yes, they dedicated a separate paragraph to the game’s dumpsters) from the original 2005 game, and then discusses something even stranger – the concept of “shimmering things”.
“Each element of the Pathologic game world, from a hat to a brick, actually belongs to several different “planes of existence”, so to speak,” the team explains. “This makes the art style interactive in its own right: the surroundings lend themselves to being interpreted in different ways, and each object is a small mindscrew you have to find a place in the big picture for.”
”This creates a robust and uncertain atmosphere that’s perfect for Pathologic. It’s always up to you to interpret what you’re seeing, to make it solid—and forging your own vision of a fluid world is what this game is about. It’s about double meaning, innuendoes, and the feeling that nothing is ever final.”
Basically, they want to mess with your head while you’re playing the game. Everything you see will feel like it doesn’t fit into the world, from simple objects to characters and plot devices. Humanity in the Town you are exploring has been slowly erased, leaving only an “aesthetic and ideological dichotomy” behind.
Phew. It’s getting very existential in here, isn’t it? I’m not sure if Pathologic, with its defiant oddness and its frequent flights of fancy, will strike it off with the general gaming public, but I can’t wait to give it a go. Ice Pick Lodge is pepping for a late-2016 release.
