I finished all three routes for the first time a little over a month ago, and since then I’ve begun playing exactly 2 things non-stop: Horror Games and Immersive Sims. Which is to say that I have played a lot of very good games recently. Silent Hill 1 and Deus Ex first, then Thief and Resident Evil. Ever beat Silent Hill 2, System Shock 2, and Vampire the Masquerade in the same day? Cause I have. And they've been great! They're all absolutely amazing games that I’m endlessly happy I took the time to play, all truly stellar experiences that deserve the praise they've gotten. But I was still, ultimately, playing all of them for the sake of trying to find something, anything that could make me feel the same way that Pathologic made me feel.

None of them even came close.

Pathologic is an incredibly unique, one of a kind game. Lying somewhere between immersive sim and survival game, you take up the role of a healer who's responsibility it is to try (and fail) to keep a town in the Russian steppe healthy by finishing a series of quests before a timer runs out each day, it’s actually not too much unlike Dead Rising of all things. Making your way around a detailed map trying to get to a lot of really out there characters while trying to complete quests under an ever-present time limit. These quests often involve fun things like getting food and medicine for the sick, delivering messages, getting lied to by the people you’re trying keep safe, being given impossible moral quandaries, and getting emotionally blackmailed into murdering children.

It is a game that often feels like it hates you, constantly giving you tasks that are comically cruel and miserable to ask of anyone. This is the kind of game that will lock you in a house infested with plague clouds for an hour, and then make fun of you for getting infected. That happens. Make no mistake, by hitting the new game button, you are willfully signing up for suffering and stress. In the same way you decide to play DOOM because you want to shoot guns at demons or play Sonic because you wanna go fast, you decide to play Pathologic to find out what creative ways the designers have found to torment you. This is the video game equivalent of signing up to be on Hot Ones: You having a bad time is the point.

And it might be my new favorite game.

You are not going to have fun here, just like you wouldn't read The Brothers Karamazov or watch Antichrist to have fun. You aren't here to get a playful romp. What you are going to have is an engaging experience that DEMANDS you take it seriously and immerse yourself in it if you want to survive. You're here for rich, layered writing that explored a wide arrange of themes, unique characters with their own distinct ideological motivations, and a one-of-a-kind setting caught between multiple eras of human history. You will not have a good time playing Pathologic, but you will have an experience that you'll never forget, and one that may even offer you some new ways to look at the world around you.

That said, this comes with all of the usual caveats: You are going to HAVE to use a guide if you want to see everything, it does look dated even by the standards of it's time, it has no shortage of THE JANK™, the plot can be deliberately hard to follow, and even coming into it with the most open heart possible may not be enough if you don't have a particularly high tolerance for being treated like ♥♥♥♥. However, if you take the time to learn all the ins and out of it's mechanics and can commit to seeing the story through to the very end, I can promise you you'll never have another experience like it with a game. Trust me, I've tried to find one.