Good news arrives today for Pathologic 2 players put off by its hard difficulty. The relentlessly bleak and gruelingly hard survival sim/psychological horror title is slated to get a difficulty slider in the near future.
While the harsh gameplay actually is the main point of the game, there is a point reached where playing whack-a-mole with the hunger meter gets in the way of the experience instead of enhancing it.
Developer IcePick Lodge made the announcement today that “we’d rather give people a tweaked experience than none at all.” The developer noted that many players only beat the original game by cheating. The devs went on to explain their reasoning:
We’ve always believed that games are a medium capable of delivering all kinds of compelling experiences — and that said experiences don’t need to be conventionally pleasant to be interesting and fulfilling. Pathologic 2 was always intended to be grueling, stressful, and bleak; we believe in ludonarrative cohesion and aren’t too fond of stories that are only dark and hurtful on the cover.
However, we also believe — even firmer — in player freedom.
Pathologic 2 was balanced around three principles:
- We want the player to always balance on the verge of death, but also always to have an opportunity to drag themselves out (perhaps loading a save or two back — that’s why the game keeps the full history of your saves)
- We want the player to be forced to sacrifice “cool and interesting” content due to their survival needs, to be always short on time and not being able to achieve an optimal playthrough. The story of Pathologic 2 is written to be caught glimpses of, not unfold completely
- We want the player to do things that feel clearly wrong, like voluntarily thrashing their reputation or using the healing items that could have saved someone. Among other things, Pathologic 2 is an exploration of selfishness — that video games often allow us to completely disregard as a factor
Those interested can read the full update at Steam here. The slider should arrive in an update within the next three weeks.
For those about to release a pterodactyl screech of “get gid noobs!” into the sky, well, legacy players can keep the difficulty at its original, extremely unforgiving, level.
No matter what difficulty players want to experience, they’ll want to know the locations of the save clocks and various kid stashes to have a chance at surviving all 12 days of plague-infested gloom. Be sure to head over to our Pathologic 2 guides.
