Não é tão difícil quanto imaginei, mas o valor artístico e sentimental são poderosos, e adoro como o jogo literalmente te joga pra se virar, muitas vezes não te obrigando a fazer nada. Fora o fator re-play que é grande por algum motivo, é irônico um jogo na qual foi feito pra você sofrer ser tão divertido (por algum motivo eu gosto de caminhar nesse jogo). A única coisa que me incomoda é o tempo, que é curto (propositalmente) e me deixa afobado as vezes, mas eu não mudaria nada, afinal pra mim é isso que torna esse jogo "difícil". "Você não deve aceitar a morte, e sim supera-la , ir além do limite humano".

✅ Positives:
• I haven’t played many games with atmosphere quite as oppressive as this felt, almost suffocatingly so. From the get go you’re set off in a town that’s immediately out to get you, with the game getting much worse to manage as a deadly plague starts to set in, supplies run low, and districts fall into disarray. As the town’s doctor, you’ll be tasked to try and keep the people there and yourself alive as long as you can, which gets more miserable with each passing day. While there are difficulty settings to choose from, at the start it’s said to keep it on an “intended” level as a way to really understand the almost unbearable world they’ve made here, and I’d say it does work very well even if it can be exhausting to play after a while
• With the survival systems and timed deadlines you’re pretty much forced to always be doing something, and I liked how the characters, quests and points of interest are structured with a “thoughts” map which made it easy to keep track of things. You’ll rarely be lost cause of this which was appreciated
• The majority of the game is spent talking to the town’s residents, and dialogue is well written. And while he’s not voiced I liked how personified they made the main character’s dialogue options too, endearingly emphasizing his stress with the situation and other characters as he tries to find a cure
• I liked how the barter system works in the game. Ordinarily you can go to stores to buy supplies but that’ll start getting expensive very quickly. Instead you can trade a bunch of general items you have with NPCs for anything they’re carrying to keep you going, like food or medicine. This makes all the random items you find useful when they wouldn’t have much value otherwise
• The music is understated but does a great job making you feel very uneasy as you go around town and things continue to get worse

❎ Negatives:
• Didn’t like the combat. I get that it’s supposed to be avoided as you barely have any means to defend yourself or heal, but in those cases where you have no choice or get overwhelmed by multiple enemies it’s very janky to deal with. On top of this, the game does this thing where you get punished if you die by taking away a piece of your overall health across all your save files, meaning you can’t just reload afterwards from what I could tell. With how fast combat can kill you in general, I felt this wasn’t really necessary on top of everything else
• You will be walking through the same town districts A LOT, there is only a limited way to fast travel with boats and you need finite items to use them (and eventually they’ll ask for more at once too). Didn’t really care for this and felt it just took up more time than anything
• Assuming you play on the intended difficulty, you will constantly be starving. This works as the means to keep you active throughout the game, but at times I felt it was a bit unbalanced as water was comparatively much easier to find and stock up on. Don’t think I ever had a point where I was really in need of that, meanwhile your hunger meter barely lasts a couple hours before having to look for more (and it gets expensive to do so)
• Performance on Steam Deck was okay, but couldn’t really handle it past 30 FPS. Probably should only play this on an SSD also, as it loads every time you enter interiors and I’ve seen it can have extremely long wait times otherwise

Though Disco Elysium may beat it on many levels, this is my favorite game ever made.

What this game has done for me, I can't really prescribe to any other piece of media. It's got its flaws, and the ending definitely could use some work, but there have been very few things that have made me feel the same way as this could. There were so many times I wanted to give up, to start over when I was playing through this, but something, that sheer perseverance despite all the odds that were stacked against me. I cared for the characters, I worked so hard to make sure they could all survive, and yet, I still lost Murky.
This isn't a game for everyone, it's hard (though it tends to be over-exaggerated), but if you are willing to dive in, you are going to have an experience unlike any other.

Chickens score 0/10: No chickens
Overall Score: 10/10

Chicken score: 0/10

What are games?

If you were to ask this to most gamers, they would call it an artform. But to those same people who might also criticize this game on the simple foundation of it ''not being fun'', I ask you to either reconsider your take on videogames even being an artform, or your criticism of pathologic.

It's weird, really. So many gamers pretend to be some intellectuals for considering video games art, yet dislike a game for not being a constant dopamine dispensor. Art is about making you feel emotions. These emotions do not have to be positive emotions, they can be feelings of horror, boredom, sadness and... utter dread.

And here I am, with a positive review, saying this with the most positive intent:

This game is dreadful. Absolutely dreadful. And you should play it.
Pathologic 2 is a survival game, with a MASSIVE emphasis on survival. This is not your regular ''eat food and drink water thats very easily accesible every once in a while, your health will become better over short time'' type survival. This is an ''Oh, you're literally starving? Well, buy this fish for just 500 coins! Oh, you dont have enough coins? Just trade some items to afford it! Oh, you traded all your items and finally got just enough coins for it, but the fish only satisfied one slight bit of your hunger, and you're still starving? Well f*ck you then!'' type game.

It is a constant struggle, not just over the big goal of CURING A PLAGUE, but also a struggle of mere survival, ramped up times ten.

This, in itself, isn't inherently good. There are plenty of bad games that are also incredibly hard. But what makes this game good? A great mix. This game excels in storytelling and atmosphere. As you walk through this plague-ridden town, listening to its strange, but fitting music, observing its strange monuments, houses and inhabitants, you immerse yourself in the game. You find yourself genuinely desperate to reach your goals in time. You approach carefully around every corner to look out for hostiles, your heartbeat increases every time you enter a district with a worse opinion of you, and you're willing to do whatever just to satisfy your hunger for a couple hours.

It's honestly hard to describe how well the dread of the gameplay, brilliance of the story and atmosphere of the town mixes into one of the best showcases that games REALLY ARE art, because it's not just a reward-based monkey in a restrain-chair dopamine dispensor, and I believe it's really telling to gamers who criticise this game for not being exactly that.

The only reason it’s not 5 stars from me is that the ps version of this game works abhorrently. Sometimes I would just run from the guys, and the house, in which I want to hide from the said guys, just won’t fucking spawn (like I would just see blurred textures and that’s it, even though from far away it looked fine), and the said guys would just give me a couple of stabs and bid me farewell. Or instead of playing a game I would be watching slideshow, or it would just turn off for no apparent reason. The fact that this game still gets a 4/5 is a feat comparable to only few things in this world. The game is a unique experience and is a work of art. Too bad my laptop is half-dead and it cannot even run Pathologic 2 on minimal settings and I can’t try the pc version.