This game has been living rent-free in my head for the past year or so ever since I beat it, and for very good reason.

I would say Pathologic 2 at its core is a game about sacrifice. You gain some, you lose some - only taken to the absolute extreme. You fight a battle of inches every single day and experience death, misery and desperation at every corner.

You are punished greatly for you decisions, being forced to experience the consequences first-hand no matter how brutal or heart-breaking. Your action (or inaction) will invariably alter the world and the people around you one way or another.

You play as a surgeon in the middle of a horrible epidemic that's killing people in the thousands every single day. You do your best because you grow to care for most characters you encounter throughout this experience - and yet they can still die at any moment.

No matter how "well" you do and how many people you somehow manage to treat, you're still faced with the statistics at the end of each day: deaths by the thousands. As if you can't even make a dent and the game was mocking you for it. Maybe you don't have enough antibiotics, so you have to prioritize this person's life over that other one. Maybe you simply don't have enough time to save everyone - and trust me, you just don't. And despite all this, I was encouraged to keep trying because I got to know these characters and seriously wanted to give them a chance at living.

Despite how disheartening the odds were, the little things like busting my ass just to fix that kid's magic lantern felt twice as rewarding - even if, ironically, I didn't get any rewards. Making at least one or two people happy when the rest of the world has already checked out felt impactful to me.

Anyway, corniness aside...

It's one of those pieces of media you only get to experience once, and for me it sure was one hell of an experience - probably the likes of which I'll never get to enjoy again in a videogame.

Also, the soundtrack is a banger.