Pathologic is a game like no other - it created an experience that you will not find anywhere else.
But let me explain, what makes Pathologic so special for me.

I feel like every game out there has a very specific goal...to make the players enjoy them. To create fun. To let Dopamin flow through your veins. Nintendo lead director Reggie Fils-Aime once told that if a game is not fun...why bother? And indeed this was the goal that every gaming company has tried to achieve over decades of gaming development. To make games more fun.

The ways to achieve this goal are quite different. From good looking shooters, to epic RPG's or maybe for people who enjoy to overcome a challenge games like dark souls or Real-Time-Strategie games. There are many genres, many ways so that every person, no matter how casual or hardcore they are, no matter if they prefer the fast paced action of a shooter game of the slow, deep thinking game like a Turn Based Roleplay, a Racing game or a farmsimulator. All of these games, are measured by the amount of fun that they can bring to their audience.

But if every game from every developer is always focusing on the same objective then there will at some point come a certain problem...the games will become repetitive, almost remakes of the games that came before them, because the developer cant figure a new way out to make games fun...so we see shooters with the same storylines but a little bit better graphic coming out, RPGs with exactly the same style, the same plot-points, but with "new" characters (which personality is also just a rip-off from other games) etc. And as a gamer for now 15 Years of my life, i come to see the limitations of always trying to achieve the same goal since it leads to very similar, repetitive games that are hardly different from all the other shooters, RPG's etc. on the market

A different medium that is also often measured by the amount of "fun" or excitement is the film industry...but i think that especially the movie industry has to a certain degree abandoned this fundamental goal quite some time ago and are trying something new. There are documentaries, that want to educate the viewer in a certain topic, historical movies about the dark ages of humanity like movies about the holocaust, that dont want to bring the viewer excitement, but rather to let them experience the inhumane cruelty, the pain and the sorrow, that the people had to endure and so on. Movies try to make bizarre movies, where the person who watch it, can not understand what its even about. More and more indie studios try to break out of the cycle of always making the "next exiting" movie and are trying to use the medium of a movie as something totally new. To give the viewer a new experience that they will not find anywhere else.

I feel that the developers of pathologic did tried exactly that...rather then to copy the same mechanisms other games had to achieve the goal to create a fun experience for the players, they have aimed to create an experience. And because of this, I feel that the value you as a (possible) player will get out of it, is highly dependable to the question, if you are interested in the experience that they offer…or not.
As you know, the setting of this game is that you are a doctor in a eastern Russian (non historical) town in the steppe, fighting against a deadly plague that has infected it while trying to stay alive. So far so good. So you begin the game thinking that you can defeat the plague, with clean hands and give everyone around you a smile…just to realise how much you mistaken.
You will starve, you will get infected, you will murder innocent people just to get to see the next day…because this game is cruel, and unbearable hard! And I say this has a hardcore player, who is experienced with challenges in games and even look especially for them, since I like to be challenged. But Pathologic is so hard, that I felt often that I cant take this any longer, that I should quit because I will not make it to the next day anyway…and that was when I realized how perfect the balance was.

Because unlike in other games you are NOT supposed to be the hero. You are not the savior of everyone. You are just as trapped as everyone, and with everyone, you will feel the distress, the pain, so sorrow. And so while playing it and thinking you will try to safe everyone, you will quit important missions that save the life of the people around you, because you had to loot houses of innocent people to get some food not to starve, or that you will use the last bit of medicine to safe your self, rather then the people dear to you. And so you slowly degenerate from a herolike Person, hoping to safe the town, to a selfish monster, who will does everything to stay alive…just in the dim hope, that in the end your actions will safe at least someone!

By doing this the game will force you into making impossible decisions, but unlike a “normal” RPG by forced questlines where you have to choose between saving Person A or B, in Pathologic the Gamemechanic itself will force you into this decisions constantly. Who will you safe? The important Persons of the Town? Your friends? At least the children? Yourself?...Anyone? Because one thing is certain…you will not safe everyone.

But unlike other games, where most of the features of pathologic would make it a bad game, because its to hard, and punishing to have fun….in Pathologic it’s the other way around. You are supposed to have stress, from the time mechanic, from starving, from having to finish many different important missions while you body needs to sleep! The permadeath penalitys, the “unfair” disease system, in which persons can get infected and die EVEN WHEN you gave them medicine for protection, the weird townslore and the steppe people myths (that are kinda true but not?!?)

Everything in this game will make you unease, feeling like a rat trapped in a deathpit. But at the same time it creates absolute magical moments, pure moments, in which you try to create moments of beauty in a world filled with suffering. And this moments were the most treasured moments I have ever seen in any videogames. They literally made my cry.
And for this moments, this constant rollercoaster of emotions, when you safe an innocent child by going throw hell, just to see it die the next day, to safe your best friends, just to hope that he will make it to the next day, have given me the ability to see the beauty of the moment. It’s not always about having the perfect happy ending. Sometimes it’s the moment that matters the most. What tomorrow will bring, if we will even be alive to witness it – who knows?
And for this moments, I thank you developers from Ice-Pick Lodge.

So the conclusion is, that this game is by far not for everyone. But what it brings, what it is supposed to be, it is an artform, an experience that really let you FEEL the mysterious, painful, but at the same time somewhat…hopeful? Situation that you as a Doktor who hopes to safe the town is in. It is for me the best game of 2019 by far…maybe the best game I have ever played, and the decisions and moments I experienced will haunt me for many days to come.