#we're watching hbomberguy's pathologic video

[problemcore]

movie night with mikey

[mickstart]

Have you seen hbomberguy's video? Curious re your thoughts on it.

god I'm so sorry sddfgfdsj I meant to answer this 1000 times today but I kept falling asleep due to The Sunday Sleepies.

Overall I think it's a good into to patho, I think it's great how much attention it brought to the game, and I think overall he gets the main themes of the first game. I've seen better essays / video essays that delve deeper into its influences specifically in the context of what european / russian texts and theatres it's drawing from for dankovsky, and stuff that REALLY tackles how it fucks up colonial/imperialism themes despite how earnestly it wants to engage with them. But overall, as a video that introduces an obscure game to a wider audience, yeah it's great.

But oh my god the RESPONSE to it? Has not been great.

There's this great long post, I forget where, about how you can't just watch a video essay on a text and come away expecting to be an expert on that text. How the video essay is one person's experience and interpretation of a text intensely filtering it and passing it on to you, and to you that then becomes The Text, even though it is fundamentally a DIFFERENT text. It's not a complete game, it's a video from one guy's perspective focusing on certain aspects. I think this is ESPECIALLY true for hbomb's video because the way he emphasises how the game hates you personally and wants you to die puts people off of playing it for themselves.

In a lot of ways, in the public / internet consciousness, Hbomb's patho video has BECOME Pathologic to people. They're not thinking of the game, they're thinking of His Video. Which is fucked because like. Ugh.

For example: The video doesn't give Changeling Route the attention it really deserves. There's a reason for this - Changeling Route is the route the devs had the least time to develop. So, the more polished routes of bachelor and haruspex naturally took up more of hbomb's attention. That's fine! It's a natural response to the game! What's not fine is how the internet has taken that Response To The Text as being The Text, and now discussion about the game, because it's a Response To A Response To The Text like a game of telephone, is so heavily centered on Daniil. With each new iteration of response, Daniil becomes more and more central to the audience response until suddenly we're in a position where Daniil Dankovsky IS pathologic.

What I ESPECIALLY hate is that. Pathologic 2 is a totally different game, in more ways than I could possibly get into. The story is different, the characters are portrayed differently. But Pathologic 2, despite being infinitely more playable than patho 1 and even coming with accessibility difficulty options that can turn it into a borderline walking simulator, is IGNORED because "oh we saw the hbomb video we know what patho is about!" Which means I now have people who admit to not playing patho 2 telling me "daniil is a PRICK he's a PRICKLY PRICK HAHAH" when that is not the case in patho 2. I played pathologic 2! I know who Pathologic 2 Daniil Dankovsky is! I met him! You watched a VIDEO about Daniil Dankovsky that exaggerared his traits in a different game for COMEDY!

Sorry I got super off track there. Anyway to sum up: I think the video itself is great, but I wish it wasn't treated as The Text. Hbomb shows a lot of love for The Actual Text in that video and it's a shame that people don't want to actually experience it because they think they already have somehow.

[introvertedppl]

ive been eyeing pathologic for years but i do very bad with amnesia:dd-esque horror and ive seen it recommended if someone enjoyed a:dd?? so from ur expert opinion should i play the it

i legitimately do not want to inflict suffering on another person by recommending it. I havent exactly finished the original game but ig the most i can warn you abt is just the extremely stressful but at the same time, awfully boring it is (thats probably just my adhd actually). but if its patho 2 we're talking abt and u REALLY want to be stressed and just miserable for the experience, go for it. The boring-ness of patho 1 was almost non-existent in that remake bc instead of boredom its replaced w even more stress lol. personally when i finished it i was like "Well that was the worse thing ive ever experienced. I Want To Do It Again" also, hbomberguy did a really good video about the first game and a bit abt the second one so if u really wanna know abt it in depth go watch it before playing