Around the start of quarantine, I reviewed a game called Pathologic. I feel now that quarantine is wrapping up that it's a good time to revisit the game and give a new outlook. At it's core, Pathologic is a game about self interests. When playing through the game as the various characters, you can see their interactions with you and other characters in different lenses. In your first playthough, you'll likely pick The Bachelor of Medicine. Daniil Dankovsky comes from a large city and is an outsider just like you. He tries to help people sincerely but struggles to break through the various cultural hurdles the city throws. As an example, a bull is impaled on a spike by accident. You want it burned as it's clearly a health code violation, but if you're playing as The Haruspex, who is an insider, you needed to collect it's blood to make a medicine. It shows how in both playthought you compete against yourself because no one person knows all or what's the best. Maybe the medicine was key, or maybe it was useless. It's impossible to know. As the disease spreads, there is a lack of alarm until authority is put into control. For days people walk about with very little worry as the Sand Plague spreads fast and kills even faster. When the military arrives to put down the disease, all hell breaks loose. I can only see this transition from unorganized peace to organized chaos as hauntingly prophetic...
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A new product on Steam is the lowest reviewed of all time. I'm a huge fan of Paradox Interactive's games. With hundreds of hours placed in their games, I've found them to be well worth their price... that is if you like to install mods because the games by themselves are incomplete. Paradox for a while know has been critiqued for it's aggressive DLC policy. Often times they'll release games and then make DLC after DLC for said games. There's nothing inherently wrong with DLC, but when you're charging people full price for a game and then asking them to pay 2 or 3x that price for the full game, people take notice. And notice they did when Europa Universalis got a new DLC. It cost the price of a full game, about $20, and yet, it was entirely broken. Broken graphics, broken code and broken mechanics. This has called into question the validity of DLC as requirements for full games. A lot of people's grief has been directed at Paradox because of their priority of DLC over actual game content. They have been cited as using a strategy of releasing games early and unfinished but playable before then adding the content people expected in the first place at a price. This can be seen especially with the game Imperator which was slammed with bad reviews for being uncomplete and people knowing what was coming next. The pressure mounted so firecly that Paradox ended up updating the game for free. But what about Europa? The DLC currently sits at 8% Positive with over 4,000 reviews. It costs $20 which is half the price of the base game and recent reviews for Europa itself have fallen to Mixed. It's unclear currently what Paradox's strategy is for EU4, but it likely won't make such a blunder again. Hopefully.
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AuthorI am an artist as anyone else is an artist (if that makes sense). My style is abstract and I also draw cartoons. I am also a voice actor for a web-series. Archives
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