games
Friday, January 16, 2026
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Late game Pathologic 3 is so buggy
Even by Russian Eurojank standards
He's fixed a lot of it, there have been 6 pretty sizable hotfixes
and days 1-8 are (more) stable because they've been finished for years
it's just the very endgame that is a mix of buggy due to the nature of things having 10,000 different cascading triggers from prior days
and the general "these days were the least tested"
I think I'll finish it tonight, I'm really close
easily the best version of the Pathologic story
biggest misstep was not voicing everything, which is weird because I'm usually in the camp that prefers the unvoiced text blocks
There's a small fundamental (but ignorable) problem with the time travel, that the game almost needs a 2nd version of all dialogue
a surprising amount of the game gets updated time travel dialogue, which works also different from 4th wall dialogue
tbf, I don't think anyone but you or me care about Pathologic in the first place
but yeah
Replying to Spooky Phijkchu #spooky.131 There's a small fundamental (but ignorable) problem with the time travel, that the game almost needs a 2nd version of all dialogue a surprising amount of the game gets updated time travel dialogue, which works also different from 4th wall dialogue
I've had a dialogue system in my head for a long time, which I've been told was actually done once before in some retro game
But rather than having Mass Effect/Bioware style dialogue menus with 1-5 options, every dialogue should be linear
You influence the game by picking a character disposition to have at any given time, or when interreacting with a particular character
For Pathologic it could also play off the mania/apathy bar
Because in all games with dialogue options (Bethesda and NuObsidian are most guilty of this) you can tell they have a few different character archetypes they are already writing for
In Pathologic, you basically need to decide whether your character is skeptical or not, and whether he is manic or apathetic
Replying to taxes #tzfi the plot twist of oh two kids were just playing with toys mourning a loss... BUT ACTUALLY THEY'RE ALSO SENTIENT AND THE KIDS DONT HAVE CONTROL
I'd be curious if they actually do the Changeling route still at this point
I get that Pathologic is his 1 story
but I feel like mechanically you can't go back after introducing a time mechanic like this
I managed to skip a day altogether
The game was not happy about that lol
Sunday, January 18, 2026
oh, I think I actually got a double no-ending
I actually missed something normal which gave me this ending, but had I found that I'd have gotten a more absurd non-ending
I feel pretty happy with where I ended Pathologic 3, I concluded all the quest lines and saw most of the notable alt paths at some point
There were a couple really good big thunk moments in the course of the normal story
Though I think the layer on-top of that could have been a little more fleshed out, they want you to see that its there early and often, but at the end don't really pay it off beyond what you're expecting
I think mechanically it's super interesting, and reminds me a lot of Witcher 1 strangely
the actual gameplay is un-pitchable, the minigames are fun but overtuned , and the meta mechanics are ambitious and actually somewhat fully realized
the gameplay exists only to break up the delivery of the story, which is why it even sort of works
I think my appreciation for the narrative is pretty uneven, because I think they blow their load regarding the supernatural elements too early from both the Player's and from Dankovsky's perspective
It's hard to suspend my disbelief that he can be written skeptically at all in a lot of situations, and even if that's what he reverts back to unconsciously sometimes, it should take basically nothing to shatter that once again
Best version of Pathologic easily regardless
Replying to Spooky Phijkchu #spooky.131 I think my appreciation for the narrative is pretty uneven, because I think they blow their load regarding the supernatural elements too early from both the Player's and from Dankovsky's perspective
showing you the
Monday, January 19, 2026
People are putting a lot of effort into simulator slop games now ig
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Replying to Spooky Phijkchu #spooky.131
should I wait until they smooth the game out with patches or is it playable through the jank?
it's stable enough to play now, the last few hotfixes/patches fixed a lot
single handedly is going to carve the mod scene in half
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Rusp poppin off
Its hard to justify charging for this when holocure is free
it set the standard for how much I'd pay