its true that you dont really need to play the first pathologic to play this one, its a remake of 1/3rd of the original (as of this writing, please god let ipl be able to release on the other two thirds in due time e: lost interest in really pushing for that after seeing accusations against director nikolai dybowski of ephebophilia https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KeKKptAkn1D662UZYdWWg-mr16YbYK-S/view) with some pretty major differences more than it is much of a sequel. but playing the first several years ago, specifically doing just a bachelor run in 1 with the original weird translation and then going to haruspex in 2, really affected how i experienced this.

i originally came to the town on gorkhon as a pompous city slicker suddenly faced with an alien culture, being forced to discard certain "facts", though perhaps not enough. with so little making sense, i followed the lead of the town's idealists perhaps too closely, only out of trusting the most friendly and hospitable people i see out of the gate like a newborn baby. some people died and i felt responsible. back then i took this as a compelling game that was horribly broken, so i often cheated. why not right? the game being so buggy vindicated me, so if its too cruel then why not fall back on an out, to move things forward? why not noclip for a bit, in the interest of finding immortality? its only logical.

then, in the second go at it, i became shaman turned doctor trapped between two worlds, one of reason and one of mystery. i thought i knew the town, things about it were definitely familiar, but the years i spent away from it changed it and made me less confident in my memory. everything felt too foreign to be recognizable, but also too recognizable to be foreign. some of the people i knew back then were now indifferent strangers, others resented or lamented that i left them in a way that made them more than strangers, even if they seemed like they were before. i spent alot of time trying to get in these people's good graces again, and occasionally even trying to check in on ones i failed before, the ghosts from a past life. i let unfortunate mistakes and disasters i couldn't foresee happen...well most of the time. i realized playing this time that i can't try to save everybody, i shouldn't cheat, i should sometimes let logic fall by the wayside, for better and for worse, for some greater understanding of how a world can breathe and choke. but i didn't want kids to die. pathologic 2 told me that that was my weakness, but also my strength.

also, maybe this is unethical to say in terms of faithful translation, but props to the localization team for mixing in that mystical quality of the machine translated english in the first translation of the first game. i want to give classic hd a real shot sometime and im not gonna say "its so much better when i have no idea what im being told to do", but idk. its a little too direct, and it feels wrong to not be called an onion

this, majora's mask, animal crossing, and sakura momoko no ukiuki carnival are the small handful of games i know of in which my hunch is that they took notes from moon's game design in pretty clear ways, without involvement from moon's team. this is only a theory of mine i can't prove so take that with a grain of salt, but it's funny to me that ghs, a tie-in game to a CG anime, is the one out of these that feels the hardest to ignore for possible love-de-lic influence. it's got a stamina bar/timer to contend with before you need to go to sleep, requires observation of characters' schedules and gathering information on them, and even tries to be meta (if you know anything about the arc of the main narrator in each season of the show, its like that. better handled as a game honestly, though still kinda out-of-place imo).

ghs actually takes that character observation in ldl-likes to its logical conclusion, contextualizing your voyeurism of others with stealth elements. the whole idea is you are snooping on creepy halloween monsters that want to trap you here forever and mock you constantly as they do it, when they arent more indirectly causing you grief, and you want to get some advantage over them. its interesting this kind of format of walk-and-talk rpg-ish adventure game lends itself to a haunted hotel scenario, as a way to inject character-based humor n camp into horror while disempowering you, something that wouldnt be the same with a more straight-laced clock tower approach (there is quite a bit of that in this of course).

and the game itself is pretty decent for what it is too!! fuck getting the souls from tv fish and my son though. you read that right, "my son" is in this and i hate him

RE4 is a game designer’s wet dream. If you really break it down, all Leon can do is point and shoot; and that simplicity is part of how it immediately gets you into this mode of consciously analyzing situations and being intentional about everything you do. Corralling enemies into a single spot and headshot-ing one of them to set the whole group up for a juicy roundhouse kick seems so basic, but having to actively look for ways to achieve that scenario never stops being engaging.

All the different weapons, the upgrade system, enemy types, random loot drops: they add to the basic formula in a way that’s so elegant and immediate that it makes every modern action RPG looter shooter whatever the fuck hybrid look like a dry, convoluted Excel spreadsheet by comparison. It’s so no-nonsense that I honestly struggle to come up with more ways to explain why it’s so good that aren't insanely obvious. RE4 is endlessly polished and pure and exciting and one of the most perfect games of all time.

Boy did they go the wrong direction with this one. Instead of focusing on what people really loved with the first 2 games, they focused on just killing zombies. Arguably the most boring part of the games. The zombies were just roadblocks, moving through them was the interesting part, especially on a timer with about 6 survivors trailing behind.

Absolutely all difficulty is gone, the story is slightly less funny, there's next to nothing to do except the main story, Its annoying to go anywhere since you rely on cars so much and there's so many roadblocks, etc.

How did they go so wrong with it. Its like everything people liked about the other games they took out and focused exclusively on the parts people didn't like.

The worst thing is I can see a great game in this. I can see a real dead rising 3 if they just took another 4ish months to add in survivors, calm down with the combo weapons, polish the level design with much less road blocks, and a few other things they'd be set.

The closest 4 that's almost a 9/10 that's ever been. Maybe they'll be a mod one day that fixes it all.