Gameplay 

The premise of the story is excellent, but let's see how the gameplay looks like. It's a combination of first person combat game with some rpg elements. This kind of gameplay was used also in Call of Cthullhu: Dark Corners. Unfortunately this kind of gameplay is not so successful in this game. Maybe because there is no graduate advance in the game. From the beginning in the most classical manner, you can access any part of the town, and after two hours you can choose which quest to do from the big list you already have. You need to travel long distances from one side of the town to the other in order to accomplish the quests. Depending on the order of the quests, some of them might have different results. That's why you can have several different endings. For example on the 12th day you can choose either to leave the town and die, destroy the town, destroy the Polyhedron (the great building in the middle of the town which was considered to be base of it), or let the Impostor destroy the sickness. Besides the fact that every action made by your character decides how the NPC's will react in front of you, you must pay attention on how your actions will influence your advance into the game. Because your character will get tired and hungry you will have to battle for the food in the next few days of the game. So don't forget that you can exchange goods with the citizens of the town. Like in Gothic, you can lay you character to sleep for a maximum of 6 hours for full regeneration. But for food you still need to search the town. You can also buy it, but sometimes the food can become really expensive, so the best solution is to exchange you found objects for food. I already forgot to tell about the fighting system. That's because it's not a significant part in the game but it still exists. If you will use melee weapons, the enemy is quite hard to kill. The system is not so well done as in Dark Messiah where you can easily discover the limitations of your body and the length of your attack. Here you can easily lose all your health when fighting a burglar or a beggar, who will attack you with a little knife. You have also an inventory, but is just a pale concept of what a real inventory is like.

Such a great story should have a similar graphical environment behind it. But this is not to be found in Pathologic. The graphic is old coming from other era. The colors do combine in a good manner to recreate a moody atmosphere, but this is not enough this days. If its gameplay was much more innovative, maybe this game could become a masterpiece like Anachronox, in which the graphic was not the main component. Unfortunaterly Pathologic is based only on its original story. It's like a good interactive book, where you can change destinies and influence the worlds in it.