The Cat Lady was a game that legitimately frightened me. I hate that house 'stealth' section...
I will specify that it's more a general sense of horror and terror rather than scary. Foreboding and depressing, but it never strays into merely being some cheesy idea of being bleak for bleak's sake. It actually has a point to convey and is more so a story of how one survives themselves in the face of the surreal and dark places of the mind and world. And it actually ends on as realistically positive note as one could expect for such a cast of characters.
Cool OST and trailer, as well. Also some pretty darn clever puzzles that will really get you thinking like a murderer improvising on the fly.
Also Pathologic is pretty fucked up as you go through it.
That is an amazing story (three actually), wrapped in bad translation, wrapped in a realistic idea of a plague ravaged town of yesteryear. That suddenly delves into the surreal, alien and downright mysterious and chilling.
It is beyond hard to talk about the themes in Pathologic. And it depends on the one of three characters you play the story as.
There is an incredibly breadth of nuance everywhere, minor changes in how the characters see the world, reacting to your character, the insanity that as the people talk the jarring reality dawning on you that the unnamed town you explore is a mixture of times, ideals, era'd politics, and human quirks.
Music subtlely changes depending on the character, depending where you are, and depending how far time has gone on. Reflecting each character's own unique attachment to the town, its history, their background, and the passage of time itself. As the laws of nature, and one's reception to the surreal aspects of the world, are no longer so concrete anymore ... and become mere vagaries of opinion, outlook, and personal perception rather than anything that can be understood by ordered reason or logic as the deathly march towards the abyssal brink relentlessly drives the population to extinction.
A town famed for its odd theatre opens the game with an odd, theatrical moment of the three playable characters (and a fourth, the observer, the player controlled avatar that watches them)... recognizing it's all a play, a morbid, macabre scene that signals all is grotesquely already fated to be that they would go their separate ways.
Probably the single greatest 'character introduction' in a videogame moment ... as you learn about your future avatar and how they feel, what they're here for, and who they are... themselves presented in an overly theatrical manner as they explain and explore their morbid curiosities of the phenomena and their strategies for the future. Even as a town is dying around them and they have acceptedthey'll likely die with it in time ... but not before their various understandings of personal satisfaction.
Whether you want to understand, protect, or to preserve.
One of these characters is locked until you complete the adventure with another character. Which is brilliant. It just sums up a great little message of wrapping metagaming as if game mechanic itself ... as one character 'Devotress'/'Changeling' is a strong believer in occult mysteries, practices and believes she has supernatural powers or some supernatural connection to the town itself ... and so while each character interacts with the town in a unique way ... that body of metagame knowledge quietly helps solidify an idea around this character using asif a sixth sense to navigate the hurdles and vagaries of the passage of time to explore aspects of the game that you otherwise missed, couldn't access, or simply avoid the same mistakes and pitfalls.
A town famed for its meat production on the Russian Steppe ... as day 11 and 12 closes in, the streets with hanged, curing meats is now desensitizing you as bodies grow on street corners and become just as symbolic, and government forces are torching the streets and attempting to burn away the plague as you struggle to find an answer to what you truly see in the town as left worth saving.
It's ... smarter people than me have tried to explain why this game is so fucking chilling, cold, and brutally ruthless in its depiction of humanity and how it deals with the insane ... and it still feels like its missing something and about why it's such a mindfuck to play through each and every time, with each and every character.
It's proof that games don't need to be fun to be unforgetable in the best possible ways.
