Just downloaded on PC gamepass. Has anyone got any tips or advice to ease the point of entry? It sounds very interesting but also quite convoluted and difficult. I don't want to bounce off it hard if i can help it.
Just make sure to buy lots of food on the first day! You can store food in the cabinet in Big Vlad's house once you meet him, until you eventually get your hideout.
That's the thing with this game, it's not actually particularly convoluted: the game expects you to do what anyone would do during a Pandemic. Buy food and stock up on medicine. avoid infected people, try your best to keep clean. The interesting stuff comes in when the game juxtaposes these core principles against quests that make you decide which of these principles are actually necessary or important. The thing that makes this hard to understand is that most of these ideas are completely secondary systems in most games, but Pathologic puts them front and center, which a lot of people struggle to reconfigure their priorities around. Your #1 Goal should be surviving, and once you have that down, then you can begin thinking about the quests. In most games, quests would always take priority, so it's easy to see that most people would find this design difficult.
If you are super scared of the difficulty, play on Cocoon or Larva setting, or, just make your own custom difficulty in the menu. It is actually exceedingly difficult to truly screw yourself out of beating the game, even when you are constantly dying.
Oh, and whatever you do don't take the Fellow Traveller's deal.
I'm replaying the game soon again and am very interested in playing the first game.
Pro Tip: Always walk diagonally in Pathologic 1. The game treats movement speed as individual vectors, so holding two directions makes you walk 1.45x as fast as normal. This is an easy, non-cheat way to gain a leg up.
