Pathologic 2

"Russian literature is built on suffering. Either the characters suffer, the author suffers, or the reader suffers. If all three suffer, then it's considered a masterpiece."
10/10 suffered a lot

You need to know this before playing:
Pathologic 1 have the story of 3 characters.
In Pathologic 2 what you play is 1 of those, therefore is like a remaster and you don't need to play the 1st one.
"Shadow distance" is an FPS killer, if you turn it off or lower it to 5 your game will run way smoother.

seeing haruspex and bachelor talk is like witnessing an epic battle between adhd and autism.

Pathologic 2 is not a game that you play. It is a game that you go to war with. Unfortunately, your army is equipped with sticks and slings, whilst the enemy forces have fully automatic weapons and state of the art drones. In spite of this however, you are asked, not only to persevere, but succeed. This game was made by sadists who enjoy watching other people suffer - and it is glorious.
Pathologic 2 is an oppressively difficult game, so much so that the developers actually had to add difficulty options post-launch due to public outcry, much to their own dissatisfaction as I understand it. If you play on the intended difficulty (and you should) you will find a game that kicks you while you are down and spits on your face. It is unforgiving and it relishes in that fact. When you die in this game, you are punished for it, you'll lose max health and max hunger bar which is very rough for a survival game. However, the difficulty of this game adds so much to the atmosphere that it makes the tension of the game almost palpable. There are other games out there that have world ending plots that aren't even a quarter as tense as this game is. This game will take you on a roller coaster of emotions. Most of those emotions will be stress-adjacent, but the ones that aren't are so powerful. This game offers a sense of earned-catharsis that rival and even surpass the Fromsoft games.
Dying in this game is very unforgiving and you SHOULD be afraid of death. However, you should be more afraid of giving up. This game has so much to offer and death is just part of the experience. You play as one of the few doctors in an eastern European town that is being relentlessly assaulted by plague, famine, crime and all manner of otherworldly things and it is your job to keep it together. Sound stressful? You don't know the half of it, because while you are doing that you also need to make sure to eat, sleep, drink, check up on people in town and be a doctor. In doing these duties, you will become engrossed in a unique world that is so different to anything that the current video game market has to offer. With excellent dialogue, endearing characters, solid survival game play and a fantastic atmosphere to tie it all together, I could not recommend this game more if I tried. If you're interested in a single-player, story driven, survival game with real consequences, play Pathologic 2.
I know that this review is ambiguous, I have made it intentionally ambiguous, but I do not apologise for it. I went into this game almost entirely blind and I was treated to an experience that I will not forget, maybe ever.
"An open wound is a window into the world" - now go do your job as a surgeon and stitch it back up, Emshen.

i'd rather kill myself than play this game again 10/10

I thought a lot how to really put it. A work of art, an animated drama novel, survival game as it supposed to be, and so on. All of it just won't do. Then I recalled a conversation with a friend, which we had in times of struggles. And so I found my own words to describe it.
"Life is never fair. What are you going to do about it?"
The game itself, as an actual game, is not the masterpiece of technology, even slightly flawed visually and mechanically, but in a way that does not breaks the impression, and with amount of meticulously thought through, immersive details, you may not even notice most of technical jankiness. Despite technical perfection never being game's main strength, it still uses all it could for building of very impressive, immersive atmosphere.
The story is.. wild, to say the least. Despite seemingly simple premise, it is full of human characters, interactions, motivation, and events, outright worthy of Dostoevsky novel. The game openly invites you to participate in intrigues, opinions, grudges and motivations of characters who actually resemble humans, with their own stories and angles.
Survival is hard. Really hard. As many reviewers already mentioned, it is hard up to the point of being unfair. It is so, but there's a thing - it is hard not because of technical difficulties, or because the game outright cheats you. It is hard because the game directly says to you - it is all about your own decisions, take it or leave it. There will be no hand-holding, there will be no justice, there will be no happy ending. Life is never fair, and you are just one pawn among many in fate's hands. What are you going to do about it?
In fact, the game says so to properly condition you - there will be hints, but you have to be aware to spot them. There will be help, but it will cost you dearly. There will be decisions which you see as definitely right ones, which will lead to disasters just because you are so used to narrow vision, used to fairytales of heroism, so you can't often see the full picture. The game pulls the rug under you feet constantly not because it is strictly unfair, but to genuinely challenge you - life is never fair. Your decision could be in fact not yours, just someone's whisper in your mind which you heard. Unfolding events could be not in your control, since you are never the center of human world, just a part of it. Your own prosperity could be not something granted due to "rights and privileges", but something you have to fight for. All you have in your life - your own judgement, and your actions, which you throw at fate and see if you can wipe this wicked grin from Death's face. What are you going to do about it? You are nothing but an actor on life's stage, and all you can do - is to play your role as you see fit.
The game will mock you openly, taunt you, suggest you to put it away, to play something easier, where after each learned hop and trick some master would reward with tiny piece of mental sugar. Don't listen to it, carry on, and think - if you're an actor in grand theatre of Life and Death, it does not matters how badly you perform, as long as you perform genuinely, tapping into your own emotions and creativity, finding your own ways in the face of unbearable or even impossible odds. It is a game about you.
Wherever you are, dear player, and whatever moment of life you're in, never give up on life, even when struggling with something seemingly impossible to defeat. Only after delving deep into pits of desperation and hopelessness, you may truly learn how to appreciate little moments of your life, appreciate people around you, and the fact that life's play is not about achievements. It is about your own story.
Life is never fair. But it is always about what you are going to do with it.

i love this game i wish it didn't make me want to kill myself every time i play it