jokes aside I actually dreamt about Pathologic 4 last night
The town is much more interactable to the Changeling who's small enough to climb the pipeline into the roofs or crawl under the raised platforms.
Then you could investigate the objects around you:
Use a coin to scratch a mismatched layer of paint that reveals a child's drawing someone painted over, the painting depicting a past rumour you can investigate further to use as blackmail
Sometimes there are forgotten keys in there, marbles, bird feathers, rat tails. You can use the keys to sneak into houses. The other two you collected to trade with.
When the army arrives, you can talk to the General twice or thrice a day? If it's not business, he acts awkward, not used to someone addressing him as him and not his military rank. He feels bad that you're... you, so he gives you army rations and clothes at the end of each visit.
You don't need food or get affected by the weather, using them for their trade value instead. Only that none of the proper shops ever trade with you, so you have to get creative.
You don't trade for items, mostly, but for information. It's how you maintain your "creepy all knowing" image
You can sit down anywhere, even on the ground. it's mostly just for flavour. You swing your legs whenever you sit on something elevated tho, the animation was adorable. If you sit on funny places (hospital floor, bull manour, middle of the street, on the ground or on the table instead of a chair when a character asks you to take a seat) the characters around you have dialogue about it
The Saburovs aren't as involved in your life as P1. You mostly see them on your own terms whenever you feel lost and need someone to point you the correct way. They are still your caretakers officially tho. But it feels more like sponsoring you rather than adopting you. They are a new player's best friend and an old player's last thought
Unlike the other Pathologic games, quests now are randomly decided each day from a pool of quests. In different orders and with changing characters. That got a lot of people reasonably upset and "rogue-like elements? in my narrative game? more likely than you think" memes spread
So all playthroughs are slightly different EXCEPT the first playthrough you do which follows the P1 plot
In the prologue you briefly control Grace instead as you experience being woken up in the early dusk by one of the grave bells ringing. Having to grab a shovel, and dig Clara out.
You get to have a brief chat with one of the dead in the graves! But only one, each playthrough you can pick a different one tho. Mostly flavour text.
The 50/50 cure/kill mechanic still existed, but didn't matter for the most part since if you cured a character you were supposed to kill, the others around you hail you as a merciful saint, and if you killed a character you were supposed to cure, they say you must've sensed the evil inside them and wisely chose to spare them their fate. The fact you could literally cure the plague with your hands was the least interesting part about you to the game. Cults were on-the-nose parodied in the narrative.
I don't remember using the force turth mechanic in dialogue. I was mostly crawling under anything I can to find more keys
Under one bridge, tucked to the railing, you find one chewed pink bubblegum stuck to the corner. It was the most controversial thing in the entire game because it sparked a huge debate about what year Pathologic takes place in, since a lot of the medical and technological advances revealed in P2 & P3 were rolled back in P4, reverting the world to a time period closer to P1
There wasn't any combat in the game, it's mostly you sneaking about like a rat in different ways. Instead of plague districts being the hardest to get through, it was burned ones for you; the robbers had no qualms about killing you for the rat tails in your pockets.
I remember in the dream I was thinking huh wonder when I'll meet my twin, then the idea "what if I'm the twin??" flashed across my mind, and I was genuinely stressing for a good minute because I collected so many stuff and info, oh god I'll be fucked if she uses them against me, then I promptly forgot that line of thought and went back to climbing pipelines for the spare change in the bird nests.
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