8 Video Games That Punished You For Being Good

6. Pathologic

Heather Mason Silent Hill 3 1280x720
Ice-Pick Studios

Pathologic is a brutally strange game. One that seems intent on keeping the player at arm's length, but then occasionally wrapping their own arm around them and guiding them backstage for a tour of the "fourth wall breaks that will break your mind" exhibit before then booting you out of the fire escape and calling the police on you.

Therefore is it any surprise that concepts like morality are but playthings to Pathologic? Throughout the game, depending on which character you play as, you'll be presented with situations in which you must make decisions that either benefits your character, the people of the plague-ridden town around you, or you the person playing. However before you try to untangle which is which, let me give you a tip.

Every choice results in suffering.

Even when you're trying to be good, like by selling your possessions to raise enough money to buy food for the sick, you'll arrive at the hospital to find that everyone is either dead or dying, only to have your food surplus taken off you and a meagre reward handed back, meaning that you failed to save anyone and are now starving to death.

Elsewhere you can pay huge sums of cash to free people who are wrongly imprisoned, thinking that maybe by doing so these people will help you out later on in the game.

Not a chance mate. They walk off without ever saying thanks and now you're poor. And starving. And likely have the plague.

Seriously this game actively teaches you to save yourself and no-one else.

Contributor
Contributor

Jules Gill hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.