I was bored one day and wanted to try something different. I watched the anime a long time ago. I decided to see how different the original VN is. And even though I knew the overall solution to the mystery... once I started this, I had to play it nonstop in one sitting until I was finished. I used to think that anime was great! Now... I know how truly foolish I was to think I got the Higurashi experience. THIS is the Higurashi experience, and it is absolutely irreplaceable.

It's a slow burn of fun innocent school days at first. Prepare yourself for consecutive days of fun banter and bonding through club games. You will absolutely fall in love with these characters. Even these silly club games have intensity and stakes since there is a dare and risk attached to the loser, so the characters give it all they have and are competitive to an insane degree. You might be bored that it's not getting to the psychotic ♥♥♥♥ yet, but how you'll yearn to return to those fun, innocent, peaceful days... because little by little, the peace unravels, and once it gets to a certain point, it is a nonstop of rollercoaster ride of WHAT THE ********************* jaw-dropping insanity, and by the end you will be in a state of shock at what you've just witnessed.

And yet, this is just the seed of what's to come. Humble, simple beginnings. You will find that you are now totally invested in this mystery and these characters. The game encourages you to do your best in connecting the dots, so I suggest you actually do write down some notes to keep track of it all. This adds a whole other level of fun to an already incredible linear visual novel. The difficulty comes from cleverly processing the information it's giving to you. I will give you one piece of advice: doubt is your only ally, yet it is also your worst enemy. You will need to question everything and everyone, including yourself.

It's one of the most amazing things you'll ever read, and it's free until a cure for COVID-19 is found. There is actually an iiiiinteresting little reason for that! It's also very iiiiiinteresting that with the mayhem of 2020 comes a new Higurashi anime adaptation. But don't watch that. Read this. However good that new anime may be, I guarantee THIS will be better, by a mile and a half. Just trust me on this one. Try this one chapter, this one free chapter, and by the end of it, you'll see what I mean. You'll know... YOU'LL KNOW. And you will be completely hooked and it will consume your whole life until the next chapter, and the next chapter, and the next chapter... What do you have to lose? It's one of the most exhilarating spine-chilling experiences I've had with a video game, and it's free now! If you don't play it right now, I will kill you in your sleep.


Also: I personally advocate for playing the game as is, with no mods. I prefer it this way! It's the way the creator made it, and it's the way God intended. The photo backgrounds make you really feel like you're in a real rural Japanese town, and gives it an eerie immersive minimalist atmosphere. This is a game I feel works better as plain text prose in your head rather than voiced aloud by squeaky Japanese girls and with overdone scene art. The new artists try to enhance certain key scary scenes, but I think they end up detracting from it and making it kind of cheesy. And the voiced dialogue kinda makes it distracting, and this is one of those games where your own imagination is better. It is also essential to take your time with it and linger at certain moments in discerning self-reflection to ponder all the little details. Just the incredible music is enough to put your mind in a certain zone. Read it like a book, don't watch it like an anime. It is a visually/audio-enhanced novel where your imagination's interpretation makes it scary, not a static anime's professionally drawn pictures rubbing in your face TELLING you "THIS IS A SCARY PART AHHHHHH". You're an adult, you're better than that... Just a blood splatter on a black screen with some terrifying audio, and your mind will do the rest better than any artist's particular visual interpretation. It kind of reduces it, in a way. Also, I played the whole series usually defaulting to the new MangaGamer portraits which are pretty fantastic, but I actually started getting oddly attached to the old amateur portraits little by little. They look funny, but there are certain nuances in their facial expression that don't translate into any of the "better" art styles.

This review might be all over the place, but there is so much to this game it is hard to pin down. This game was absolutely hypnotizing and compelled me to the point of obsession with its unique atmospheric surreal vibes and the immense sense of mystery and bewilderment it sets up right away. I get bored kinda quickly, so it's rare when I find a game that I just cannot put down and have to see it through to the very end. I was playing it for, like, the whole day, many days in a row. It knows how to dangle a LOT of carrots, and it's up to you to prioritize which ones to chase after. Because you can't do it all within the tight time frame they give you, you have to make actual decisions with stakes, because choosing one thing means losing out on another. That definitely makes each playthrough totally unique, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is such a long massive game even for just one run (on the one character out, currently).

It always feels like you're just barely keeping your head above water. Managing your hunger was definitely a bit TOO hard at launch, but they've tweaked it now. Food was too hard to come by, and when you did, it would keep you from losing HP for only a few minutes. Finding water was definitely not as hard. Interestingly enough, I found the hunger and thirst meters to be much harder to manage than immunity, since immunity will build back up on its naturally and it doesn't decrease too unreasonably fast when you're in infected areas. I was surprised that which districts were infected was something that rotated out daily (I thought once the infection came to a certain place, it was permanent). There's always some "safe" non-infected areas. You will inevitably have to run through infected areas, but if you've found equipment to wear that really mitigates its threat. Immunity boosters weren't too hard to find. It's still pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ when a plague cloud appears right in your face and you lose a whole bunch of immunity at once, but I was able to roll with those punches without ever getting sick. Funny that a game about plague has the plague as one of the more easy threats to manage. Hunger, thirst, and time are your greatest enemy here, and constantly waiting for your sprint meter (tied to thirst) to fill up.

Combat is definitely tough, in a good way. You'll be lucky if you can even come across a gun, and when you do it (and every weapon) will break super fast. I'm not exactly a fan of metal weapons breaking after a few uses, but fights have a real sense of urgency because when you get hit, it's GONNA hurt, and your ability to strike back is tied to stamina. If you deplete it too much, you take an embarrassingly clumsy swing. It feels like a real struggle. It's a challenge to come out of a fight unscathed unless you a very careful and precise and take as much advantage of stealth backstabs as you can.

So its a quite challenging game and you may sometimes run into times where you are just screwed, resources-wise. The main paint of the game is scavenging for precious junk (because even junk is life-or-death in this game), trading with whoever is willing to talk to you (can only really rely on kids), and going down the rabbit hole with its weird story and the town's strange culture it throws you in the middle of. It is extremely difficult just to keep yourself alive, let alone others. You're a doctor, but not much time or resources to be much of one! This game is designed where any of the named characters can die and you lose out on that insight they would bring. As much talking as there is, it is anything but straightforward, so the mystery is ever elusive and endlessly fascinating the more you piece together.

It's not a game for the faint of heart or people who want something straightforward and easy to latch onto and understand. But the excitement of the game comes from that jolt of exhilaration from finding something, anything, in a trash can. They seem empty most of the time, but you gotta keep looking. Most of the time you will be disappointed, but then when you do find something or get on a lucky streak, you have that much more satisfaction. Gotta be thankful just for being able to relieve one burden, even if only temporarily. The excitement comes from finding someone to trade with who actually has something you want, and all the junk you've been carrying around finally pays off. And dat lore. The dialogue is very cryptic but fascinating. It always feels like you're talking past each other or you're not even speaking the same language (and it does feature its own unique language). And when you do die, it can be so sudden it makes you yell out in shock. It's frequently down to the gnat's ass like that.

Something about the game just made me always want to keep going. The struggle and the failures drive you forward. "Maybe if I tried this, I could stay alive for a little longer..." Just the constant struggle of not dying. Choosing when is the best time to sleep. What routes through town you want to go, considering the time commitment. This game is an EXPERIENCE, there's just no other game like this. It's a unique blend of a looooot of different things that would all be pretty interesting just on their own. Every new day is a totally different situation and that always keeps you on your toes and looking forward to something. The narrative presentation is super thought provoking because it only hints at things and makes you fill in the rest with your imagination. And the graphics are just beautiful.

And to top it all off, this is just one of 3 characters (hopefully the game expands to include the other 2, not that it's lacking in content as it currently is), and each time you die, even if you Alt+F4 the game will KNOW. Every time you die, the game lectures you and gets just a little tougher. So you might as well listen to the theatre guy talk, the consequences will be there anyway so you might as well just embrace the fact that you died, you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, and hear him out for those fascinating story sprinkles.

This is UNDOUBTEDLY a recommend, there's no other experience out there like this, truly unique vision and compelling in ways few games manage to achieve, and it is a way better use of $35 than most of the same old, same old out there being sold for $60. For me this might be the hypest sequel of 2019, and this a year where Kingdom Hearts III and Devil May Cry 5 came out. The comeback of Pathologic is a big deal. Go check it out for yourself.