Last year, Pathologic developer Ice-Pick Lodge said that while the incoming remake of its 2005 psychological horror game will remain true to its source material, it'll implement some "drastic changes" so as to bring it inline with modern expectations. Having played and thoroughly enjoyed the teaser demo launched towards the end of 2016—named The Marble Nest—I can confirm Ice-Pick Lodge has done so successfully. The dev has now released the complimentary demo to the public.
Designed to give players a taste of what's to come, The Marble Nest runs parallel to the game's main story and introduces players to its twisted environments, disparate cast of characters, and survival horror-meets-RPG mechanics over the course of a few hours. You can read my spoiler-free thoughts over here, but I'd recommend giving the teaser demo a bash yourself as Pathologic is, and always has been, a world best experienced first hand.
To mark the demo's public release, Ice-Pick Lodge released the following suitably unsettling trailer:
"We started working on what became The Marble Nest as an internal prototype, but it quickly blossomed into something we felt was representative of the tone and style of Pathologic," explains the game's producer Ivan Solvtsov. "We gave it to Kickstarter backers in late 2016 as a surprise gift, and it went down really well —but we also got some really fantastic feedback from those early players. So we decided to polish up the game based on that feedback, and release it to the world, as a taster of what people can expect when the full game launches later in 2017."
More information on Ice-Pick Lodge's Pathologic remake can be found on its official site. Download its free The Marble Nest demo over on Steam.
