I've just bought Pathologic Classic HD and I've been really looking forward to play this game. However, something in the graphic settings of either the game or my rig is seriously messed up, resulting in the game being totally unplayable.

I'm running it on an HP ProBook 470 G1 laptop (with Windows 7 64-bit), Intel® Core™ i3-4000M CPU 2.40GHz, 2400 MHz, 4 GB RAM, with AMD Radeon HD 8750M graphics. It's definitely somewhat dated, but most of the time it runs other games just fine, and it seemed to be just good enough to handle Pathologic.

Alas, when first launching the game I've been greeted with massive horizontal black bars, going downward across the screen, and covering approx. 50% of it at any given moment. I've fumbled a little bit with the in-game settings, turned the V-sync on, did some other things with them. To no avail; the best result I've been able to achieve was to remove the bars (yay!), but now the screen is kinda dimmed down and flickering constantly. Needless to say, while I'm able to actually see the damn thing, the incessant flickering is seriously hurting my eyes and driving me nuts.

In this state the game is unplayable.

I'm no tech geek, so I'm kinda lost and unsure as to what to do next. I suspect my rig to be at fault (I'm looking at you, graphics card), even though the game doesn't seem to be all that hardware demanding. So, should I just keep it on the shelf and wait until I buy a better PC, or is there any hope for me to actually play it?

While there might be someone in the community able to help you, it's probably best to contact GOG's support about this issue. This might also lead to patches for future players.


As a personal comment I'd like to say that this is the most complete bug report I've read this year. ;)

Well, I guess that's what I'm gonna do! Thanks for the idea. I'll definitely contact GOG about the issue, and if get any response from them, I'll post it here for future reference.

Of course, I still hope that maybe someone sometime somehow will know the solution to the problem, all the more reasons to leave this tread hanging here. :D

Absolutely. Even if a problem would be unsolvable by mortal means bug report threads might help other users to determine whether or not they'd want to buy a certain game.


[Edit:]
That being said, there is an upcoming remake. If support can't fix your problem, you could wait for the remake to release.