Have you played Pathedral?

Pathedral was the first weird internet game I ever played. I first heard about it on somethingawful in 2004 or so; I had just played Ico and I saw a thread about "weird games" and thought hey, sounds up my alley.

Well, it was!

It had some really unique visuals, cool music, and the character designs always stuck with me.

What's strange about Pathedral, and why I'm making this page, is that I can barely find anything about it online — let alone a copy of the game.

The only trace of it I can find is a screenshot of the title screen (shown above), hosted on an abandoned tumblr page.

It's probably not a particularly impressive game, but as a dumb kid just getting into "weird art" at the time it kind of blew me away. I'm sure there are some other people out there who were affected by it like I was.

Here's some things I remember about Pathedral:

• It had an anime-inspired art style, but it was definitely made by a western Otaku.
• It had a lot of mixed media, I remember anime girl drawings on photographed backgrounds.
• I don't think it was made in RPG maker ...? But it had that vibe. It was more point-and-click-adventure than top-down. I remember it feeling pretty janky to boot up. Definitely the kind of game that was held together by duct tape and an artistic vision moreso than coding prowess.
• The story was about a young girl trying to get a night of sleep in a world filled with "daydreamers" — people who've chosen to electrically modify their brains to always be half asleep so they can be half awake all the time.
• It takes place in the Pathedral, (Pathos + Cathedral), a half-built-then-abandoned facility made by a cult to house a "godlike" computer. Main girl thinks she can awaken the computer to get the secret to "breaking the daydream"
• You talk to several "waking dreams": surreal characters created by your half-dreaming subconscious and hallucinated into reality.
• Whole game is probably like 2 hours or less. It might have been longer, but I think everything I played as a kid felt longer than it was.
• I don't remember exactly how it ends, I think it went over my head back then.

Here's a page from my old middle school sketchbook with the main character from Pathedral and one of the waking dream characters. (Finding this was actually the reason I remembered the game ^_^)

Contact me!

I've set up an email address for anyone who has any information to share about Pathedral. Message me at pathedral@puppydog.party. Let's find this game together!