pathoblogging....on a real blog???
Feb. 3rd, 2026 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luckydicekirbyin my aspiration to do more (any) bookblogging I’ve cleaned up this journal a bit (actually added an icon. maybe someday i’ll add an icon that isn’t from my circa 2008 livejournal…). However i have yet to finish a book this year because royal assassin is really kicking my ass (I don’t care about this teen romance robin. robin I’m begging you.) but you know what I DID spend 60 hours on in the two weeks following its release? plaything pathologic 3, which is basically a book, if you think about it!
Pathologic really a subject that I resist Posting about because it feels like something many people smarter than i have said a lot about. But no one follows me here so I can post to my heart’s content? Anyway, for my dear friends who have to listen to me say baffling things about pathologic once a quarter, here are some more baffling things, perhaps slightly more coherent? Spoilers for any and all Pathologics in here but mostly about the mechanics and the metanarrative stuff.
Pathologic (2005) is a Russian survival horror game about a remote town in the steppe that is struck by a plague, and three doctors who try to save it. In the original game, there are three routes, one for each doctor: Daniil Dankovsky, the Bachelor (of medicine), Artemy Burakh, the Haruspex, and Clara, the Changeling. You know, the three kinds of doctors that there are. It was largely popularized in niche weirdo English speaking spaces by a) a series of articles in Rock Paper Shotgun and b) a hbomberguy video extolling its virtues. Its mechanics are focused around ‘trying not to die of your survival meters’ and ‘walking around a horrible town’ and ‘save important NPCs from the plague’, and it’s famously extremely janky, hostile to the player, and actively unpleasant to play. The original English translation was also famously bad, although the current one is much better, and all the later games have very good localization.
So, there’s a Pathologic 2 and 3, those are sequels, right? No, of course not, they’re “remakes”/reimaginings of Haruspex and Bachelor routes, respectively. Why they decided to name them this way I simply cannot tell you. Pathologic 2 was originally intended to be a full remake and get the Bachelor and Changeling routes as DLC; as these things go, they ended up spinning off the new Bachelor route into an entirely new game instead. If we’re very very lucky they might someday finish Changeling route/Pathologic 4 (if we’re VERY lucky they’ll change their naming conventions AGAIN and call it something else). Pathologic 2 has the same type of survival mechanics as the original, but made even more effectively brutal, and Pathologic 3 goes off in an entirely new direction with a meter to manage based on your emotional state and time travel mechanics. You can no longer starve to death but you CAN get so depressed through dialogue (or by just standing there doing nothing for too long, or by shooting someone else in self defense, or…) that Daniil pulls out a gun to shoot himself.
My preferred description of playing Pathologic is it’s like reading Dostoevsky, but meanwhile he’s trying to fight you in the street. (Me saying this is cheating, I haven’t even read any Dostoevsky.) It’s a game that is well known for being difficult almost to a memetic level, in a very different way than say, Dark Souls. The difficulty is the point not because you’re supposed to get good and overcome it and feel accomplished, but because you’re supposed to feel what it’s like to be in a bad and unfair situation that you don’t understand. (to quote mr h. bomberguy: it’s not a game that has a hunger mechanic, it’s a game about starving to death.)
Pathologic 2 was my entry to the series upon its Playstation 4 release on March 6, 2020. So my experience of these games IS inextricably linked to the fact that I was spending all my free time playing Pathologic 2 as the world was actively falling apart due to a global pandemic. For the obvious and kind of trite reason that it’s a game about a plague and about a town not getting its shit together to effectively do anything about it, but also because it’s an extremely frustrating, intentionally difficult experience. It’s a game where time actively passes whenever you’re not paused or in dialogue (and time literally passes faster every in-game day), and you never have enough food or time or sleep, and so to play it effectively you have to constantly strategize about what to do next—and you have imperfect information! Sometimes you’ll do what seemed smart and the game will just say fuck you and ruin your day anyway. There were several points when I had fucked myself so bad on my survival meters that I had to roll back to saves from one or two days earlier to figure out a way forward. This is extremely annoying and time consuming, but a GREAT use of my time and attention while avoiding thinking about ‘the real world’. I think if I had played it at another time in my life I might have gotten too annoyed and given up, or decided I had better things to do than get bullied by a very interesting game. Or at least turned the difficulty down! (there are extremely granular difficulty sliders, although the game discourages you from using them, so in some ways despite it all, pathologic 2 perhaps less hostile than silksong?)
The other thing I will say about the patho2 ps4 release: it was terrible! Horribly optimized, dire loading screens, constant crashes, and the game had a save cap of 100 that if you reached it, you had to EXIT THE GAME to delete some saves before you could save. Thus, of course, erasing all your progress since your last save. I feel like this, alongside the already intentionally frustrating mechanics, have given me a real ‘oh you!!’ relationship with pathologic. When something about the game is annoying or frustrating, whether or not it was intentional, I just feel like, oh, of course, that’s pathologic! That’s my buddy who hates me! Pathologic 3, for the first week or so of its release, had daily hotfixes. This is because, in classic pathologic fashion, it is janky as hell and needed at least several more months of QA than it got. I spent several frustrating hours near the end of my playthrough troubleshooting questlines that weren’t triggering properly or in the right order, via reddit threads and straight up trial and error. I would not put up with this shit for any other game, no matter how beloved. But it’s pathologic! That’s my friend, a game that will never be optimized in any way that matters!
There are a lot of interesting things to talk about when you talk about Pathologic: it’s a really dense, meaty game, with an interesting and sometimes baffling story operating on multiple meta levels, and it has a lot of characters who all have weird things going on. However, I’m not dedicated enough to do real textual analysis, so instead: one of the things that most constantly interests me about patho is how much it grows and changes through its iterations. For one thing….og pathologic is kind of easy! Partially I’m saying that because by coming to it second, I already knew some of its tricks (I knew food prices were going to skyrocket on Day 2, for example), but it genuinely is easier. It’s a game meant to be hard, but also, it has quicksaves. You can fail a quest by saying the wrong thing to an NPC, but if you just quicksaved, that’s just a minor annoyance, really.
I think you can really tell that they tried to remedy this in patho2. Here is my favorite hostile mechanic in Pathologic 2 that did not exist in the original: if you die, any time, at all, you’re punished with a black mark on your save file that cannot be removed by reloading an earlier save. There’s a helpful death counter on the loading screen. Mark Immortell, who runs the theater in the Town-on-Gorkhon and also The Theater Production That Is Pathologic, Kind Of, explicitly tells you a) you should never ever ever die and that b) save scumming won’t save you. Every time you die, you reload into the town theater, where you’re told your punishment (usually, this is the max of one of your meters being lowered, and sometimes it’s an in-story punishment like ‘you can’t touch anyone’ which prevents you from hugging your friend Lara near the end of the game. It’s really hard to avoid this, it’s like the second punishment.) The punishments stack up to I believe 21, at which point the game takes pity on you, and also, by then your max health is permanently halved. Also, on death 7, a mysterious Fellow Traveler offers you a deal to remove all past and future death punishments! If you take him up on this, he does so, and also you are now unable to get either proper ending of the game. Your ending is now living with death forever! (Pathologic 3 has its own version of this, which I did, and I actually felt like it really enhanced my experience of the game…and also, I felt like the game had tricked me into running into a painted tunnel on a wall!)
My favorite early game moment in Pathologic 3 was realized They’d Outdone Themselves on this level. Here’s one of Pathologic 3’s hostile mechanics: time travel (this includes going to The Next Day) is powered by a resource called ‘amalgam’. You get it by talking to your manic pixie dream landlord Eva at the end of the day, by smashing mirrors, by accomplishing in game tasks, and by euthanizing people dying of the plague in the street (but watch out, if you fuck up and give them too MUCH morphine they die in agony and you LOSE amalgam, and also a slice of your amalgam meter gets a little crack in it. Get three cracks and that piece breaks until you repair it. Letting the bachelor get so depressed he shoots himself will also crack your amalgam piece, btw. Have fun!). Also, amalgam drains slowly ANY time you are on the apathetic side of your apathy-mania meter (any time you’re on the mania side, your health drains instead.) And you are Always Getting More Apathetic. Amalgam, for the most part, will not become scarce until 20-30 hours into the game. However, what’s really evil is that aside from being used to travel forward and back from the current in-game day, loading a save when you die also costs amalgam. The first time you die without any amalgam, the game gives you a warning. The second time, it wipes your fucking save file. I genuinely shudder to think of what incredibly unforgiving shit they’re going to pull in Changeling route. There’s a bit of a running joke that all the early posts on reddit about Pathologic 3 were about how it was too easy, and then everyone hit Day 9, realized amalgam was Actually Scarce and that this game might actually be harder than ever before. And it is! The difficulty spike just comes late, which is actually crueller than it being early!
All of that said, my original experience of Pathologic 2 is now forever out of my reach, because it’s a game I now love and understand. I’m good at it now! Almost anyone who finished a run of patho2 and then plays it again will have a much, much easier time, because so much of the difficulty doesn’t come from actual difficulty, but from not understanding what things are important. Some quests are better off left undone; some items seem useless but are vital. If nothing else, you’ll just know where in the town all the damn children’s caches full of useful items are. My first run, I bought morphine when I should have bought immunity boosters, I got lost, I wasted time, I ran out of water I needed to brew tinctures because I didn’t realize that the water pumps scattered everywhere around town were suddenly going to start breaking, I didn’t understand when the game was telling me to collect a precious plague cure resource and wasted it all and then let almost all of the children I was responsible for die. I rushed to a boat to travel quickly to somewhere where I could buy food, because I was almost starving to death, and discovered for the first time that boats—of course!—won’t take you out of infected districts. I had almost forgotten that I streamed a little bit of the game when I first started it, and that video is still up unlisted on youtube, so I could go and watch a bit of it. I really enjoyed seeing myself stumble around and get just stupidly incredibly lost in a town that I now know very well. What kind of idiot doesn’t know where Isidor’s house is? Well, literally anyone who’s never played Pathologic 2 before.
I now replay patho2 for fun, distraction, and relaxation because it’s satisfying to stack up smoked fish and water bottles and delicious eggs in your cabinet and run around so fast that you’ve made a panacea for the plague before you even have anyone to test it on. After finishing patho3 and deciding I would wait for some more bugfixes before starting a new playthrough or going achievement hunting, I cracked open a new patho2 save and started stacking up fish. It’s genuinely a nice steppe vacation. Which is kind of an interesting paradox, because part of patho’s appeal IS its cruelty. The reason I never turned my difficulty down on my first patho2 run is I wanted to say I’d beaten it For Real. So maybe it is like Dark Souls actually? But it’s a world that really rewards you for understanding it. Once you’ve cracked the trading nuts with children for drugs and fish economy, you’re halfway to not dying!
Having just written a bunch about the mechanics, I feel like I should talk about the story, but this is a kind of ‘what is there to say?’ situation. Mr. bomberguy does a good overview. The actual non-meta story of pathologic is very good! I’m waiting for all the video essays about Pathologic 3 to drop (and found a few Rock Paper Shotgun articles while googling the old ones, so now I have to read those…) because the ways it changes the mechanics and story are really interesting, but I haven’t thought hard enough about them yet to have anything interesting to say. So the thing I will talk about is the metanarrative stuff, because I find it the most striking. Mr. bomberguy goes over this as well. To make a long story short: in the original pathologic, your reward for being really good at the game is finding out it was all a game played by children, and that you—the bachelor or the haruspex or the changeling—are just a doll. If you’re REALLY good at the game, you can go and discuss this with a representation of the developers, putting you the player’s words in the doll’s mouth, to put the final layer on the ‘this isn’t even real’ cake. It’s a fun little twist! It does a good job of making you reflect on the artificiality of video games, on suspension of disbelief in general, and on Fate.
Pathologic 2 and 3 don’t really have the equivalent of going to meet The Powers That Be (the children who are playing dolls)—Pathologic 3 technically does, as a kickstarter backer reward that I watched on youtube, but it’s not REALLY part of the game. That kickstarter reward conversation actually addresses this—the now grown up Powers That Be say, well, that was a fresh idea in 2005, but now it feels stale—that’s why you didn’t meet us in Burakh’s story. But I still find the idea of the game as a A Game to be really present and powerful in both of them. I just replayed my favorite It’s All A Game moment from Pathologic 2 last night—at one point, Artemy tries to talk to two powerful young women from the town who are meeting to discuss its future, and they tell him to get lost. When he exits the house where they were, he’s confronted by Clara, who berates him for getting involved, and says that she’s going to curse him so that he can’t interfere—she’s going to make it so that he won’t be able to talk to them even if he wanted to! You can choose to reply that you’re going to go talk to them JUST to spite her then. So you turn around, go back into the house, and….
Well, of course, you can’t talk to them. Because Pathologic 2 doesn’t have incidental dialogue NPCs—you can talk to people or you can’t. You already exhausted your dialogue with both Maria and Capella, so you can’t talk to them again. That’s the mechanics of the game you’re playing. You already knew that! So did Clara actually curse you? Or did she just draw your attention to the boundaries of your world that you already understood? Is this immersive or is it actually pushing at your suspension of disbelief, and making the inherent fakeness of the game more stark?
You walk back out of the house, and Clara isn’t even there. You can’t talk to her about the experience you just had. You just have to sit and think about it.
Pathologic 2’s other main Moments of fourth wall breaking are mainly centered around Aglaya
Lilich, the Inquisitor. In all routes of og Pathologic and in Pathologic 2, she arrives in the town on Day 7, sent by The Powers That Be (who, aside from being the children in charge of it all, are generally referenced within the game as an ominous bureaucratic government authority. They send you letters, they’re trying to shut down the Bachelor’s lab…) to deal with the plague issue. Her preferred way to do this is by destroying the Polyhedron, a magical impossible tower that looms large over the town and which I cannot believe I’ve gone on this long without mentioning ONCE. This aligns her, generally, with Artemy and against the Bachelor (Pathologic 3 really gets murky with this, but we don’t have time for all that right now. Pathologic 3 also gets silly with it by having a DIFFERENT inquisitor arrive on Day 7, but we REALLY don’t have time for all that right now.) In fact, she actually essentially falls in love with Artemy after her first conversation with him—because Aglaya is aware that she is a doll and that it’s all a game. You can talk to her about it when you learn it in the game. She knows that she’s trapped, and it fills her with despair. And in her first conversation with Artemy, they’re also discussing the ways that he’s trapped by his fate, and how he’s being manipulated by forces greater than him—and he says that he doesn’t care. The Pathologic 1 dialogue is actually easier to dig up (all the text is linked on the reddit…), so I’ll quote that here instead, but to my memory, the gist is pretty similar in Pathologic 2:
Inquisitor: Oh please, no one is blaming anyone here! Who in the world would call you guilty... the Powers That Be tricked you. You were set up. Who led you onto this path? Who was this malicious influence? You are but a pawn in their clumsy hands. A tool for someone else's execution.
> I do as I see fit. I choose my own path. If someone wants to use my choices for their scheming, so be it.
> Let them foresee my steps and use them in their scheming. That doesn't rob me of my freedom. *
Inquisitor: ... That's some nerve. Or am I missing something...? Listen to me, you silly man, you've been played! Manipulated! My position comes with perks -- facts, access to information. Don't you believe me? Do you need proof?
> If someone works my part into their play, that's on them. I am only responsible for my own choices.
> Do you expect me to chance my decisions just for the pleasure of spoiling someone else's schemes? My choices are driven by familial obligations and love. That is enough reason for me. *
Inquisitor: ... A worthy answer.
> You seem visibly shaken. Why? *
> Yes. It's worthy because it's honest.
Inquisitor: It's strange. I never thought of it like that before. Is it really that simple?
Now we’re really veering into My Shipping Opinions That Are Also About Themes, but I’m a big Artemy/Aglaya girlie because this is so striking to me. Aglaya knows it all isn’t real, and meeting Artemy shows her how to live when you don’t have any choices, when you’re being controlled, when you are beholden to fate. Artemy essentially says to her, I don’t care if I was manipulated, my choices are still my choices. It’s kind of showing the player one way to react to the ‘it’s all a game played by children’ twist. Yes, it’s all a game played by children, but you still made your choices. Out of love! You loved those kids you were trying to save!
There is a LOT more I could say on this subject (to me it's very much about both the inherent constraints of video games and also the inherent constraints of Being A Person In The World) but to be honest I’ve already written fanfiction about it, and I’m typing this in google docs so I can see how long it’s gotten so I’m officially calling it. Pathologic is endlessly fascinating to me and I WILL have deeper thoughts about Pathologic 3 someday (there's something interesting about how it's a game About Save Scumming following up on Pathologic 2, a game which went out of its way to punish you for even thinking about save scumming...), once they’ve patched the damn thing enough for me to want to replay it all.
Pathologic really a subject that I resist Posting about because it feels like something many people smarter than i have said a lot about. But no one follows me here so I can post to my heart’s content? Anyway, for my dear friends who have to listen to me say baffling things about pathologic once a quarter, here are some more baffling things, perhaps slightly more coherent? Spoilers for any and all Pathologics in here but mostly about the mechanics and the metanarrative stuff.
Pathologic (2005) is a Russian survival horror game about a remote town in the steppe that is struck by a plague, and three doctors who try to save it. In the original game, there are three routes, one for each doctor: Daniil Dankovsky, the Bachelor (of medicine), Artemy Burakh, the Haruspex, and Clara, the Changeling. You know, the three kinds of doctors that there are. It was largely popularized in niche weirdo English speaking spaces by a) a series of articles in Rock Paper Shotgun and b) a hbomberguy video extolling its virtues. Its mechanics are focused around ‘trying not to die of your survival meters’ and ‘walking around a horrible town’ and ‘save important NPCs from the plague’, and it’s famously extremely janky, hostile to the player, and actively unpleasant to play. The original English translation was also famously bad, although the current one is much better, and all the later games have very good localization.
So, there’s a Pathologic 2 and 3, those are sequels, right? No, of course not, they’re “remakes”/reimaginings of Haruspex and Bachelor routes, respectively. Why they decided to name them this way I simply cannot tell you. Pathologic 2 was originally intended to be a full remake and get the Bachelor and Changeling routes as DLC; as these things go, they ended up spinning off the new Bachelor route into an entirely new game instead. If we’re very very lucky they might someday finish Changeling route/Pathologic 4 (if we’re VERY lucky they’ll change their naming conventions AGAIN and call it something else). Pathologic 2 has the same type of survival mechanics as the original, but made even more effectively brutal, and Pathologic 3 goes off in an entirely new direction with a meter to manage based on your emotional state and time travel mechanics. You can no longer starve to death but you CAN get so depressed through dialogue (or by just standing there doing nothing for too long, or by shooting someone else in self defense, or…) that Daniil pulls out a gun to shoot himself.
My preferred description of playing Pathologic is it’s like reading Dostoevsky, but meanwhile he’s trying to fight you in the street. (Me saying this is cheating, I haven’t even read any Dostoevsky.) It’s a game that is well known for being difficult almost to a memetic level, in a very different way than say, Dark Souls. The difficulty is the point not because you’re supposed to get good and overcome it and feel accomplished, but because you’re supposed to feel what it’s like to be in a bad and unfair situation that you don’t understand. (to quote mr h. bomberguy: it’s not a game that has a hunger mechanic, it’s a game about starving to death.)
Pathologic 2 was my entry to the series upon its Playstation 4 release on March 6, 2020. So my experience of these games IS inextricably linked to the fact that I was spending all my free time playing Pathologic 2 as the world was actively falling apart due to a global pandemic. For the obvious and kind of trite reason that it’s a game about a plague and about a town not getting its shit together to effectively do anything about it, but also because it’s an extremely frustrating, intentionally difficult experience. It’s a game where time actively passes whenever you’re not paused or in dialogue (and time literally passes faster every in-game day), and you never have enough food or time or sleep, and so to play it effectively you have to constantly strategize about what to do next—and you have imperfect information! Sometimes you’ll do what seemed smart and the game will just say fuck you and ruin your day anyway. There were several points when I had fucked myself so bad on my survival meters that I had to roll back to saves from one or two days earlier to figure out a way forward. This is extremely annoying and time consuming, but a GREAT use of my time and attention while avoiding thinking about ‘the real world’. I think if I had played it at another time in my life I might have gotten too annoyed and given up, or decided I had better things to do than get bullied by a very interesting game. Or at least turned the difficulty down! (there are extremely granular difficulty sliders, although the game discourages you from using them, so in some ways despite it all, pathologic 2 perhaps less hostile than silksong?)
The other thing I will say about the patho2 ps4 release: it was terrible! Horribly optimized, dire loading screens, constant crashes, and the game had a save cap of 100 that if you reached it, you had to EXIT THE GAME to delete some saves before you could save. Thus, of course, erasing all your progress since your last save. I feel like this, alongside the already intentionally frustrating mechanics, have given me a real ‘oh you!!’ relationship with pathologic. When something about the game is annoying or frustrating, whether or not it was intentional, I just feel like, oh, of course, that’s pathologic! That’s my buddy who hates me! Pathologic 3, for the first week or so of its release, had daily hotfixes. This is because, in classic pathologic fashion, it is janky as hell and needed at least several more months of QA than it got. I spent several frustrating hours near the end of my playthrough troubleshooting questlines that weren’t triggering properly or in the right order, via reddit threads and straight up trial and error. I would not put up with this shit for any other game, no matter how beloved. But it’s pathologic! That’s my friend, a game that will never be optimized in any way that matters!
There are a lot of interesting things to talk about when you talk about Pathologic: it’s a really dense, meaty game, with an interesting and sometimes baffling story operating on multiple meta levels, and it has a lot of characters who all have weird things going on. However, I’m not dedicated enough to do real textual analysis, so instead: one of the things that most constantly interests me about patho is how much it grows and changes through its iterations. For one thing….og pathologic is kind of easy! Partially I’m saying that because by coming to it second, I already knew some of its tricks (I knew food prices were going to skyrocket on Day 2, for example), but it genuinely is easier. It’s a game meant to be hard, but also, it has quicksaves. You can fail a quest by saying the wrong thing to an NPC, but if you just quicksaved, that’s just a minor annoyance, really.
I think you can really tell that they tried to remedy this in patho2. Here is my favorite hostile mechanic in Pathologic 2 that did not exist in the original: if you die, any time, at all, you’re punished with a black mark on your save file that cannot be removed by reloading an earlier save. There’s a helpful death counter on the loading screen. Mark Immortell, who runs the theater in the Town-on-Gorkhon and also The Theater Production That Is Pathologic, Kind Of, explicitly tells you a) you should never ever ever die and that b) save scumming won’t save you. Every time you die, you reload into the town theater, where you’re told your punishment (usually, this is the max of one of your meters being lowered, and sometimes it’s an in-story punishment like ‘you can’t touch anyone’ which prevents you from hugging your friend Lara near the end of the game. It’s really hard to avoid this, it’s like the second punishment.) The punishments stack up to I believe 21, at which point the game takes pity on you, and also, by then your max health is permanently halved. Also, on death 7, a mysterious Fellow Traveler offers you a deal to remove all past and future death punishments! If you take him up on this, he does so, and also you are now unable to get either proper ending of the game. Your ending is now living with death forever! (Pathologic 3 has its own version of this, which I did, and I actually felt like it really enhanced my experience of the game…and also, I felt like the game had tricked me into running into a painted tunnel on a wall!)
My favorite early game moment in Pathologic 3 was realized They’d Outdone Themselves on this level. Here’s one of Pathologic 3’s hostile mechanics: time travel (this includes going to The Next Day) is powered by a resource called ‘amalgam’. You get it by talking to your manic pixie dream landlord Eva at the end of the day, by smashing mirrors, by accomplishing in game tasks, and by euthanizing people dying of the plague in the street (but watch out, if you fuck up and give them too MUCH morphine they die in agony and you LOSE amalgam, and also a slice of your amalgam meter gets a little crack in it. Get three cracks and that piece breaks until you repair it. Letting the bachelor get so depressed he shoots himself will also crack your amalgam piece, btw. Have fun!). Also, amalgam drains slowly ANY time you are on the apathetic side of your apathy-mania meter (any time you’re on the mania side, your health drains instead.) And you are Always Getting More Apathetic. Amalgam, for the most part, will not become scarce until 20-30 hours into the game. However, what’s really evil is that aside from being used to travel forward and back from the current in-game day, loading a save when you die also costs amalgam. The first time you die without any amalgam, the game gives you a warning. The second time, it wipes your fucking save file. I genuinely shudder to think of what incredibly unforgiving shit they’re going to pull in Changeling route. There’s a bit of a running joke that all the early posts on reddit about Pathologic 3 were about how it was too easy, and then everyone hit Day 9, realized amalgam was Actually Scarce and that this game might actually be harder than ever before. And it is! The difficulty spike just comes late, which is actually crueller than it being early!
All of that said, my original experience of Pathologic 2 is now forever out of my reach, because it’s a game I now love and understand. I’m good at it now! Almost anyone who finished a run of patho2 and then plays it again will have a much, much easier time, because so much of the difficulty doesn’t come from actual difficulty, but from not understanding what things are important. Some quests are better off left undone; some items seem useless but are vital. If nothing else, you’ll just know where in the town all the damn children’s caches full of useful items are. My first run, I bought morphine when I should have bought immunity boosters, I got lost, I wasted time, I ran out of water I needed to brew tinctures because I didn’t realize that the water pumps scattered everywhere around town were suddenly going to start breaking, I didn’t understand when the game was telling me to collect a precious plague cure resource and wasted it all and then let almost all of the children I was responsible for die. I rushed to a boat to travel quickly to somewhere where I could buy food, because I was almost starving to death, and discovered for the first time that boats—of course!—won’t take you out of infected districts. I had almost forgotten that I streamed a little bit of the game when I first started it, and that video is still up unlisted on youtube, so I could go and watch a bit of it. I really enjoyed seeing myself stumble around and get just stupidly incredibly lost in a town that I now know very well. What kind of idiot doesn’t know where Isidor’s house is? Well, literally anyone who’s never played Pathologic 2 before.
I now replay patho2 for fun, distraction, and relaxation because it’s satisfying to stack up smoked fish and water bottles and delicious eggs in your cabinet and run around so fast that you’ve made a panacea for the plague before you even have anyone to test it on. After finishing patho3 and deciding I would wait for some more bugfixes before starting a new playthrough or going achievement hunting, I cracked open a new patho2 save and started stacking up fish. It’s genuinely a nice steppe vacation. Which is kind of an interesting paradox, because part of patho’s appeal IS its cruelty. The reason I never turned my difficulty down on my first patho2 run is I wanted to say I’d beaten it For Real. So maybe it is like Dark Souls actually? But it’s a world that really rewards you for understanding it. Once you’ve cracked the trading nuts with children for drugs and fish economy, you’re halfway to not dying!
Having just written a bunch about the mechanics, I feel like I should talk about the story, but this is a kind of ‘what is there to say?’ situation. Mr. bomberguy does a good overview. The actual non-meta story of pathologic is very good! I’m waiting for all the video essays about Pathologic 3 to drop (and found a few Rock Paper Shotgun articles while googling the old ones, so now I have to read those…) because the ways it changes the mechanics and story are really interesting, but I haven’t thought hard enough about them yet to have anything interesting to say. So the thing I will talk about is the metanarrative stuff, because I find it the most striking. Mr. bomberguy goes over this as well. To make a long story short: in the original pathologic, your reward for being really good at the game is finding out it was all a game played by children, and that you—the bachelor or the haruspex or the changeling—are just a doll. If you’re REALLY good at the game, you can go and discuss this with a representation of the developers, putting you the player’s words in the doll’s mouth, to put the final layer on the ‘this isn’t even real’ cake. It’s a fun little twist! It does a good job of making you reflect on the artificiality of video games, on suspension of disbelief in general, and on Fate.
Pathologic 2 and 3 don’t really have the equivalent of going to meet The Powers That Be (the children who are playing dolls)—Pathologic 3 technically does, as a kickstarter backer reward that I watched on youtube, but it’s not REALLY part of the game. That kickstarter reward conversation actually addresses this—the now grown up Powers That Be say, well, that was a fresh idea in 2005, but now it feels stale—that’s why you didn’t meet us in Burakh’s story. But I still find the idea of the game as a A Game to be really present and powerful in both of them. I just replayed my favorite It’s All A Game moment from Pathologic 2 last night—at one point, Artemy tries to talk to two powerful young women from the town who are meeting to discuss its future, and they tell him to get lost. When he exits the house where they were, he’s confronted by Clara, who berates him for getting involved, and says that she’s going to curse him so that he can’t interfere—she’s going to make it so that he won’t be able to talk to them even if he wanted to! You can choose to reply that you’re going to go talk to them JUST to spite her then. So you turn around, go back into the house, and….
Well, of course, you can’t talk to them. Because Pathologic 2 doesn’t have incidental dialogue NPCs—you can talk to people or you can’t. You already exhausted your dialogue with both Maria and Capella, so you can’t talk to them again. That’s the mechanics of the game you’re playing. You already knew that! So did Clara actually curse you? Or did she just draw your attention to the boundaries of your world that you already understood? Is this immersive or is it actually pushing at your suspension of disbelief, and making the inherent fakeness of the game more stark?
You walk back out of the house, and Clara isn’t even there. You can’t talk to her about the experience you just had. You just have to sit and think about it.
Pathologic 2’s other main Moments of fourth wall breaking are mainly centered around Aglaya
Lilich, the Inquisitor. In all routes of og Pathologic and in Pathologic 2, she arrives in the town on Day 7, sent by The Powers That Be (who, aside from being the children in charge of it all, are generally referenced within the game as an ominous bureaucratic government authority. They send you letters, they’re trying to shut down the Bachelor’s lab…) to deal with the plague issue. Her preferred way to do this is by destroying the Polyhedron, a magical impossible tower that looms large over the town and which I cannot believe I’ve gone on this long without mentioning ONCE. This aligns her, generally, with Artemy and against the Bachelor (Pathologic 3 really gets murky with this, but we don’t have time for all that right now. Pathologic 3 also gets silly with it by having a DIFFERENT inquisitor arrive on Day 7, but we REALLY don’t have time for all that right now.) In fact, she actually essentially falls in love with Artemy after her first conversation with him—because Aglaya is aware that she is a doll and that it’s all a game. You can talk to her about it when you learn it in the game. She knows that she’s trapped, and it fills her with despair. And in her first conversation with Artemy, they’re also discussing the ways that he’s trapped by his fate, and how he’s being manipulated by forces greater than him—and he says that he doesn’t care. The Pathologic 1 dialogue is actually easier to dig up (all the text is linked on the reddit…), so I’ll quote that here instead, but to my memory, the gist is pretty similar in Pathologic 2:
Inquisitor: Oh please, no one is blaming anyone here! Who in the world would call you guilty... the Powers That Be tricked you. You were set up. Who led you onto this path? Who was this malicious influence? You are but a pawn in their clumsy hands. A tool for someone else's execution.
> I do as I see fit. I choose my own path. If someone wants to use my choices for their scheming, so be it.
> Let them foresee my steps and use them in their scheming. That doesn't rob me of my freedom. *
Inquisitor: ... That's some nerve. Or am I missing something...? Listen to me, you silly man, you've been played! Manipulated! My position comes with perks -- facts, access to information. Don't you believe me? Do you need proof?
> If someone works my part into their play, that's on them. I am only responsible for my own choices.
> Do you expect me to chance my decisions just for the pleasure of spoiling someone else's schemes? My choices are driven by familial obligations and love. That is enough reason for me. *
Inquisitor: ... A worthy answer.
> You seem visibly shaken. Why? *
> Yes. It's worthy because it's honest.
Inquisitor: It's strange. I never thought of it like that before. Is it really that simple?
Now we’re really veering into My Shipping Opinions That Are Also About Themes, but I’m a big Artemy/Aglaya girlie because this is so striking to me. Aglaya knows it all isn’t real, and meeting Artemy shows her how to live when you don’t have any choices, when you’re being controlled, when you are beholden to fate. Artemy essentially says to her, I don’t care if I was manipulated, my choices are still my choices. It’s kind of showing the player one way to react to the ‘it’s all a game played by children’ twist. Yes, it’s all a game played by children, but you still made your choices. Out of love! You loved those kids you were trying to save!
There is a LOT more I could say on this subject (to me it's very much about both the inherent constraints of video games and also the inherent constraints of Being A Person In The World) but to be honest I’ve already written fanfiction about it, and I’m typing this in google docs so I can see how long it’s gotten so I’m officially calling it. Pathologic is endlessly fascinating to me and I WILL have deeper thoughts about Pathologic 3 someday (there's something interesting about how it's a game About Save Scumming following up on Pathologic 2, a game which went out of its way to punish you for even thinking about save scumming...), once they’ve patched the damn thing enough for me to want to replay it all.
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Date: 2026-02-04 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-04 01:40 am (UTC)HONESTLY LIKE. YEAH!! Patho3 is kind of just them looking at a particular experience of patho2 and going hmm... there's this running Thing in Patho2 about you being an actor, and I think they even explicitly frame the deaths as a new actor taking on the role. There's always this sense of Theatricality...the opening of the game has Mark tell you that this is the second production... And with the pantomimes every night, and the pantomimes center on The Haruspex, The Bachelor, and The Changeling, and in the first pantomime, it's actually The Haruspex talking about his motivations...and then at the end of the monologue, Mark shouts out NEXT!! as if it's an audition. the haruspex responds, confused: what? END PANTOMIME. And on Day 11 you can meet a guy who claims to be the new actor playing Artemy Burakh... anyway. someone wrote up on interesting reddit post that touched on the fact that Patho3 is explicitly more referencing film than theater, and posited that one expression of this is that patho2 is a live theater mentality of, whatever happens you have to keep going, the show must go on etc, whereas patho3 Literally Has Editing.
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Date: 2026-02-04 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-04 05:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-04 01:03 pm (UTC)