Daniil Dankovshy is a doctor. Well, a researcher to be exact, an outsider to Pathologic 3’s town who has come to trace a rumor of immortality. He arrives only to find his potential subject dead and the town awash in a catastrophic plague. In Pathologic 2, you also play as a doctor—a surgeon, returning to his hometown after years away at medical school. Where Daniil is a total foreigner, Artemy is neither at home nor a stranger. He is mixed race, and every point of the game charts his comfort and discomfort with the indigenous people of the Steppe. Some welcome him, others don’t. These two people, these two bodies, interface with the world differently. Though both these games start with similar premises, inhabiting their protagonists reveals just how different they are. In its wedding of mechanical complexity and narrative justification, Pathologic 3 undoes oft-touted binaries of story and play.
Pathologic 3 (available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S) presents itself as a sequel, but it’s better described as a parallel experience to its predecessors. In the first Pathologic, you could play as three different characters: the Bachelor (Daniil Dankovsky), the Changeling (Clara), and the Haruspex (Artemy Burakh). Each offered a different perspective on the events at hand, and different mechanics to engage with it. Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead offers a tilted view on the events of Hamlet, Pathologic gives three perspectives from which to chart its script. The proceedings appear different depending on where on the stage you are standing.
Due to a combination of budget constraints and slow sales, Pathologic 2 lacked multiple playthroughs. You could only play as Artemy (outside of a short DLC chapter called The Marble Nest); further playthroughs were going to be paid DLC. Thereby, Pathologic 3 is both sequel and fulfillment of that lost promise. If there is a Pathologic 4, I presume you will play as the Changeling.
It is easy to understand each of these characters as clean opposing elements. The Changeling is a full mystic, an unsteady healer with powers she does not fully understand. The Bachelor is all rationality, a head full of facts and a bag full of tools to inscribe those facts upon the world. The Haruspex stands at the intersection of them both, a shaman surgeon with scalpel and potion. Yet, these clean inscriptions of body, mind, and spirit flatten all three. The Changeling is as smug as either of them, constantly chiding them for their inability to see as she does. Just as the Bachelor might push away the “irrationality” of the Steppe and its children, the Changeling finds science all too confining. Ultimately, the Haruspex’s split nature cannot last forever. Pathologic 2’s unforgettable final choice enshrines him as either a chosen actor of the steppe or a medically trained surgeon forever.
The Bachelor is also a split being, psychologically torn between mania and apathy. While the apparatus of medical care is more directly scientific in his hands, embodying the Bachelor is frightful and emotional. Kicking over a trash can will either grant the motivation to continue on or tip him into madness. You can regulate the Bachelor’s emotional state with potions and medications, yet a heated conversation can fully alter his mood, no matter how many shots of morphine you take beforehand. This system creates the impression of moods needing to be harnessed. Mania makes him speedy and quick; apathy turns him docile and slow. Both a steadiness of hand and a frantic mind have their uses. It is only a question of “when” and “how much.”
The approach is still more scientific than Artemy’s. While the Haruspex focuses on individual cures and individual lives, the Bachelor creates policies for the town writ large like curfews and quarantines. The Haruspex can sense which of the town’s key characters carry the plague, but the Bachelor must diagnose individual cases. While Pathologic 2 is very much like a survival horror game, 3 is more of a interlocking puzzle. Unlike Artemy, the Bachelor needs no food or water. Resources come more readily to him.
This is not to say Pathologic 3 has no resource management, just that it is a little less fleshed out than in its predecessor. Rather than trading for meat and bread, the Bachelor trades for medications and machinery. His “prototype” machine scatters the plague-causing fog with the clean efficiency of a gunshot, while the Haruspex must wander plague districts alone, enduring the mists with sheer force of will. Pathologic 2 was about treating one man’s body, cultivating it so that it would survive. Pathologic 3 is about treating the mind, keeping it sane, honing it for the quandaries ahead.
Even combat is more a social negotiation than a desperate struggle for survival in Pathologic 3. No one is scared of Artemy, and they’ll attack him no matter what weapon he brandishes, but a doctor from the city like Daniil Dankovsky can disperse crowds with a gunshot in the air. It is the accumulation of details like this that makes Pathologic 3 feel so different from its predecessors—and that’s before discussing its most dramatic change.
In Pathologic 2, Artemy moved through linear time. For him, no death was permanent, even if every one narrowed his capabilities. In contrast, The Bachelor flits through both time and space. With some restrictions, he is able to travel between each of the game’s 12 days. However, to fly from timeline to timeline costs “Amalgam,” a resource gained by smashing mirrors and achieving goals. Each death also removes “Amalgam,” and if the Bachelor dies without any at hand, he dies forever. If Pathologic 2 is a test of endurance, then Pathologic 3 is a test of cleverness. Evading death as much as possible is quite different than outwitting it.
As a trio of games, Pathologic knots together narrative and play, weaving them so that there is practically no distinction. For lack of a better term, these games are literary. They are florid and flowery, twisting their prose between the branches of an ever-growing tree. Yet they are also grueling, demanding a careful understanding of interlocked systems and a quick-handed pursuit of your goals. These games care about all the forms their rhetoric takes. Between the inertial force genre conventions and capitalistic pressure, it is hard to make games that feel this unified, this whole and considered, but Pathologic 3 is evidence that it’s possible.
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