Dragon Quill

Pathologic was a game reviewed here by illhousen… a decade ago, god we’re old. He had the advantage of being able to play the game in the original Russian instead of its bungled English translation. However, recently several years ago the game was rereleased on Steam with a much better English translation, alongside its sequel/reimagining Pathologic 2. Farla and I have been interested in the game for a very long time (even attempting to play the old incomprehensible version), so we thought we should play both the whole way through and give our own thoughts.

If you’re not familiar, Pathologic is a survival horror/immersive sim… thing where you play as a doctor trapped in a rural village during the outbreak of a strange, supernatural plague. It is known for being incredibly grueling and punishing, requiring you to manage survival meters like hunger and exhaustion in addition to janky combat where you can die from a single hit, all while you must complete objectives under the yoke of a strict real-time clock that’s always ticking — think Majora’s Mask, but you can’t time travel. It flopped on release for obvious reasons, but became a cult classic among those of us who appreciate weird, deliberately counterintuitive games. Unfortunately, it ended up a bit too weird even for us; it felt like it tried to do too many things at once and as a result it’s hard to tell what the story was even trying to say.

Also, what it does say is… questionable. As is usual for games of this type, much of the popular analysis just stops at “Wow, isn’t it amazing that it has themes and asks hard questions?” without evaluating the answers it provides to those hard questions. They also tend to gloss over how deeply weird the games are about women, especially the second one.

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Previously, I discussed the gameplay and aesthetics of Pathologic. Now, I’ll delve into the plot, which is a more complicated beast. As I said in the first post, every healer has a unique plotline, and each one warrants their own post.

Before we begin, I will note that the writing of this game is deliberately opaque, ornate, and confusing, with one early character literally saying, “Forgive me if my speech is strange,” to establish this is deliberate. This means that even with the revised translation, many aspects of the story are unclear and have open-ended interpretations. I think I grasp most of the central themes and messages the story is going for, but here’s a disclaimer that I could be wildly off-base.

Each of the healers has a different hook for coming to the town. The Bachelor, Daniel Dankovsky, wants to uncover the secret to immortality, and is told by the town doctor Isidor Burakh he should study Simon Kain, the patriarch of the town who has is supposedly hundreds of years old. He is immediately given lodgings in the good part of town by local woman Eve Yahn, who, uh, looks like this…

…and heads out to visit the Kains first thing in the morning. They tell him Simon died the night before he arrived. Off to a great start!

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Where Dankovsky begins the game well-fed and rested in a fancy house, Artemy arrives in town after walking for multiple days straight, having not slept or eaten in all that time. He is immediately greeted by a bunch of knife murderers, who he kills but not before sustaining wounds himself. He quickly discovers this is because he has been framed for his father’s murder, so his reputation is at rock bottom and everyone in town is ordered to kill him on sight. Fun!

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The Haruspex’s route was a rough draft. This route is blatantly unfinished. And that’s a shame, because it’s really cool.

Throughout the other routes, Clara has been a major enigma. She claims she has healing hands, but we never see her use them. The townspeople claim she’s the Sand Plague incarnate and her touch actually brings death. She herself claims those are the actions of her evil twin… and while you never see two Claras in the same place, you do often find her moving between locations implausibly fast, as if there really are two of her.

So what’s the truth? What’s her deal?

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