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?

Well, first off, everyone who says Artemy is hard mode is lying. This is hard mode. Clara can only use the crappiest gun that requires the most expensive ammunition, can’t use melee weapons at all, and has a constantly decaying reputation, meaning for once you actually have to put in effort to maintain it. Oh, and despite the story claiming she’s immune to the plague, she isn’t. She also has some of the most dangerous sidequests in the game, and starts with literally no money. Good luck!

Clara wakes up in an open grave with no idea who she is or why she’s there.

Why would they call me a thief, pray tell?

What did I steal? Why does the Law detest me so?

The only thing I remember is that I am an outlaw, and will forever be persecuted.

Was I really that good a thief, I wonder? I have nothing of value, just myself and these rags I am wearing. My crime is horrendous, still, I am beyond redemption. Back in the day, every heart was open before me. Now, whatever door I approach is slammed in my face. This is terrifying. Where should I run? With whom shall I seek shelter? Shall I find what I stole and give it back? Who will agree to take it off my hands?

Who will answer my questions, if not you?

Even by Pathologic standards, this is capital-W Weird. While the other healers begin with a clear mission, Clara has only questions, and seemingly breaks the fourth wall in her final statement. The player is compelled to find answers, both by the intrigue of this setup and by Clara herself.

We immediately run into our Tutorial Tragedian, even though they are redundant by this point since you must have completed the game once already. Immediately we can see that Clara’s dialogue is markedly different from the other healers’.

Tragedian: How small you are, how frail…

1. You’re talking as if I were a newborn baby.

2. What happened to your face?

[…]

Tragedian: You’ll have to be taught to eat, drink, sleep, move around, heal yourself; even to breathe. This place drains your health all too fast; even a seasoned person must stay alert. Not everyone manages to cope.

1. Teach me, kindly Mask. How can I stay in good health?

2. I don’t need your advice. I think I’m familiar with eating. You open your mouth and go “nom.”

[…]

Tragedian: You can take anything you want at the mansions of those destined for the leading roles in this unfolding drama: such is the custom of hospitality with the local aristocracy and those who try to imitate them.

1. What sort of people are they?

2. I know, I know all that already. Goodbye, good soul.

[…]

Clara: Thank you, Mask. I don’t need you anymore.

Again, even by Pathologic standards, this dialogue is weird. The stagehands have always had tongue-in-cheek meta dialogue, but this is the first time the player is allowed to respond in kind. At every juncture, you can point out the ridiculousness of the situation or bypass the tutorial entirely because, of course, you already know it. You can still play along by selecting the first options, but even they feel tongue-in-cheek; they’re as melodramatic and over-the-top as the Tragedian’s own dialogue, as if Clara knows that she’s only playing along. Clara is not like the other healers; she, like the stagehands, is aware of the fourth wall, and she uses it to blur the boundaries between player and character.

The weirdness continues when you start the plot proper. In the cemetery lodge you can speak to the keeper’s granddaughter, who claims she saw you yesterday visiting her dead grandfather.

Clara: Shhh! Be quiet! I don’t know anything about a Grandfather… Got it?

What the hell, Clara? Also in the lodge is Katerina Saburova, the failed Mistress who has lost her powers of prophecy. Yet she claims she knew Clara would be here.

Katerina: Where did you come from… girl? Tell me your name.

1. I’m Clara… that’s who I am. I saw the lights and thought I may be welcome here. I’m cold…

2. Let it be Clara. I’ve come to this town… looking for my sister. Yes, I’m looking for my sister. Something’s telling me she has recently paid you a visit.

What the hell, Clara? It’s clear by this point that we are not in control of these conversations the way we were in the previous routes. These dialogue options aren’t normal responses. Clara is introducing new information out of nowhere, presenting us with mutually exclusive versions of reality, and behaving in ways that don’t make sense… except, of course, in the context of someone who has played the previous routes and already knows there’s a second Clara.

Katerina directs Clara to the Saburov house, where she promises to discuss things further.

Katerina: You need a warm place, a meal, and a bath. Look, you are all covered in earth… and something red… is that clay?

Clara: No, it’s not clay.

When we talk to Saburov, things get even more interesting.

Saburov: My wife Katerina said you had been seen at the cemetery. The late caretaker’s daughter claims that you had crawled out of a fresh grave, the appearance of which could not be accounted for. Is this true?

1. Yes, I awoke in an earthen pit. It didn’t look like a grave. Just a pit in the middle of a cemetery… But that’s not a crime, is it?

2. What? How could she possibly have talked to you already?

Holy crap, we can actually say it! Yes, unlike the other healers, Clara is allowed to see the wires. Yeah, it is weird that characters can seemingly teleport across town and relay information instantaneously. Clara gets to ask all the pointed questions I so desperately wanted to ask throughout the previous routes. I truly felt seen here. The developers know you’ve done this rodeo at least once already and they’re letting you trash the set a little, as a treat.

Saburov explains that the Kains are accusing Clara of being a shabnak-adyr, an evil creature taking the form of a woman. (This is why the townspeople were lynching women way back in the Bachelor’s route.) Clara admits to having supernatural powers, but insists that they are good, not evil.

Saburov: Why, then, are you being called a thief? I do believe larcenous skills are the exclusive domain of the wicked.

Clara: Who’s calling me a thief?

Yeah, what the hell, Saburov? We were just born an hour ago, where is this coming from? Yet, inexplicably, this matches with Clara’s opening monologue. This makes no logical sense, but on a narrative level we have to trust that it’s true.

Saburov: You are a miracle-worker. That makes you almost a saint. Yes, a status like that precludes accusations of murder and theft. But then explain to me the meaning of those coincidences! If not for my blind faith in my wife’s words, I would have no doubt that you are an evil spirit, a spawn of the netherworld. And if you don’t explain that mystery at once — I swear not even Katerina’s influence will save you!

Clara: Wait! I’ll tell you. I have a twin sister. She looks exactly like me, is named the same, and wears the same clothes! I fear that she was the one who committed those horrible crimes…

Saburov: …All right. Have it your way. I accept this explanation, and I believe you.

1. Thank you for believing me.

2. (…I’ve just had to tell a lie for the first time in my life… to invent a fictional sister and shift all those outrageous accusations to her… strange I could even utter the words… but I promise, I promise when it all clears up I’ll explain myself and undo that lie…)

What the hell just happened? This is the first time in the game we’ve had a player character express internal narration through a dialogue choice, and the way it’s integrated almost feels like it’s directed at us. The options read as if they are a single passage: Clara audibly says “Thank you for believing me,” then thinks this. It’s all the stranger that she claims this is a lie when we already had the option to invent the sister twice before in the previous scene, but Clara gave no indication it was a lie then.

Then Clara is asked to explain her powers. She can heal the sick by laying hands, which we already knew from the previous routes. But she adds something new: She can hypnotize people into a state where they will answer any question truthfully, “provided they consent, of course.”

Saburov directs you to speak with Katerina, who claims she has seen a prophetic vision of twin harbingers, one of death and one of life, and that she believes Clara is this harbinger. To prove that she is the good one, Saburov orders her to heal a wounded man in front of a witness. The target turns out to be the traitor boy from Artemy’s first quest; in this timeline, Artemy attacked him but botched it, allowing the kid to limp away to safety. Clara lays hands on him… and he dies. Fortunately, the witness is cool with this, because he’s decided the kid had it coming and Clara acted as an agent of divine justice. Ah, Christianity. Even more fortunately, Artemy’s incompetence is the gift that just keeps giving: he also failed to heal the dying thug in this timeline, so Clara has another guinea pig. This time, Clara’s hands do heal him.

Dankovsky: …Are you some kind of a saint?

1. No, I’m a thief! You get that?

2. I’m a miracle worker.

Hey, Clara? What the hell are you doing? My read of this is that it’s an extension of the theme of artifice: Just as Clara can draw attention to the wires of the production, she can also go off-script. In many cases the characters don’t react to these nonsensical dialogue options, which furthers this theory; the other actors don’t know how to respond. I feel like they could have done more with this, though. For instance, if you have a gun at this point, you can take the absurd action of shooting the man dead in front of everyone… but this just softlocks the quest instead of anything interesting.

Having proven the first of her abilities, Saburov then tasks Clara with proving the second: She is to hypnotize Georgiy Kain and ask him to reveal the truth about Simon’s death. Clara responds by introducing more rules: Not only must they consent, she must also know their true name and a secret of theirs.

Katerina: But Georgiy will never speak to you, will he? Or do you wield such power over people as to be able to make him talk?

Clara: No, I have no such power. But cunning will become the solution where power can’t.

What. Clara, you just said you have supernatural hypnosis powers. I can’t tell if this was translated poorly or if Clara’s supposed to sound contradictory. In any case, Katerina gives us the secret: Georgiy never loved Simon, and they’re not actually twins. (My reaction: They were twins? Isn’t Georgiy way younger?) When you speak to Georgiy, you’re given two dialogue options, but one is a dead end that fails the quest; you must say Clara’s incantation precisely for the hypnosis to work. It makes no sense for Clara to make this mistake when she’s the one who provides the incantation, so I chalk this up to more meta-weirdness. If the hypnosis works, Georgiy reveals that the manhunt for the murderer is smoke and mirrors, as he knows that Simon could only have been killed by a supernatural force.

My heart is beating something horrible. How could something this terrifying ever happen?

Clara’s narration implies she didn’t actually think this would work, yet in her first conversation with Saburov she said that the only lie she told was that she had a sister.

When Clara reports back to Saburov, he reports that Dankovsky has discovered Simon died of plague. Interestingly, it’s Saburov who forwards the theory that Clara’s sister is responsible for the outbreak, in a very sudden leap of logic.

The next few days have a very formulaic structure. Saburov asks Clara to investigate someone suspected of causing the outbreak (who is always one of her own Bound) using her hypnosis, but of course they’re never actually guilty. Clara can lie and use them as a scapegoat, which will boost her reputation but cause the scapegoat to fall ill; or she can tell the truth and absolve them, which hurts her reputation as it becomes more likely she’s the culprit. These quests are extremely interesting, as they reveal new facts about the characters, in many cases resolving mysteries that were left unanswered in the previous routes. After two routes of getting jerked around by weirdos talking in circles, Clara’s hypnosis finally gives us some straight answers.

Katerina will also give Clara a secondary quest each day to convert one of the other healers’ Bound to Clara’s ideology. However, these quests feel unfinished; you can’t actually convert anyone, and your debriefing with Katerina has no relation to the actual outcome of your conversation with the Bound.

This changes on day 6, when the inhabitants of the town cathedral (which Dankovsky designated as an isolation ward) are all found dead. Eyewitnesses place Clara at the scene of the crime, causing her reputation to drop dramatically throughout this day as everyone turns against her. It’s at this point Clara discovers that the evil twin she made up is not only real, but is in fact the Sand Plague incarnate; you see, it’s true that Clara cannot tell a lie, so when she made up the evil twin, she made her real. (Every day after this, Clara’s twin will hide inside one of the town’s nondescript houses and, if not found, will infect the district on the next day.) This day is a genuinely tense and shocking ordeal, and unless you leave the main quest for last your quest-givers will all turn hostile.

Unfortunately, this is the point where the developers ran out of time. After this day, your only sidequests are repetitive obvious filler that feature the same dialogue every day, and they feel like tedious busywork more than anything else. (Also, apparently Artemy and Dankovsky acquire posses in this timeline. Where were these posses when I needed them, game?) The main quests also become less coherent and ultimately end anticlimactically. Though they do keep providing us with gloriously meta dialogue:

Oh, and also when the army commander arrives he inexplicably loves her and declares she’s going to come with him when the pandemic is solved because army people are super religious and think she’s an angel. I don’t really get it.

Instead I’ll talk about the game’s most memorable twist, because it’s integrated into the main plot on this route. On the final day of every route, if you cure two sets of Bound, you are invited to the innermost chamber of the Polyhedron, where you see… this:

Speaking to the children will reveal that they are the “Powers That Be” spoken of throughout the story, previously assumed to be the government. They claim that everything you’ve experienced is just a game they’re playing in their sandbox, and that the player character is one of their dolls that has suddenly come to life. For Clara in particular, the reason there are two of her is because the kids can’t agree whether she should be good or evil. But in case that makes too much sense for you, the Sand Plague is real: The children are returning home from their grandfather’s funeral, who has just died of it. (This provides some interesting parallels to the townsfolk referring to Simon as the town’s grandfather.) When you return to the game world, you can inform various characters of your discovery; most will dismiss you, but the Inquisitor and the Changeling will reveal they already knew. The Inquisitor, in particular, will claim that she is a very old doll — one owned by their mother — that the children wish to discard, and they brought her to this town to destroy her.

It’s not clear why this bizarre twist exists unless you cure every Bound, in which case it gets weirder: You are invited to the Theater to speak with the developers of Pathologic (or, rather, their avatars, as represented by the Tragedian and the Executor). There, they make the point that, well, in real life this is all just a game, but does that make it any less meaningful? The Powers That Be are using play to cope with grief and death, just as we use art to cope with difficult concepts. They draw a comparison between the Polyhedron as represented in the story — as a prism that preserves souls and confers immortality — to art itself, as art can be said to hold the soul of its creator and to preserve an image of them for future generations long after they’re dead.

Now, is this incredibly pretentious? Yes. Artists making art about the power of art is always inherently masturbatory and self-congratulatory. But I think this handles it better than usual. Unlike most it-was-all-a-dream twists, it doesn’t invalidate the story we’ve become invested in, it simply extends the themes and metaphor. By tying it in with the Polyhedron, a structure within the story itself, it feels like a natural outgrowth of what we’ve already seen rather than contradicting it.

Unfortunately, I have to say I feel it doesn’t go far enough. The developer chats, which are supposed to be this mindblowing capstone that recontextualizes everything, are disappointingly short and sparse. You get two conversations that are only a few paragraphs long at most, and that’s it. I also can’t help but think it feels a bit like the developers covering their asses: If there’s any jank, don’t blame us, it’s because the kids don’t know what they’re doing!

The bigger issue I have with this is that it doesn’t fit with the version of the town we see. It’s far too complex and deals with topics the kids shouldn’t be aware of. For instance, why is there so much sex and slut-shaming? Little kids may know those things exist in the abstract, but the detailed gender politics and misogyny we see from the characters could only be conceived of by an adult mind. They could know that seedy pubs exist, but they shouldn’t have any idea what goes on inside one. Maybe that’s the point, maybe we’re supposed to think that somehow the town both is and isn’t real, but I think that’s a cop-out. If this was supposed to be the ultimate twist, the writers should have presented a world that gelled with it, but they didn’t.

But now we have to talk about the ending, such as it is. In the end, Clara comes to the opposite resolution as Artemy: The Polyhedron is not a parasite, but a symbiotic organism that must be preserved. The Sand Plague is the result of contradiction between the futurism of the Kains and the traditionalism of the Kin, but don’t worry, she can fix it by, uh, murdering people. See, it turns out that Clara’s healing hands can convert her Bound’s blood into the magic blood used in Artemy’s panacea, allowing him to eradicate the Sand Plague without destroying the Polyhedron. Her final quest is simply talking to her Bound and convincing them all to die for the cause.

This is seemingly presented as the best ending — your reward for playing through all three routes — but I find it monstrous. We’re explicitly told the Sand Plague is the result of the Earth suffering, but Clara’s solution is to treat the symptom and not the disease, and that solution is to create a constant meat grinder slaughtering people like cattle. It’s also a solution that is totally dependent upon her, despite the fact that she doesn’t even know how her powers work of if she will keep them. Given she is revealed to be a spirit of the Earth, I think it’s entirely possible the earth god will take those powers away once she declares she’s going to use them to force it to keep suffering in perpetuity! (And isn’t she leaving with the commander? How is she supposed to do this if she’s not there???)

Moreover, her Bound, the specific people she chooses to sacrifice, are all outcasts. They are all villains and criminals who are so ashamed of their actions that they are willing to die for the town. Now, it’s not explicitly stated that this is a crucial component for the sacrifices… but it is uncomfortable combined with Clara’s insistence that nothing needs to change and the town can continue like this forever. Narratives about the outcasts redeeming themselves usually involve them reintegrating into society in some way, or at least the people saying, “They were willing to do something good for us, so we should rethink how we treated them.” But this is simply using them as raw materials. Clara does not care about these people, she uses them. Everything we’ve seen from the past two routes shows that there is hideous cruelty and inequality within this town, and Clara wants that to continue. This leads to an implication that her solution requires an underclass willing to sacrifice itself, an implication that isn’t helped by the fact that she represents religion, which loves willing victims. The other two endings are both about progress in some form, but this is the very worst of stagnation and authoritarianism: forcing people to suffer and die indefinitely just to preserve the crumbling edifice of empire. If the Bachelor’s ending was the Soviet Union and Artemy’s ending was modern Russia, this feels like tsarist Russia, the worst of the three. This is a terrible ending.

It doesn’t make sense on a thematic level, either. Clara’s theme is supposed to be “faith”. In every other route, she insists she can’t explain her solution because it will only work if you trust her on blind faith. Yet her own route does explain it. It shows us the science behind the magic. The only element of “faith” is that it’s often a coin flip if it’s worth it or not, and Clara rejects ideas such as “figuring it out” or “trying harder”. So… it’s ultimately an ending that doesn’t seem like it’s going to work, so you have to take it on faith? But that’s dumb. And isn’t it redundant with Artemy’s story also having a theme of “sacrifice” and hope for the future?

I’m extremely disappointed by this. The first half of the Changeling’s route is so incredibly interesting, but not only does it cut off halfway through, it gets a horrible tacked-on ending that sours the whole thing. I’m genuinely really curious what a hypothetical remake of this route would look like… but given how much of a disappointment Pathologic 2 turned out to be, I’m keeping my expectations tempered.

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