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!

Dankovsky tries to salvage the situation by asking to see Simon’s body, hoping that could at least provide some clues to his longevity, but the Kains insist he can’t because tradition demands they hold a vigil first, and start babbling confusing nonsense if pressed for more information. They instead direct him to talk to Isidor, who was the last person to see Simon alive and therefore has the best chance of knowing what killed him. So you head over to his house and HE’S DEAD TOO. Could this get any worse? Oh yes, because both of them were killed by a local disease, the “Sand Plague”, and the town must be put under quarantine, so you’re locked in with it.

Along the way, you are likely to stumble across this optional scene of townspeople lynching a woman:

Well, that’s deeply uncomfortable, but depiction is not endorsement, I’m willing to see where they’re going with this. If you talk to the lynch mob they’ll explain they thought she was a “shabnak-adyr”, a malicious spirit from local folklore that takes the form of a woman. Throughout the day you’ll see more randomly-generated lynch mobs attacking and killing innocent women. Dankovsky calls them maniacs and threatens to shoot if they don’t stop, so surely it’s okay to kill them?

No. If you kill the mob the game cries and you lose reputation.

This is the beginning of the game’s awkward relationship with women. The writers appear to recognize that violence against women is wrong, but also bend over backwards to explain why in this case it’s okay. See, they don’t actually hate women, they’re just hunting a monster and this resulted in hurting innocent women by mistake, which is tragic, but not tragic enough for them to feel any remorse or stop them from killing more innocent women. There is no interrogation of why this folkloric scapegoat takes the form of a woman and what that says about the culture’s underlying gender politics.

People stop lynching women on the second day, at least. This is where the game’s difficulty spikes, and is the point where most players throw their hands up in defeat. As I mentioned in the previous post, prices skyrocket without warning, so if you didn’t stock up on day 1 you’ll quickly be forced to bankrupt yourself if you want to stay fed. This can be alleviated by vigilante action, as the night murderers drop money that automatically scales to the store prices, but they can kill you in a single hit and most new players won’t know how to get more bullets, so they probably won’t think to farm them.

Day 2 establishes the focus of Dankovsky’s story: negotiating with the town rulers. The town is controlled by three families: the Kains, who provide spiritual leadership; the Olgimiskys, who manage the economy; and the Saburovs, who govern traditional law and order. All of them are duplicitous schemers who lead Dankovsky around in circles, refusing to make any compromises that jeopardize their own power. The main quest of this day has them forcing the player to jump through various hoops to convince them that no really, this is an emergency and we need to do something now. BOY HOWDY did that age well, huh?

In navigating the family politics, we additionally learn about a weird gendered aspect. The wives and daughters of the ruling patriarchs are called “Mistresses”, and they supposedly have powers of prophecy and other forms of mysticism. These powers seem to be real, but despite everyone claiming the Mistresses are the ones really in charge, they don’t seem to be. As per usual, their husbands and male relatives have all the tangible political power, while the most they can do is “advise” them. Truthfully, I can’t make much sense of this; I suspect there are significant cultural elements I’m missing. But it felt weird and misogynistic, like it’s making a huge deal about women having any power at all while still making them subservient to men.

Anyway.

There is a sidequest on this day from Eva Yahn advocating that you escape this mess by hijacking one of the trains. I find this sidequest very weird, because it seems wildly out of character for a doctor to even consider breaking quarantine, and I chose not to pursue it on those grounds. (Naturally, you can’t actually escape, so it doesn’t really matter anyway.) Dankovsky is portrayed as a selfish prick on the other routes, so perhaps this is meant to be in-character for him, but I can’t tell if the writers realize just how awful it is for a doctor to do this; it’s a violation of his oaths and a betrayal of every principle he claims to uphold. A normal person doing this would be an understandable moment of weakness, but coming from a doctor — much less a doctor who positions himself as a trustworthy authority figure — it’s irredeemable, and I don’t like reducing Dankovsky to a such a shallow villain. It feels really mean-spirited, like it’s saying of course city slickers are all morally bankrupt hypocrites, even the doctors.

This day also features one of the game’s most famous side quests: “House of the Living”. One of the town’s inhabitants, Lara Ravel, wants to establish a safe house where she and her friends can wait out the plague, but the sudden inflation has made it difficult to acquire provisions. She and her friends will give you their life savings, which now aren’t even enough to cover the full shopping list, forcing you to dip into your own funds if you want to complete it. If you do manage to deliver all the food, you discover that her safe house has already succumbed to plague, so it was all for nothing. Great! If you’re a monster you can instead simply run off with the money, which has no consequences other than getting a guilt-tripping letter from Lara the next day.

This is a wonderfully brutal quest that really grinds you into the dirt and emphasizes that you cannot rely on normal video game logic of gaining commensurate rewards for effort expended, and that you must weigh altruism against your own survival. It’s a great window into what the game wanted to be, and should have been. Instead it’s an outlier, because after this sidequests do all give you great rewards and none of them provide choices anywhere near as tough as this one. Swing and a miss.

It turns out the other families’ fears were well-founded, because Saburov doesn’t wait long before abusing the emergency powers we gave him to falsely imprison Artemy right when we need his help, while also condemning tons of innocent people to death row on the side. Whoopsie! He agrees to let the prisoners go if you pay their prohibitively high bail — ah, capitalism — and the other families agree to empty their coffers so you can do so. However, as with House of the Living, you can simply walk away with the money, and this time you don’t even get a guilt-tripping letter. I feel like that really should have cratered your reputation the next day, especially since that would be basically the only time you have to worry about low reputation in this route.

(The real purpose of this quest is clearly to repair your reputation after breaking Artemy out of jail — no matter what, you have to kill at least one guard, which deals a big blow to your reputation — but freeing the prisoners conveniently grants you exactly enough reputation to reverse that. Once again, paper tigers.)

Dankovsky is told by the local doctor that, because the plague dies outside of a living host, in order to create a vaccine they need to study a living infected person. Or rather, that’s what they would need in a version of the story that made sense. Actually they want the still-beating heart of a just-murdered plague victim, even though they have no idea how long the bacteria can survive, because they love to roll the dice I guess. Local traditions prohibit anyone but the town shaman from dissecting bodies, so Dankovsky needs Artemy to do this for him. Artemy ends up killing… a stripper. Yes, really. It’s cool because she was already infected, so she was doomed already, even though on the previous day we discovered that shmowders can indeed save the infected. More on this in Artemy’s route, because his side of this quest is so much worse.

Then it turns out that wasn’t even necessary, because the local doctor created a vaccine out of Simon’s remains (who, it turns out, is not completely dead) instead. This is presented in-story as a game-changer, but to the player it’s actually crap — it does significantly boost your immunity, but only for a few hours, so about the same effect as chugging store-brand immunity pills.

It’s a good thing they have at least this to show, though, because the townspeople warn that the plague has gotten so bad that the government is sending an “Inquisitor” — a government administrator with absolute authority, authorized to use any means to solve a problem. Everyone is terrified and regales you with stories of the horrible things Inquisitors have done in the past, and the Inquisitor’s introduction is suitably intimidating:

Contrary to expectations, however, the Inquisitor is amazingly reasonable and agrees to solve this problem with reason and deduction instead of burning it all to the ground. Recognizing the vaccine is only a stopgap measure, she tasks Dankovsky with identifying the source of the plague.

Two days later the powers that be remain dissatisfied with the situation and deploy an army force to occupy the town, burning the infected with flamethrowers under the guise of “sanitation” (including you) and threatening to flatten the town with cannon fire if a cure cannot be found. The player can tell the soldiers they’re lunatics, except they’re, uh… objectively right, actually. The flamethrowers really do reduce your infection level (and unlike antibiotics, can cure it completely!), so who’s really the lunatic? Gameplay mechanics at odds with story, again.

As Dankovsky continues his investigation through this chaos, he discovers that magic is real, and the Kains have perfected it in the form of the Polyhedron, an impossible structure on the edge of town that floats as if weightless. The Polyhedron is able to turn dreams into reality and store the memory of a person, allowing the Kains to practice a form of pseudo-immortality by rewriting their personalities with Simon’s. The Polyhedron was designed by two architects the Kains invited from the capital: Peter and Andrei Stamatin. Peter prototyped the Polyhedron with similar smaller structures scattered throughout the town, but he considers them “failures” and “stairs to nowhere”. His design was only made possible with collaboration from Andrei, who designed the base that enables the Polyhedron’s impossible structure: a massive spike drilled deep into the ground that acts as a counterweight. But he drilled too deep, rupturing a cesspit of organic waste the native people use for their ritual sacrifices.

I think this is an allegory for Communism and the Soviet Union. Communism promised a utopian world, but its initial adherents could not actualize it. It was only through the likes of Mao and Stalin that the dream was made reality, but they could only do so by drenching it in blood. This tracks with the portrayal of the two brothers: Peter is a romantic artist who can barely function, losing himself in dreams and drugs, while Andrei is a cold, calculating thug willing to do anything to protect Peter — including killing a rival architect who threatened the Polyhedron project. That reads to me like they are allegories for Marx, Stalin, and Trotsky, respectively.

This interpretation tracks pretty well, I think? The story levels strong critiques at capitalism and industrialization (more on that in a minute), but though the Kains promise an alternative, they are out-of-touch elitists living in the upper-class neighborhood, and their magnum opus literally can’t support itself. The townspeople claim that everyone loved the previous Kain matriarch, but also that she was a tyrant who controlled their every thought and action, which is an eerie parallel to Stalinist Russia. The Kains use loaded religious imagery, describing their work as “miracles” while their mansion stands across from a cathedral, but at the same time the cathedral is described as a failure where God is not present, which feels cogent with the USSR’s rejection of explicit religion while simultaneously creating a cult of personality around the State.

By the final day even the army commander can’t maintain order, and all Hell breaks loose as half the soldiers mutiny. Dankovsky must either pay them a bribe in the form of a panacea, or kill them all in the closest thing the game has to a final boss fight. Our efforts are rewarded by the commander declaring he’s going to shell the town anyway unless we can come up with a better plan. For some reason Dankovsky directs all his rage not at the commander, but at the Inquisitor.

End of the quest on day 11:

Inquisitor: We have found the source. I congratulate you on your victory, Daniil. Tomorrow is the last — and the hardest day.

Dankovsky: We have — but it’s all very sudden. Somehow I can’t shake the feeling you knew beforehand…

To which she does not respond. The very beginning of their conversation the next day:

Dankovsky:

1. I don’t want to talk to you. I despise you.

2. Your diabolical deception was so simple! The cause and the source — it’s so easy to put these very different things together, Inquisitor! But they are not the same!

I’d like to see your citations, Mr. Scientist.

I genuinely have to wonder if there was supposed to be an additional scene here that got cut, because this makes no sense. The Inquisitor is completely reasonable and open about her motives the entire time: She wants to base her actions on actual evidence instead of just destroying the whole town, we give her the evidence, and then we come to different conclusions about what must be done. The fandom insists that Dankovsky’s random leap of logic was correct, she knew the truth the whole time, and was just jerking Dankovsky around, but I see no evidence for this, especially not on Dankovsky’s own route. This comes out of nowhere. I chalk this up to the game being weird about women with power.

Dankovsky’s ending, if he sides with the Kains, is to destroy the town but leave the Polyhedron intact as the basis for a new settlement on the other side of the river, a callous choice to sacrifice people for an idea. This, at least, makes sense to me as a metaphor for the discrepancy between the promises of Communism and the atrocities of the Soviet Union, as well as broader conflicts between ideals and reality.

But that’s just one-third of the full story. Next we have to talk about the Haruspex, who is significantly less coherent.

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