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!
Fortunately, the game doesn’t leave you completely helpless, and in fact this intimidating starting position is, once again, a paper tiger. Advancing from your starting position treats you to a cutscene where Artemy demonstrates a skill that can never again be replicated: Climbing over walls. Gasp! This leads you to a meeting with a local criminal gang, who don’t care about your reputation and will offer you a handy quest: Kill a member of their gang who turned coat and ran off with valuable medicine.
Oh, by the way, the gang is all children. So yes, your very first quest tasks you with killing a child, and it is a genuinely difficult decision. You are starving, tired, and bleeding, with the whole world against you — can you really afford to piss off your only allies by defaulting on the first job they give you? Do you kill the child so that you may live?
PSYCHE actually if you spare the kid the gang walks it back and says they’re grateful you didn’t kill him, giving you enough of a reputation boost that townspeople will no longer attack you on sight. So actually it is in your best interests to do the right thing. Whew, there was almost a moral dilemma there! This may have worked if the reputation system was more complex and multi-dimensional as in Fallout New Vegas, but alas no.
If you do this, you’re actually pretty safe and the rest of the day is relatively straightforward. It’s only a nightmare if the first thing you do is murder a child, so I want you to understand that anyone who claims that is telling on themselves. (Sparing him in fact pays dividends, as it also gets you out of having to do a genuinely difficult quest later on. Everyone everyone loves to bang on about that quest being ~such a hard choice~ too but I didn’t even know about it because I didn’t kill children, you weirdos.)
Artemy enters the patronage of the Olgimisky family (who run the town economy) and this is where we get into some race issues. You see, half the town is occupied by “the Kin”, an indigenous group of the Eurasian steppe who are now being exploited with the rise of modern industry. Artemy is half-Kin and his father was a holy man of the Kin, whose pastoral culture places great importance on the ability to cut flesh, treating surgery, butchery, and haruspicy as the same act. This allows him to interact with the Kin and the lower classes who don’t give Dankovsky the time of day, showing us a very different side of the town.
You might think this is a nice acknowledgement of Russia’s imperialistic conquest of the native peoples of Siberia and analysis of real racial tensions. You would be incorrect. While they are loosely based on the real-life Buryat people, in practice the Kin are a nonsensical mish-mash of real and made-up cultures, including aspects of Native Americans for some reason. I can’t tell if anyone on the dev team was Buryat, but I would guess not.
The Kin also look like, uh…
 |
 |
 |
…this. The ones on the left are called “Worms”, and are identified as half-human mud golem things who, together with the fanservice girl on the right, maintain the natural plants of the steppe (which of course have magic powers). But the fanservice girls also dance as strippers at the pub. So we have both literal dehumanization and fetishization of native peoples; not great. You might think the middle guy at least looks human, but he’s actually the least humanized of the three. They only talk in the Kin’s language, and the Bachelor straight-up can’t interact with them at all. You are only able to view them in the way that everyone else talks about them: grunting beasts.
And… hoo boy. If you thought the previous route was weird about women, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Worm: My daughter is a Bride, she knows how to summon herbs from the Earth. She does it well too, just look at how generous a summer we had! I’ve sold my daughter at a good price, I’ve sold her as a wife to this Gatherer. […] But my daughter didn’t come to his house as a wife. She doesn’t want to bring him riches, she doesn’t want to summon herbs for him.
So the native people are also deeply misogynistic and treat women like cattle. Cool. (You can, of course, force the girl into the arranged marriage.)
The story does do one thing which is at least gesturing in a good direction: The tension of native peoples being forcibly integrated into capitalist labor structures. Olgimisky places the Kin in a workhouse known as “the Termitary”, which true to its name is a cramped, squalid hovel. The Kin are deeply unhappy about their working conditions, leading to frequent riots that Olgimisky suppresses violently. But there is hope: Olgimisky’s son expresses a deep interest in learning about and connecting with the Kin, and promises to provide more equitable conditions when he succeeds his father.
Except halfway through the plot, we discover that the plague outbreak began in the Termitary, and to keep it contained, Olgimisky’s son locked everyone inside and lied about it. And not just locked inside with no medical care, with no food or water. He locked them inside to die.
I found this to be a very sobering and realistic twist that also ties in with the capitalism vs. communism themes. The bosses will sometimes play good cop/bad cop and pretend to be on the workers’ side, but when push comes to shove they will always throw us under the bus for their own interests. This goes double if there are racial tensions in play. Olgimisky Jr.’s interest in the Kin was only ever superficial, and he never felt true empathy for them. You are ultimately given the choice to turn him over to the Kin for vengeance, or to let his father take the fall instead. Rarely do we ever get to see minorities revenge themselves upon their oppressors so directly in media.
(Unfortunately, there’s either a translation or writing goof: The game claims that the person you turn in dies, but they later reappear no worse for wear and in fact must be spoken to in a later quest. I suspect this was done to avoid breaking that quest, but the writers could have done a better job of integrating it.)
As for the main plot…
After breaking into his father’s house, Artemy receives the inheritance his father left for him: the key to his father’s laboratory, where he can distill herbal medicines and, ultimately, a cure for the Sand Plague. This is a mechanic unique to him: Because the herbs are magic, they only reveal themselves to the Kin, so you don’t see them on the Bachelor’s route. Even here, they are extremely hard to find, as they blend in very well with the regular steppe grass, and you must go far afield from the town to find them. In a game where time is at a premium, you must sacrifice time that could be spent dumpster diving or bartering with locals to pursue this alternate resource.
Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near worth the effort. The herbal mixtures are barely any better than the standard medicine you can get by providing children with sharp objects — and those you can sell for money, while merchants all treat your herbal remedies like garbage. The only valuable thing is the panacea, but you don’t need to engage with the mechanics for that at all — you can make it out of any herbal mixture, no matter how crappy it is. I find this a terrible shame. We’re constantly told the plague is magic and normal medicines don’t work, so why are they just as effective as the magic medicine? If these really were the only medicines that worked, that would both reinforce the atmosphere and justify the difficulty of the minigame. It feels like they put a lot of effort into making this mechanic but forgot to give the player any reason to use it.
This also ties into another unique mechanic of Artemy’s, which is that he can dissect corpses to collect organs. Organs from healthy people can be traded for herbs, while infected organs can be combined with herbal mixtures to create antibiotics. This is presumably meant to encourage temptation — do you kill innocent people for their organs so you can get more of those sweet, sweet herbs? Unfortunately, it doesn’t accomplish this, since not only are the herbs not worth the effort in the first place, you’ll get plenty of organs anyway just from killing criminals. Like with the other resource mechanics, loot drops from people you’re free to kill with impunity breaks the economy. So this mechanic also ends up mostly extraneous.
That extends to a lot of Artemy’s campaign, honestly. It feels significantly less polished than Dankovsky’s — there are fewer dialogue options, and many of the quests feel lackluster in comparison. It’s not incomplete, but it’s lacking the fluff and polish of a final draft, and there are a few elements that feel like placeholders.
Artemy spends the first half of the plot taking a significantly most passive role than Dankovsky. Whereas Dankovsky spends his first day in a mad scramble to uncover Simon’s killer, Artemy doesn’t actually have to do anything to clear his name — all you have to do is wait until nightfall and talk to Dankovsky when he comes home, whereupon he’ll declare he’s already absolved you by discovering the real killer (the Sand Plague). Rather anticlimactic. You then spend the next few days as Dankovsky’s errand boy, which is probably for the best because when Artemy does decide to investigate things on his own he just runs in circles and accomplishes nothing.
The most significant event happens on day 5. Remember that bizarre quest where Dankovsky had to grab the still-beating heart of a plague victim, and how I said it was worse in Artemy’s route? Yeah. As Artemy, you have to extract the heart yourself… by killing a stripper.
Willow: Do you think I’m a carrier? No, that’s not true… I’ve been in a crowded place all the time, people saw me! You know how quickly the Sand Plague spreads, the pub would have become a mass tomb in no time.
Artemy: Have you been… with anyone recently?
Willow: Why do you ask? Well, yes… Of course.
Artemy: Were they in good health?
Willow: I don’t know. I haven’t seen any of them since then… None of them have come back to the den. That doesn’t mean they are dead though, does it? There are plenty of reasons to avoid public places these days…
Artemy: I doubt that. Prepare to die.
Yes, you gun her down while she tries to (sexily) run for her life.
This is the implied “canon” choice, as she’s the victim in Dankovsky’s route and she has the most dialogue and characterization. You do, however, have other options: You can kill a different herb bride instead, or take the heart of a Kin man, which makes Dankovsky produce a worse vaccine. Still not great!
Then when the Inquisitor shows up she immediately falls in love with Artemy’s rugged rural charm. I really don’t know what to make of this. The in-universe explanation is that Artemy is just so honest and straightforward that the Inquisitor finds him comforting after a life spent in political schemes, but this is mostly an informed attribute; you can make Artemy behave just as dickishly as Dankovsky, and both of them do horrible things to complete their main quests (like, you know, the prostitute murder we did just two days earlier), but she inexplicably loves one and hates the other.
While Dankovsky investigated the history and structure of the Polyhedron, Artemy investigates the Abbatoir, a massive slaughterhouse that also serves as a temple for the Kin’s rituals. Through their rituals, the blood from the bulls they slaughter is transformed into the blood of the mythical aurochs, and this blood proves to be the essential ingredient for Artemy’s panacea: the only safe cure for the Sand Plague. However, he also discovers this blood pooled and clotted around the base of the Polyhedron, as if it’s draining the reservoir. There is enough blood in the sacrificial pit to make panaceas for the entire town, but the Kin bar Artemy’s passage until he proves himself Isidor’s successor by performing a great sacrifice — either the Polyhedron or the Inquisitor, who claims she will be executed for failure if a resolution is not obtained. He also must defeat the current warden who, as it turns out, killed Isidor to seize power for himself.
Artemy ultimately comes to the opposite conclusion as Dankovsky: The land itself is alive — the aurochs of myth — and the blood under the town is not a cesspit, but a living heart imbued with life from the rituals of the Kin. The Polyhedron is a parasite that has pierced that heart, and the Sand Plague is a reaction to this damage. In his ending, he orders the commander to destroy the Polyhedron, curing the town while sparing the Inquisitor.
I don’t think this tracks with the Soviet Union metaphor as well as Dankovsky’s ending. It seems more like an allegory for colonialism? The Polyhedron, and the modernized town in general, exploits indigenous labor — literally draining the life they’ve given to the land — while dehumanizing and delegitimizing them, leaving no place for them in the new utopia. At the same time, though, the narrative itself dehumanizes them, and treats them almost as an afterthought. None of Artemy’s “Bound” (the list of core characters needed to achieve his ending) are Kin — he implicitly sides with the settlers and not the natives.
It’s also not a traditionalist ending, though — Artemy’s Bound are all children, and his spiritual guide claims that she foresees the new generation changing the status quo and breathing new life into the town. (This includes her effectively becoming her husband’s slave, in case you thought the misogyny would ever stop.) Perhaps it’s saying that reform needs to come from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down, as it was in most Communist states.
What’s clearer is the theme of sacrifice. Artemy is constantly getting his hands dirty and making choices about who or what to sacrifice. A crucial component of regaining his reputation on the first day is that he must donate his own blood to heal a dying man. Someone has to die to provide the Bachelor with his vaccine. To create dead gruel you must harvest organs from living people. During the trials he must sacrifice his bodily functions and is ultimately called upon to sacrifice his very life. It is ritual sacrifice that creates the panacea, and ultimately Artemy must sacrifice someone or something the gain access. And the very structure of the gameplay encourages you to make sacrifices about what aspects of survival to prioritize (at least in theory).
Other analysts have noted that this is in contrast to Dankovsky, who still makes sacrifices but externalizes them. He doesn’t carve the still-beating heart out of a woman to make his vaccine, he orders someone else to do it. He callously orders the whole town shelled while only caring about the Polyhedron. His vaccine protects the healthy but is of no use to the sick, while Artemy heals the sick by carving up the healthy (again, in theory, not so much in actuality). This is reflected in their choice of friends, too: Dankovsky works with the wealthy and upper class who are detached from the problems of the common man, while Artemy works with criminals and outcasts. It’s an interesting rumination on how two doctors with ostensibly the same goals can work in very different ways, and that for all the high-minded ideals of “do no harm”, you’re always going to be sacrificing someone.
…But overall, it just didn’t really land for me. I found this route a lot less satisfying. It’s supposedly about the Kin, but we’re only given confusing, fragmentary snippets of their culture that end up leaving us with more questions than answers. Like I said, it feels like a rough draft: It’s gesturing at someone interesting, but never quite gets there.