“Dreams are fine, but we need bread.”
To play Pathologic is to be ill at ease.
Whether you take the role of the Bachelor, the Haruspex, or the Changeling, you will arrive to The Town feeling unwelcome. The world is cast in ugly sepia tones and shrouded with fog. The very layout of the Town seems hostile, with dead ends constantly cutting you off from where you need to go. Dog barks and baby wails punctuate the already disturbing soundtrack, making you feel like you’re plodding through some half remembered nightmare.
Things in the Town are always one half-step away from being normal. Most of the architecture is late Victorian, except for its gravity defying ruined houses and that enormous abattoir, looking like a termite nest carved into the face of a mountain. Everyone is human, except for the ones who are not, and scant little explanation is given for their existence. The fourth wall breaking Executors that you might assume are just there for the tutorial are instead a fixture, blending into the fabric of the world like anything else.
It is the uncanny valley made flesh and blood. You spend your entire time walking on the eggshells of uncertainty, trapped between a disdain for the supernatural and the evidence before your eyes. Every conversation is a psychological battle waged in a foreign language and cadence, as you struggle against a plague that demands concrete understanding. You spend only 12 days in the world of Pathologic, but by the end of it the Town has been well and truly transformed, its flesh flayed and its blood boiled, revealing the mundane carcass of human pain and suffering for all to see.
There are three ruling families in The Town: The Saburovs, the Oligimskys, and the Kains. The Saburovs represent the executive power and command a sizable militia police force. The Oligimskys have total control over the abattoir and bull industry, effectively running the economy. The Kains control the judiciary and the intellectual cadre, and are responsible for the creation of the miraculous Polyhedron.
They are at war with one another. It is a cold and asymmetric conflict, its battle lines drawn in manipulation and backstabbing rather than gunpowder. And when you come to the Town, you are dropped into the centre of it, a tool to be wielded to the betterment of each respective clan. They will blatantly lie, deceive and otherwise trick you in any way they possibly can to achieve their own ends.
Why would you let yourself be used in such a fashion? Well, it’s the only game in town.
Regardless of which character you choose to play as, you are a healer. So when a deadly and highly contagious plague breaks out, you’re burdened with the responsibility of both understanding and mitigating the plague to the best of your ability. But you cannot possibly do it alone. You need funding, you need authority and you need protection. And in order to get those things, you must be prepared to do business with the families.
You might think that when faced with this devastating disease that the factions would come together, but unfortunately for yourself and the Town the very opposite is the truth. Chaos is indeed a ladder of opportunity, and as the Town slowly falls to pieces each family only gets bolder and more greedy in their lust for greater power. As you struggle to save everyone you must repeatedly deal with those who would gladly see the ruination of everything, as long as they could stand atop the pile of corpses at the end of it
It is truly horrible to experience and endure, as every step forward is met with two steps back. It is easy to be lulled into a false sense of serenity with the mystical elegance that the dialogue holds. Conversations never resemble a normal back and forth - every exchange is laden with symbolism and philosophical undertones, even when the subject matter is about something routine and ordinary. Your brain kind of fuzzes over as you contemplate the higher meaning of the words, before you snap back to reality as you realise that you were just asked to murder someone in cold blood.
It all adds up to a uniquely disturbing and immersive experience. The characters are complicated, imperfect and have understandable motivations and goals. The story has a dense history to it, and slowly unravels itself in layers, with the full plot only becoming clear after playing as all three characters. The seemingly impenetrable dialogue and ramblings become so much clearer the deeper you delve into the game, the truth behind the Town and the plague slowly revealing itself. And at the heart of it all is the bleak reality of people suffering, and your quest to end it, in spite of everything that stands in your way.
Not everyone is a scumbag, but they all have agendas, and if you find yourself at odds with it they will not hesitate to push you aside. You are given rare opportunities to cut through the deception, or manipulate the situation to your own advantage, yet even then you cannot stop the inevitable. As the days go on you become more and more weary as you fight against the sense of overwhelming hopelessness, trudging from person to person, each one demanding compensation in some form. It gets its hooks in your brain, and your heart - a story lived and experienced, not just observed.
Pathologic refuses to let you just be a spectator to its horrors. You are no tourist, peering at the Town through a gold laden telescope, reclining in a bathtub with a glass of champagne. Your grander attempts to stop the disease and politically manoeuvre must be balanced with a far simpler objective: survive.
With every step you take, you are slowly dying. You must constantly consume food if you don’t want your health to drop - except food is absurdly expensive in a quarantined plague city. You have to sleep if you don’t want to drop dead of exhaustion - but your other metres don’t magically stop going down while sleeping. And if you’re lucky enough to get infected, you better be prepared to pop pills like an addict if you want to live to see tomorrow.
As the people in the Town suffer, so do you. Any riches that seem to descend upon you by completing the requests of the families are quickly swallowed up in service of supplies. It seems like a perfect entwinement of story and gameplay, a level of immersive that dismissively spits in the face of the cries of ludonarrative dissonance.
There is a problem here, however. While surviving in Pathologic at first seems outrageously unfair, it quickly becomes trivial to overcome. What should be depressing and tense transforms into something dull and tedious once you understand how to manipulate the hobo economy to your advantage.
It starts with the bins. There are hundreds of bins strewn across the Town, which have trash in them - needles, empty bottles, hooks. You know who wants this garbage? Children. So you approach a child, and offer a bunch of trash for something that has actual value, like medicine or bullets. Then, you stroll into a general store, and trade your medicine for bread. On the way out, make sure to purchase any walnuts or flowers off them for pennies, which you can later use to con children of their valuables.
It seems like a fascinating and well thought out system, since goods are given value relative to the person buying or selling them. But the liquidity of transferring items up and down the supply chain is far too soluble. Once you understand how to make money through trading, you have essentially solved the survival problems that the game poses to you. Unfortunately for you, you still have to participate in this trading chain because of the god that rules the game.
That god is Time. The steady metronome of the clock is always ticking as you walk through the Town. Theoretically this should add a degree of pressure to your activities throughout the day, making you struggle to achieve all of your goals. In practice though, it turns the game into an endless grind for resources, one that is completely antithetical to the atmosphere that the game otherwise flawlessly conjures.
Sleeping is bad. Your metres all shrink, demanding more resources to refill them. So you should only sleep until your exhaustion metre is full and no more. But then what are you to do with your remaining time if you have completed all your quests for the day? Well, it's time to grind. You can continue to walk around, hitting bin by bin, or if it's night time, you can deal with the atrociously clunky and unreliable combat and kill some bandits. This is not stressful, it's not anxiety inducing, and it's not even remotely engaging. Yet if you are not grinding, you are setting yourself up for failure, because every resource you acquire ultimately trades up into what you actually need for your survival.
What is on the surface a clever and sophisticated interlocking of systems - exhaustion, hunger, infection, hobo economy, Time - ends up in practice to be walking around clicking on bins for hours and hours. This cannot and should not be understated - for all the brilliance of its storytelling, Pathologic is actually an awful game to play.
Pathologic is a game filled with conflict. The Healers war against the plague. The legacy of the spiritual steppe wars against industrialisation and progress. The children war amongst themselves, but also against the adults who would take their future away. The families stage war on a grander scale with you caught in the middle. It is therefore somehow only appropriate that Pathologic seems to be a game at war with itself.
I have never quite experienced a story like Pathologic. It is so complex, so sophisticated; a triumph of non-linear storytelling and narrative. It will perplex and frustrate you, and occupy your every waking moment as you struggle to unravel it. The setting is alien and obtuse, but thematically is undeniably human.
And the same goes for the gameplay, but for all the wrong reasons. The gameplay of Pathologic is nothing more than a dull chore. Once you wrap your head around its systems, it quickly becomes a never ending compulsory grind, less engaging than killing boars in an MMO. I dreaded completing the last quest of each day, because that meant it was time for bin diving, and there was no real alternative to doing so if I wanted to see the next day.
As to whether you should play it? It comes down to how much you are willing to deal with in order to experience one of the greatest stories ever told. Only you can answer whether the pain of tedium is worth the brilliance of the storytelling. But if you are on the fence, maybe let the game itself answer for you.
“Convenience is poison. One must accustom themselves to pursue any intention as soon as it appears, regardless of difficulty. Otherwise one burns out, gives in to doubt, starts fearing oneself. The bolder the dream, the more surely it becomes dust when the moment is lost.”
