“Pathologic 2” is one of the most unique and brilliant games I’ve ever had the chance to experience. It is a game truly literary in scope, over fifteen years in the making, and has one of the most well-realized and well-crafted worlds I’ve ever seen in a video game. It is the lovechild of Camus, Dostoevsky, and “Planescape Torment”, with a dash of Brechtian theatre and Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” thrown in for good measure. But it’s such a memorable experience that I don’t think even these comparisons really do it justice. If you’re familiar with me, or my work, you may know me as the guy that made a very long analysis of “Pathologic 1”, and hey, well, eh, now I’m back again. I’m SulMatul, a longstanding fan of Ice Pick Lodge and their various works, and I intend to do my best to analyze this beast of a game. But I have several caveats to get out of the way. Firstly, this game is not yet fully realized; we have one campaign, or story, out of an intended three, and each story will have an entirely different series of themes and perspectives to analyze. Second, I’m primarily an English-speaking fan, so I’m relying on the translations of the game – which may differ from the original Russian text. Third, I’m no art critic, or even a student of the humanities – I’m a doctor by trade, and, whilst that may add something to my own experience of the game, I’m by no means an expert on art or literary theory. That being said, let’s get into the meat of the game; this analysis will be split up into several parts, and will be heavy with spoilers throughout. If you want to experience the game yourself, you can pick it up on Steam (and GOG!), and I’ll leave a link in the description below. If you want to see some more concise reviews of the game, MandaloreGaming, RagnarRox and Hbomberguy have all made excellent videos, which I’ll also link below. Firstly, I’ll go into a rough summary of the plot events for the current story of the game, the campaign of Artemiy Burakh. Some of the events will be summarised slightly outwith chronological order for the sake of an easier continuity in my narrative flow. Second, I’ll talk about some of the major characters we see within this story, and how their complexities contribute to the overall themes of the game. I’ll also discuss the nature of the mechanics and the notorious balance and difficulty, and how these all contribute to the ludonarrative, and the emotional impact left upon the player. And an upcoming video will include an interview with the developers. This video is very long, so I’m going to include timestamps in the description below so you can jump back and forth as you like. The central plot of the game follows your character, Artemiy Burakh, a doctor returning to his hometown – the town upon the Gorkhon, a settlement in the backwater of the vast Steppe plains. It’s set in a fictional land with cultural influences from Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and other peoples of the steppe. However, the game proper begins with a rather unusual scene; it begins at its end. You awaken, an actor upon a stage, and step forward to see a theatre of corpses; your audience is dead, and the town’s other healers are even more lost than you. Towering figures dressed in bird-costumes, resembling both carrion crows and warped plague-doctor masks, inform you of your failures; the town is lost, a plague consumed all, and you, its one hope of salvation, failed to provide a cure. You exit the theatre and pace down a street in chaos; boarded up windows, crying townspeople, and corpses are strewn everywhere. Stage-lights illuminate army tents, resembling refugee camps, and the screams of the infected being burned alive ring all around. Military men inform you of their intent to bombard the entire place to the ground, and incinerate everyone left in it. The stagelights guide your way to the town’s cathedral, where you encounter two agents of the government; an Inquisitor, and the army General. Neither care for your excuses, and the town is to be razed. As you try to desperately halt the oncoming bombardment, time stops, and you are approached by the director of the town’s theater. In a Faustian bargain, you are offered a “second chance” to save everyone – despite this ostensibly being your first time coming to this scenario as a player. You take your chances with the theatre’s director, and are placed, once more, at the chronological start of the events of the game, beginning with your return to the town via train. Through flashbacks and fever-dreams, you are given the exposition for your return to the town. Your father, the town’s only local doctor, has urgently summoned you back from your studies at the capital. He fears that something terrible is about to befall the town, and needs your help in order to prevent it. You are also made aware of your unusual heritage. You are partially related to The Kin, the culture of the steppe-folk that lived in the area before the town was built, and your skill as a healer is half based on your studies of modern medicine, and half based on the shamanistic practices of an ancient, native Steppe culture. You also meet a Fellow Traveller on your journey – a man who literally steps out of a coffin to greet you. His role will become more important later – though if you’re aware of common Russian myths, you might already have gathered that his part is a sinister one. You don’t get a very warm welcome on your arrival to the town; you’re immediately attacked by three men with knives who have mistaken you for a murderer. Furthermore, you find that other townsfolk believe this apparent murderer is a “Shabnakh-Adyr” – some form of demon that is rumoured to disguise itself as a woman – and they’ve already murdered one young girl in a fit of paranoia, and quickly go about setting fire to another. You’re plunged into immediate chaos and confusion, as the once-peaceful town of your halcyon childhood is overtaken by senseless violence. It isn’t long until you find out that there were in fact two murder victims immediately on your arrival – one of Simon Kain, a town elder, but more importantly, the other – your father, Isador Burakh. The townsfolk quickly start to suspect you of patricide, and you are forced to go into hiding with your old childhood friends; Rubin, a trainee doctor who studied with your father, Griff, a young man who now roams with the local gangs, and Lara, a troubled but determined young woman who provides you shelter. Griff, however, attempts to employ your medical services in healing up a wounded gang member – coincidentally one of the same gang members responsible for burning the aforementioned young girl alive, leaving you a choice as to whether he is worth saving or not. Rubin is quick to join the townsfolk in suspecting you of patricide and has left his home – in his place you meet several other characters instead; Bachelor Dankovsky, one of the other doctors who has recently arrived at the town, and immediately reacts to you with hostility, and two lost children. The children you meet provide you with some shelter from the hostile adults of the town, and take you to their leader – a teenager named Notkin. In other games, childhood may represent innocence, however, in the world of “Pathologic” we are shown a much more brutal portrayal of youth. In the same way that the adults have formed gangs and play power politics, we see that the children have formed their own rivalries, and regularly fight and hurt one another. Notkin’s gang have had their dogs poisoned and killed by a rival gang member, and they ask you to bring them justice. Finding this rival teenager presents another difficult choice; this kid saw you arrive in town, and could provide an alibi that proves that you are not your father’s killer, however, this would betray the trust of Notkin’s gang, who are also providing you shelter. Bringing the kid to justice might mean killing him – the outright murder of a child. You are given a third option, to bring the kid a leash to psychologically prevent his escape from Notkin’s gang, however, the mental destruction that this child then endures is possibly more cruel than outright murder would have been. You come to find through talking to various townspeople that Alexander Saburov, the town’s de-facto administrative leader, believes the rumors of patricide, and is seeking to arrest you. These rumours are only put to rest when you’re finally taken in by another powerful man in town, Vlad Olgimsky the Elder, or Big Vlad – a bourgeois factory owner, and the wealthiest man in the town. His relationship to the native Kin of the steppe and to the townsfolk themselves is an awkward one; both at once, he is seen as a stern-yet-kindly patriarchal figure, a father to his workers, and yet also displays abject cruelty and callousness at times, remaining a complex figure throughout the game. With your innocence eventually believed, you have some time to prepare yourself for the oncoming days, and on the stroke of midnight may view a play in the town’s theater. The plays are events I will discuss later. With the town’s complex interpersonal and intercultural politics laid before you, you awaken to the news that your father is to be buried. You make your way to the graveyard at the edge of town, to be greeted by the peoples of the Steppe – unusual folk that culturally and ethnically appear very different from the more Europeanised townspeople. Herb brides with flowers and mud in their hair cluster alongside tall Eurasian men and women in notably more traditional garb, and around them are Odongs; strange, unique creatures that are never truly explained, beyond being “the mud left over when mother nature was done”. The sense that this culture is alien and strange, both welcoming and hostile, regarding you with a sense of expectation, lies heavily in the air as you approach the gravesite. You find your father’s body, repeatedly being supernaturally rejected by the earth – you may choose to examine it, or leave it be at your discretion. What is expected is that you declare to the world – and to The Kin – whether you are prepared to take on your father’s legacy and become their guide in the troubles to come. You are taken aside by Aspity, a representative of The Kin, and someone that may or may not be supernatural, too. The witch-like woman offers you your father’s inheritance – which, aside from material wealth and his house, also includes his legacy. It becomes clear that this “inheritance” comes with far more responsibility than it does benefit. Your father also made a list of names of people that he believed needed to be saved in order to preserve the town – a list that happens to be all the major children that you meet. Aspity herself continues in her role of representing and guiding the Kin, and can be seen at night to be giving advice to them. When asked, it seems that the ethnic tensions between the Kin and the Townsfolk are worsening, and there are Kin that believe they will rise up and reclaim the land, and kill the settled townsfolk in the process. Of the names on your list, you only recognise a few. The first I’ll mention is Taya Tycheek, the daughter of the overseer of the Abattoir and the Termitary – the enormous brutalist industrial complex that houses much of the Kin. You find that it’s been locked under the orders of Vlad Olgimsky as there have been rumours of an outbreak of disease – and, despite your best efforts, the doors remain locked, in quarantine. There is no leaving for those trapped inside; a woman accidentally falls to her death in an attempt to escape – or, perhaps, it is intentional suicide? Is suicide her escape from the horrors to come? This is a question that, with her death, goes without an answer. The next name on your list, Sticky, turns out to be a capricious orphan boy that was trying to study under your father. Whilst he is initially a source of some cheek and frustration, he quickly comes to your aid in reassembling the machines your father used, even going so far as to steal expensive machinery equipment for you. He remains your understudy in your hideout as you take on your father’s mantle, and becomes a vital asset in helping you make the tinctures and medicines that form the backbone of your healing work. Grace, the young girl who lives in the graveyard, is your next charge to be protected. You find her, on advice from the strange Changeling character, trying to commune with the dead – an act that burns away her life force as she does it – or so it’s believed. You may ask her to stop, or you may attempt to commune with the dead yourself, talking to your dead father in an attempt to get more answers. You also commune with the dead on a second occasion, meeting the actors who played the men with knives you fought and killed at the train station, hearing their stories, so that even the deaths of the extras aren’t rendered meaningless. How much of this communication is “real” is left for the player to interpret. Outside, you run into the next child on your list – a lonely orphan girl named Murky. You’ve actually bumped into her once or twice before, where she remained standoffish and untrusting. This time, she offers a different way to talk to the dead than Grace. If you trust her, she takes you out into the Steppe and bids you close your eyes and listen to the twyrine – the local intoxicating herbs that grow near the town. Unfortunately, this is shown only to be the imagination of a lonely orphan who wants a friend. When confronted, she returns to being standoffish and hostile, though you do have the herbs you have collected to show for your trouble. These can later be used to make the tinctures that will fight the plague. You return to the central town to find the other characters on your list. Capella, the daughter of Elder Vlad Olgimsky, is another important person to be protected for the town’s future. Outside her house, you find a collection of children burying a dead doll – play-acting portents of the mass graves to come. The games they play with death are laced with irony. They are treating death and suffering as a game, which, whilst initially jarring to see, is in fact a representation of what we as players are doing. Capella herself is more helpful than the other children. She is old enough to understand her responsibility as a future leader of the town, though also appears to believe she has the beginnings of clairvoyant abilities. Regardless of whether you believe her or not, she foretells that you will spill rivers of blood, so much that you will be wading in it – a prophesy with more literal significance than it initially appears. Alongside Capella, the other children of the town appear interested in helping you in various ways. Aside from trading the things stolen from their parents’ cupboards – including razors, sewing needles, and the occasional vial of morphine – they also introduce you to a game of hide-and-seek. Whilst, functionally, the game serves as a way for you to find secret stashes of helpful items, the children are clear that there are rules to such games; you must leave as much as you take, or the game won’t work. You have to play fair – though what constitutes as “fair” for these kids is often confusing and esoteric. The rules the children operate by are as esoteric the politics of their parents. It isn’t long before the inklings of plague come through the town – which you are shown in two ways. The first is that you are prevented from picking up the deed to your father’s property; the district in which the clerk lives is covered in black smog, and the clerk himself has fled. The second, and more emotionally pressing, is shown once more through the town’s children. Notkin, the leader of the gang in the warehouses, has found that one his young kids has become sick. You get the chance to experiment with your father’s machinery in order to make the curative potions from Twyrine herbs, and you’re put to work trying to find a way to help this infected child. With some luck, or skill, you may manage to give them the right antibiotics to allow them to live another day – a temporary fix, but a small victory nonetheless. The plague starts to show itself in earnest; many of the districts on the east end of town are swallowed by it, and you’re instructed to give prophylactic medicines or tinctures to help various important characters. Two of these are names not upon your initial list; the artist and architect Petr Stamatin, and the histrionic compulsive liar, Anna Angel. Both these characters are important for other storylines in the town – though the Haruspex has lesser interaction with the both of them than the Bachelor and Changeling will in their routes. In an effort to investigate and stop the spread of the plague, Notkin, and the leader of the rival children’s gang, Khan, both are having a conversation in a bar that you stumble into – and it just so happens that Khan is one of the remaining Important People on your list. You can choose to help them with this investigation, albeit to the children’s protest – finding an abandoned house in which Death Itself appears to stalk, and hounds you once you’re inside. Doing this may prevent a district or two from becoming infected for a little longer – but, of course, this has its own costs, both obvious and hidden. As the next days progress, the plague begins to swallow more of the town. What once were safe districts to traverse become incredibly dangerous, your likelihood of catching the infection rises rapidly with each plunge into infected territories, and chaos descends on the town, as the infected and the desperate stumble into the criminals and the destitute. Knife-wielding thugs at night are accompanied by burnt-out arsonists, set on lighting all the infected ablaze. The town declares a state of emergency, and, in true theatrical style, you are summoned to the town’s meeting hall to deal with the panic of the outbreak. The bells toll, and the fourth wall is briefly cracked for the game to emphasize this turning point in the play. It is decided that the town’s theatre will be converted into a hospital for the sick – a decision that may prove just as costly as it is helpful. You’re given a pay reward if you appropriately help out at the hospital each day, though as the days go by, the requested services become more and more onerous. You begin one day with the administration of painkillers, followed the next day with diagnosing patients, then the next with treating them with appropriate antibiotics – though these rapidly become extremely expensive – then the next with giving up on treatment altogether and resorting to dissection of organs of the dead for examination. Any treatments you do offer seem to merely just buy a short amount of time before the inevitable – even the child that you treated in Notkin’s warehouse merely dies the next day, and Notkin’s investigations likely leave him infected, too. One of the final tests of the hospital is to completely cure a patient – a feat that is almost impossible, and I will come back to later. You begin to make some piecemeal reconciliation with your childhood friend Rubin, who offers to help cover your work at the hospital whilst you search for a cure – a fabled panacea of your father’s invention. His feelings towards you start to soften as he’s no longer convinced that you murdered your father, but he does still regard you as an outsider, and blames you for abandoning your father and remaining away from home for so long. This blame is layered with jealousy, too; Rubin was your father’s pupil, and yet you are the one that is to claim your father’s legacy. There is one final name on your list; the name of the Udurgh – a name that the Kin use, though you are unaware of its translation. Upon speaking to Rubin, then Aspity, then eventually the son of Vlad Olgimsky – Vlad Olgimsky Junior – you become aware that it is a term that means A-Thing-That-Contains-Many-Things, or perhaps “a thing, that is more than the sum of its parts”. Vlad Junior’s explanation suggests that this might be a word for the Kin itself – the Steppe people’s sense of community. The sense of your link to the Kin is further disturbed through the nights – on one hand, you can visit Aspity to hear more of the Kin’s plight and struggle as a working-class minority group in a rapidly industrialising world, yet on the other, you find them trying to hunt down Rubin, just as you’ve made amends. Rubin asks you to protect him in the night, as he is working on something considered taboo to the kin – or in some way violating their cultural norms. Several nights in a row, you are confronted with the decision whether to fight the Kin, or whether to potentially lose your friend – and one of the town’s only other doctors, right in the midst of the plague. The taboo work which Rubin is doing appears to be in relation to the dissection of the body of Simon Kain – the other man who died upon your arrival to the town. It appears that this dissection has caused the Kin to become disturbed. Whilst it is permissible for YOU, Artemy Burakh, to dissect a body, as you are a Menkhu, taking on the jumbled butcher-priest-physician role of your father, it is an outrage for anyone else to do so. Regardless of what explanations about necessity or progress or medicine you have to offer, the Kin will not be swayed from their tradition, and blood will be shed. It is not only the Kin that you have to contend with. A further quest sees you managing the townsfolk’s reactions to infection. Even in supposedly “clean” districts, paranoia and fear have caused some townsfolk to barricade others inside their houses – and others still harbor the dead, a sense of sentimentality and a wish not to see their loved ones burned overwhelming a sense of self-protection. Still others, beyond this, seek to extort the vulnerable – of which Var, an organ-dealer, is one – and, perhaps, the other, who may be even more interesting, is Anna Angel. Anna, a histrionic and unreliable woman, is presented initially to the player as a germophobe – however, the layers of her deceit are revealed when trying to rescue a baby from a house in an infected district. You stumble through the house to find Anna there, arguing with a Steppe woman – both have come through to rescue the child, however the child is related to neither of them. Both are intent on capitalising on the reward from the rescue of a baby – an automatic pardon of any past crimes. The steppe woman wishes her husband pardoned for criminal acts in the preceding days – Anna, however, has far older crimes to atone for. I will discuss these later – however, the impact upon the player is one that emphasizes fear and desperation coursing through the town in the Plague’s wake. This desperation is brought to a head with Lara’s plans. Your childhood friend wants to set up a place of safety for those who have been left destitute or homeless from the plague, and is willing to let her large house be used for this purpose – she requests that you attain some water barrels to provide for those that she’ll care for. The barrels themselves, however, may be dangerous, as you don’t know whether the plague is waterborne or not. Upon finding muddy and unpleasant water, you are left with several choices; to bring the sample to Dankovsky, order the barrels’ destruction and doom a whole third of the town to a lack of clean water, bring the barrels to Lara and risk potential infection, or to do nothing. All choices have drawbacks, and no choice is the “correct” one. However – and, the following is a spoiler for that quest – the barrels are in fact infected. Giving the barrels to Lara will result in her district becoming infected and put her at significant risk of catching the plague herself. Destroying the barrels does weaken the water supply for a huge district of the town and put you at a significant disadvantage later. There is no correct choice. In the midst of all of this, Capella and her prophetic powers appear to be growing. A melody heard played, seemingly unconsciously by various townsfolk, who otherwise cannot play a musical instrument, is attributed to her and her deceased mother’s power infiltrating the town. There is some implication that the fourth wall is being somewhat knocked upon, if not outwardly broken, to do so – however, the implications are clear; alongside the supernatural disaster that is the plague, there are supernatural miracles rife in the town’s history, and there may well be connections between the two. Amidst the chaos, the looting and the arson, the Saburov family are convinced that they need to discover the true murderer – a drive which may also be influenced by strange supernatural entities, like the unusual Rat Prophet – a mysterious creature with whom you have terse dealings. I will also come to discuss him more later on. You’re offered a selection of various crooks and ne’er-do-wells to judge, however, it is obvious that none of them are the actual murderer of your father, and the desperate search to have someone to blame amidst the destruction is a destructive, useless, and altogether human desire. Alexander Saburov himself is uninterested in providing the true murderer, but merely a reasonably guilty party. The one piece of useful information that you do get from the ordeal is that it seems both your father, Isador, and the other man, Simon Kain, both knew that they were going to die prior to their murders – with some implication that they had, in fact, accepted their fate. The dealings of the Saburov family present a second issue; their insistence in identifying the murderer is interpreted by the townsfolk as a distraction – a cover-up for the fact that THEY may be the people hiding the true bringer of the plague. A rumour springs forth that they are responsible for hiding the Shabnakh-Adyr, the plague-demon hidden in the form of a human girl. The rumours centre around the mysterious Changeling, however, you quickly come to realise that the young orphan girl, Murky, is another potential target for the crowd’s lynching and burning. Fortunately, you ward Murky away from the town, however, she instead retreats to the Steppe wilderness to stay with a sinister “friend”. Murky’s retreat to the steppe comes at an important time for the Kin, too – upon the sacrificial mound to the south of the town, the Kin have brought a bull. They believe that the plague can be halted by a sacrifice to Boddho – the deity that embodies the earth. To carry out this sacrifice they need a Menkhu – a surgeon, a person who “knows the lines” of flesh. You carry out this butcher’s task, carving the bull into the correct pieces, living up to your title of Haruspex, or Menkhu. The ritual appears to yield more than it initially seems; in speaking to the Kin, you find that the bulls cannot be infected by the plague. You take a sample of blood from the bull, and, along with Bachelor Dankovsky, attempt to analyze why this might be. After some number of hours of analysis, you find that the immunity the bulls have to the disease is not something transferrable to humanity – however, there still may be some connection to bulls and a curative panacea. After talking to Rubin again, and receiving a strange, prophetic dream, you are inspired to walk to the village of the Kin on the outskirts of the town – a village called Shekhen. Rubin has been working tirelessly on a vaccine, but is burning out from stress and overwork, and has relatively little to show for it; if you are unable to make a curative panacea before the fourth act begins, he will die from having had to take on this burden of cure creation for you. He is likely killed by the Kin for treading the grounds that YOU should have walked, and performing the acts reserved for YOU, a Menkhu. Feeling the call of the Kin, you arrive at their village, far from the borders of the town. Though it is abandoned, there are many, many sprigs of twyre to be found to make more prophylactic potions, and, most importantly, there is a pool of what appears to be blood. This blood, the blood of the Earth, of Boddho herself, appears to be still warm, and somehow important. When you take it back to your workshop and use it to make a tincture, you find that it works perfectly; you have, at last, created a Panacea, a cure for the plague. In this brief moment of elation and hope, you are reminded that Murky has still retreated to the steppe with her “friend”. Going there, you find Murky, and then Clara, the mysterious changeling girl – or at least, someone that appears to be her. You have two separate conversations with two separate Claras, neither of which seem to remember the other – and there is a heavy implication that one of these is an imposter. Furthermore, the imposter appears to be an avatar of The Plague itself, and is shortly replaced by an Executor in beak-masked garb, taunting you for your belief in a world so simply saved. If you thought that a noble fight and easy victory would be won by challenging your opponent and coming out on top, you have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of your enemy. The plague will claim either you, or Murky – the infection immediately takes hold. In my own game, I found my short-lived hope immediately fading as I burned away the cure I had made only moments before. Though your hope has been raised with the discovery of a potential cure, the town itself still burns with the dying, the criminals, and the arsonists. You hear news that the authorities have dispatched an Inquisitor to re-establish order and quarantine. This is not welcome news; visiting the house of Yulia Lyuricheva, the town’s unusual engineer, you find her talking to a distressed young woman. The young woman is, herself, the daughter of an inquisitor, and asks you a series of morality-play riddles – emphasizing that the arrival of this Inquisitor will spell the end and execution for much of the town. You later find her corpse beside the cathedral’s steps; she committed suicide as a means to escape the arrival of her father’s brutality. Tragically, it is not her father, but a different inquisitor that arrives by the dawn, and thus, her death is rendered meaningless. The anxieties of the townsfolk, particularly the town’s children, may be allayed; your criminal friend Griff offers a solution; come nightfall, you can ask for his help to acquire and lay explosives beneath the train tracks, and detonate them prior to the Inquisitor’s train arriving. Traipsing out to the steppe to foil the arrival of the inquisitor, you find him instead sitting by a fire, almost relaxed in posture; in the end, he tells you this idea was foolish to begin with, submitting to whatever his fate under the inquisitor may be. The tone shifts back towards one of inevitability, where the idea of having any agency itself is questioned. The fourth act begins with a cinematic; the Inquisitor arrives to town, and the gallows are erected. The theatre’s play prior to her arrival shows her signing death warrants and executions, draconian measures where every crime is met with capital punishment. She sets up her base in the cathedral, and before its great doors a line of townspeople are summoned, one by one, to answer for their actions over the past week. Approaching the townsfolk in the line, you find them scared, confused and apprehensive, many of them awaiting their own demise. Those who have already spoken to the Inquisitor reveal that they, too, were asked the morality-play questions, and fear that the incorrect answers will have cost them their lives. The Inquisitor herself, Aglaya Lillich, is a tall, imposing, and stern individual, though her outward composure seems to soften somewhat on further discussion with her. Whether this is legitimate, or whether this is merely a ploy for you to give her your trust, remains ambiguous. She asks you, too, several moral quandaries, though it appears that you, the player character, have agency in ways that other, non-player, characters do not; she remains intrigued by your answers and actions. The main acts that you must assist her with involve the re-opening of the termitary; the great factory workhouse where members of the Kin have been locked in “quarantine”. Arriving there, you find that she has ordered the doors opened – however, unsurprisingly, the plague has already outstripped you, and already has ravaged the inhabitants. Instead of a crowd of thousands, you find merely a scattered few survivors – though the young girl on your list, Taya Tycheek, is among those who lived. This young girl, the daughter of the previous foreman of the Abattoir and the new cultural leader of the Kin, is now the Kin’s new Mother Superior. You talk to her in an attempt to persuade her to escape the Termitary – the close-packed workhouse is still a breeding ground for the plague. She refuses, however, as she will not leave the rest of the Kin behind; either all must go, or none shall go. The act of uniting the Kin is a difficult one; many of them do not trust you, many believe that you mean them harm in the ways the Olgimsky family has meant them harm. Many believe that your time spent as an outsider has removed you from the Kin, and that you are alienated to their identity. You encounter an elder of the Kin; a tall, imposing man named Oyun, clad in the mask of a sacred bull. He tells you that he knew your father, and whether you trust him or not, his advice is still to unite the Kin and it still remains important; he advises brutality and leading them by-the-nose, in the same ways that the Kin themselves lead their cattle across the steppe, by-the-nose. He respects strength; though whether you see this as raw brutality, or as the guiding inner strength of a leader, is left intentionally up for interpretation. You may take on his advice, and unite the Kin via violence, killing the members that refuse to leave, or you may leave them be and choose to return later – though this is a gamble that may not go in your favour. Further to this, the Kin wish justice for the incarceration that led to the infection and decimation of their people; they want the blood of the man responsible. For them to agree to trust you, they require vengeance. You can retrieve them Vlad the Younger; the young man with grand ambitions and progressive plans for the town, the son of the patriarch Big Vlad the Elder. Vlad the Younger, despite his initial morally ambiguous actions of giving orders to lock the Termitary, is accepting of his responsibility and his fate; he will leave to surrender himself to the Kin’s justice voluntarily. It is possible to prevent his death, however – if informed of his son’s actions, Vlad the Elder will choose to go in his stead. In both instances, men who appeared selfish and scheming act on a sense of justice, or a sense of familial love, even when their own lives are at stake. It is possible, albeit difficult, to save both these characters – though this is of course at the cost of the Kin’s justice. Resolving this is the main way to allow Taya and the trapped Kin to leave, and thus protect her from infection. Oyun also reveals that the blood you are searching for – the blood of the Earth, of Boddho, of the land itself, is to be found within the Abattoir, the enormous meat processing slaughterhouse that the Kin’s workhouse is attached to. Soon, he will endeavour to unlock it. Returning to the town, the oncoming days bring further pain, confusion and death on a massive scale; the graveyard is overrun, and piles of the dead begin to mount outside in mass graves. Grace, the young girl in the cemetery, is overwhelmed and terrified; still hearing the voices of the dead, their screams flow over and over the earth, and are a burden she is unable to bear alone. Concerned for her health and sanity, you touch the mass grave and also hear the relentless cries of the souls already lost. You are presented a choice; to burn the dead, which Grace begs you not to do as this would render them suffering forever, or to leave them be, and thus they would continue to torment her. There is also a third, supernatural option; the ghostly visage of the Rat Prophet returns, and offers you to remove your problem – for a price. What that will cost, exactly, for you or for the souls of the dead, is not made explicit. Regardless of your choice, you are then confronted by an adult of the town; even after the plague, it will soon be winter, and Grace, a young girl alone in a graveyard, may not survive. You may choose to let her continue to live in her home, or make her leave – in the latter event, she is adopted by the somewhat unhinged artist and architect, Petr Stamatin. Returning to the Inquisitor, you find that she has ensnared Griff; where once you knew a cocky and arrogant man, now you find a criminal reformed by the burden of existential dread. He speaks to you about the realisation that he is merely a puppet; he dances to the strings of his fate, which he no longer believes he can escape. The longer the plague progresses, the more the fabric of the game’s reality wears thin; Aglaya understands that her role is decided by the authorities, the Powers That Be; her destiny is already written in the play’s script, as is the destiny of Griff, too. As is the destiny of everyone. Griff tells you that he is relinquishing his life of crime, and with it his sense of agency and his sense of self. You are given the keys to his warehouse, and in his stead meet far more violent criminals – though their parts in the play are decidedly cut short. With the fourth act approaching its climax, the town’s situation becomes increasingly desperate. The Inquisitor, failing at her task of containing the outbreak, is interrupted by the arrival of the military. Men with guns set up barricades in the streets – but even then, they can barely hold back the advancement of the plague, and it isn’t long until their ranks are decimated, too; all the strength of arms in the world, all the flamethrowers, all the guns, are nothing to a microbe and a cough. Aglaya looks towards the superstructure of the Polyhedron, as you look towards the Abattoir. Her concerns are that the building that defies laws of physics and reality is, in some way, connected to the plague that also seems to be defying the laws of nature – a prediction with some portent. Your task is contained on the other side of the city; the Kin have now allowed the path to the Abattoir to open up to you. Within, you find a strange, Neolithic cavern, filled with torches, pools of panacea-producing blood of the earth, and enormous, aggressive members of the Kin. If you are to demonstrate true strength, it is strength met in bloodshed, victory met in violence. You meet other Steppe girls there, dancing with the Plague itself, rituals to appease Boddho – and you encounter a Steppe girl you’ve met before, by the name of Nara. She appears several times in the game prior to this, teasing that she knows you, and that she has been promised to you – the implication is initially one of marriage, but as you see her upon the sacrificial stones in the abattoir, you realise that this wedding is of a much grimmer sort. With the skills of a Menkhu, you cut her open, and remove the contents of her insides; a spindle in the place of her emotions. Knowing the lines, the connections between all things, you draw the connections between the trash found in the Kin’s hearts, and with it create a heart of your own; the heart of the Zurkhen, of Boddho herself, of the Kin, and of the world you are so desperately trying to protect. It tells you that the Plague will only affect humanity; that which is distanced from the world of nature and miracles; “the disease only affects those who sever themselves from the earth”. It tells you that this great slaughterhouse was once a sacrificial chamber; great bulls, ancient aurochs, were slaughtered here, their blood feeding the earth, and the earth’s blood feeding the Kin. It bids you also jump in, to sacrifice yourself to Boddho. You awaken in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by walls of flesh, and wander until you find the truth beneath the surface; the literal Heart of the Earth. Beside it, an enormous spike, a hair’s breadth from piercing straight through it; the base of the Polyhedron. The Town is built upon the Earth, and the Earth lives and breathes. Just as portrayed in the 2005 version of “Pathologic”, the earth is a Bull, upon which humanity lives. And the Polyhedron is a spike driven into its heart. Act 4 (Continued) Your victory, once more, is short-lived; though the cure is within your grasp, the Plague itself comes to confront you. Every child that you have worked to protect, every character that is important to you and to the future of the town, is claimed by the plague. It breaks its own rules, and there is no way to prevent the children from becoming infected. Worst of all; even with every curative panacea possible to create, you still do not have enough for every child. The military, still failing to maintain order, appear to be falling to the plague just as quickly as the townsfolk; the army is unable to halt the spread of the plague, and the general of the military forces, Alexander Block, appears at odds with the Inquisitor, Aglaya Lilich. Aglaya, for her part, appears to have also come to the same conclusions that you have, even without seeing the spike beneath the earth; the Polyhedron, this superstructure that supposedly generates miracles, wedged into the earth itself, is to blame for the outbreak. In her view, to destroy it is to destroy both the supernatural miracles, and the supernatural plague; in yours, to destroy it is to tear out the spike that pierces the Earth, leaving blood to well to the surface and provide panacea for everyone. Aglaya agrees to start drafting the orders to bombard the Polyhedron – however, the artillery crews that the military have brought in are also being ravaged by the plague. Military General is found rapidly losing control of his army, as a third die to disease, and another third mutiny; the soldiers were provided no special protections and had no specialists to manage the plague, and feel that they are being thrown in to a worse meat-grinder than the front lines, or that they can no longer open fire on their own civilians. The sense of inevitability draws in as the loyal soldiers close the hospital, believing that there will be no cure. Within all this, your old friend, Lara, has one last act that she feels she must undertake; with the city burning, the world ending, and any sense of self-preservation long gone, she acquires a pistol, and makes moves to assassinate General Block. The general happens to be the same man who ordered the execution and court-martial of her father long ago – and, whilst Lara seems a tempered and altruistic soul, the annihilation of her world seems to give her a sense that she has nothing to lose – a sense that the player may also be starting to share. By the time she arrives at the General’s headquarters, the General himself has been whisked away by the mutineer forces, denying her her chance at revenge. The final day of the game draws close, and it brings with it the conclusions to the remaining story threads. The first of these is the Inquisitor, Aglaya Lillich; following writing the orders to destroy the polyhedron, she proposes an escape plan; she believes that you are the only character within the play that retains any degree of true freedom and autonomy, unlike the other characters like Griff, who still remain trapped as puppets, dancing upon their strings. Much like a Greek hero, she pays the ultimate price for attempting to escape her written destiny. She asks you to meet her at the train station come nightfall, where you board the train, and make your escape. It almost seems like you are successful in leaving the town forever, until fate reminds you that it refuses to be defied; the traincar is stopped by the general’s last loyal forces, you are placed under quarantine arrest, and Aglaya is shot on sight. Even if you do not take on this quest, and Agalaya does not leave the town with you, her corpse is found the next morning beside the town hall. There is no way to save her. The next story thread to be addressed is the mystery that started it all; the murder of your father, Isador Burakh. Following your journey into the bowels of the earth, your fever-dreams are prophetic and unnerving. You dream once more of returning to the Abattoir, and, finally, you encounter your father’s ghost. He tells you that he knew of the plague, and could have stopped it, yet chose not to; the town should live or die on its own, survive the disease on its own, develop its own societal immunity, or perish, if it couldn’t withstand the trauma of living. More than this – he was, in fact, Patient Zero; he intentionally became infected, and intentionally allowed that infection to spread. With the deaths of Simon Kain, and the Old Mistresses – the prophetic women, and mothers of Maria Kaina and Capella Olgimskaya – the bulwarks keeping the town’s miracles alive were lost. In this, the counterbalance to any supernatural miracle, the supernatural plague would be inevitable after Isador died – and so he accepted his fate, allowing the plague to manifest, hoping the town would learn to adapt and endure. It could no longer remain as it had done in the past. As Isador says; “To face the future is the way of love. To face the past is the way of love. But the two are incompatible, and it broke my heart”. This leads you on to understanding the final choice of the game; the choice of working towards the town’s future, or to try to preserve its past as it once was. The murder, itself, was no TRUE murder; in fact, it was a mercy-killing. Elder Oyun, seeing Isador infected and dying with plague, euthanized your father out of a sense of compassion; like putting down a sick animal to protect the herd. After confessing this to you, he retains his sense of honour, and will accept whatever fate you decide for him – be that execution, or mercy. As the final day dawns, the last moments of your struggle within the town are a desperate, frantic sprint to make the last cures and heal all the children under your care that still survive. The play itself begins to unravel, as the writing begins to break down and the theatre’s fourth wall begins to shatter. The final quest becomes a mad dash to find the inquisitor’s bombardment orders; there are several copies taken by couriers to be delivered to the barely-surviving general. You encounter the other soon-to-be playable characters – the Bachelor, who bids you listen to his reason to preserve the Polyhedron, and the Changeling, who insists that she can find another miracle cure – however, they are both too late to affect the inevitable ending. The Bachelor killed the courier he met and burned his orders, wishing to preserve the Polyhedron. The courier near Clara was killed and fell in the river, his orders lost to the waters. In your search for the final courier you find a disturbing character, instead – in the ransacked remains of the pub, you meet a man who claims to be... you. He, too, knows you are all merely actors within a play, and that he is the next actor slated to take the role of Artemiy Burakh if should you fail. Everyone, including you, remains disposable. Finally, as you find the last fallen courier and acquire the orders to bombard the Polyhedron, the Kin approach you; they beg you not to give the order – for to destroy the Polyhedron would remove the spike from the earth’s heart. Although she is mortally wounded with the Polyhedron’s spike, to withdraw it in such a traumatic manner would spill all her blood. This is the blood that you need to create the panacea to cure the plague – but to gain it would mean the Earth would bleed out, killing her, and the past world of miracles, the world of the Kin. The final choice of the game is whether to choose to ensure the Polyhedron is destroyed, and the town is cured, or whether to accept the world of miracles, for both good and ill. “Plague, monsters and wonders are all connected. Kill one, and the rest will suffer, too. Is my goal worth the sacrifice?” There are two endings to the game; the first is where the papers are delivered to the commander, and the Polyhedron is bombarded. The artillery shells fire, the Tower of Miracles collapses, and from its base wells a pool of precious blood; the blood so needed to create a panacea. The final day dawns; a peaceful day, the plague has vanished, and the town is altogether silent. Those who survived gather in their clusters around the town, mourning their losses, and contemplating what must happen next. The men and women who believed in miracles and utopian dreams – the Bachelor, the Stamatin brothers who were the architects of the Polyhedron, Georgy Kain, Simon Kain’s living brother, and various others, all discuss and regroup, with their dreams to build a new town on the other side of the river, still steadfast in their pursuit of the future. Taya and the other members of the Kin, accompanied by Notkin, practice their new lives; soon-to-be members and leaders of a revived Kin, but this time altogether too human, and altogether less miraculous. They have a new, smaller, industrialised world to come to terms with, and will struggle to find their place in it – and, for people like Aspity, they may have no place in it at all. Murky and Sticky, the abandoned children, return to your house – you have acted as a father figure and protector through the days of the plague, and have accepted responsibility and care for both them, and for the town as a whole. Rubin, if he survived, accompanies Lara and Griff upon the broken architecture that litters the town; life shall continue on for them, the most human of all the characters, continuing on their lives as best they can amidst the wreckage. You can even hug Lara, if you played the game well. The Changeling speaks of a different path; she mourns the path she didn’t win, and implies a meeting with Higher Powers and those who broke the fourth wall – a path that Artemiy will never see. Her twin, however, is with the new young Mistresses, Capella and Maria, standing adjacent to their mothers’ graves. The Olgimsky family, and younger members of the Kain family are there, too; together, the new Mistresses and magi shall rebuild their new order, and once more, a town shall form – divorced from its old miracles, yet still cautiously optimistic. The Saburovs, if they survived, have a sombre moment of seeming reunited – and, if Grace survived, they will adopt her. It is possible that the young gravekeeper may become the next Clairvoyant Mistress, much as Katerina was, though, with the death of the Earth’s heartbeat, her clairvoyance may no longer last. If you’re a truly inquisitive soul, you may even find the avatars of the developers, standing atop the town alongside the rat prophet. Finally, you take your place on the stage, at last, to conclude the play. As the curtains draw, and the director of the theatre seems, at least, somewhat pleased with your work, the town seems safe. A world saved, a people rescued, and a series of miracles sacrificed, never to return. The other ending to the game comes from burning the papers, denying the military the orders to bombard the Polyhedron, and the will to preserve miracles, at the cost of the town. The life of miraculous creatures is important; the lives of the Kin, the Worms, the strange creatures of the steppe, the forgotten miracles like the Gigantic Aurochs, and the living being that is The Plague itself. Sticky and Murky, your almost-adopted children, appear to have joined the cult of the Bulls, and join alongside the religion of the Kin. The Bachelor, the other Utopians, and everyone else within the town that would not otherwise join the Kin, leave, walking into the steppe, to traverse it until they die. Those that you knew as friends – Notkin, Griff, even Lara, have forgotten you, as the world rejects their place in it. Those that represented the future are lost; and those that stand with the past remain. Elder Oyun remains, his guilt for euthanizing your father still hanging over his head. Clara appears to watch over you, though remains enigmatic as ever. The only person to truly seem to believe that you have made the right choice is Aspity, the voice of the Kin, and the voice of the past. The shackles of industry, of colonisation, of a culture laying foundations and roots into the earth itself, is gone, and the culture of the Kin can once more thrive. The Polyhedron, the tower of miracles, remains preserved – and you are to climb atop it. Without the town’s future, the new Mistresses no longer include Capella Olgimskaya, or Maria Kaina – instead, they are Grace, the gravekeeper, Taya, the tiny Mother Superior, and Clara, the changeling who shall shatter the fourth wall. The long, slow climb up the Polyhedron reveals much, and bit by bit you speak to the last residents of the town; the children that remain atop the polyhedron. Each tells you a confession, and each confession comes closer to breaking the fourth wall further, as you realize you aren’t talking to children, but talking to the ghosts of the game’s developers. Atop the Polyhedron itself stands the Rat Prophet; the character who constantly defies the illusion of the Stage, and talks directly to the player. Amidst the sky, the visage of Boddho herself appears, the giant bull that IS the world. Within the town, even the once-proud houses of the Kains have been claimed by the Kin, and are surrounded by clouds of plague – clouds that hold you no more harm. Your future is to live with it, to be as one with it, unaffected, like the cattle of the Kin. The Cathedral itself has been changed; it is now an altar for the women of the steppe to practice their rituals. The last remaining townsperson, Eva Yan, remains – now trying to become part of the Steppe culture, herself, though it seems like this is a fatal ambition; she will never truly be a part of the Kin, and it may well cost her her life. At last, you return to the stage, bid your adieus to the director, and once more turn back to a decidedly darker town. There is an entire layer to the story of the game that I have not yet touched on – that of the Stage Play. This story sits on a more meta level than the outright story of the town and the character arc of Artemiy Burakh, though, as the story progresses, the dividing line between story-as-literal and story-as-stageplay starts to blur, and the role of the Player and the role of Artemiy Burakh becomes equally blurred. From the very beginning of the game, the entire structure is set out as if it is a stage play, and you merely an actor within it. Your first act within the game involves talking to the Director of the Play – your play, the game itself, and asking for a second run. There is a semi-ironic acknowledgement of none of the events being portrayed as “real” – however, the lack of a literal truth does not mean the story lacks emotional truth – quite the opposite. The entire purpose of the play is slowly revealed, through intermittent parts, and often revealed through failure and death. Death is a constant companion in this game – not only a thing to be avoided and feared, but an omnipresent unknowable entity, and a personal nemesis, all in one. You meet Death in the opening moments of the game; a fellow traveller in your train carriage gets out of a coffin – a cramped wooden box, much like you in your traincar. You play a game of chance – a game of secrets and wits, much as a doctor plays a game of dice every time he tries to cheat death. The Traveller arrives alongside you, the Player full-well knowing that the act of playing the game is what will bring Death to the town. The game’s story is laid out as a five-act play; the first act forms the tutorial and introduction to the world and characters, establishing the internal politics of the town, the nature of the townsfolk and the Kin, and the central tensions. The second act comes as the plague strikes, the status quo is disrupted, and Death takes his harvest – the tensions between the characters rise as the situation becomes more desperate. The third act is where the climax of the story is approached; the town falls into complete chaos, the Inquisitor arrives to establish order and fails, and your heritage to the Kin is explored further, and your ability to save everyone is called into question. The third and fourth act are bridged by the true climax of the story; Artemiy’s descent into the Abattoir and retrieval of the Panacea. However, where a standard five act play would include the remainder of a Fourth Act and conclude with the Fifth, “Pathologic” does an intentionally strange thing; it shows that the play begins to go off-script and off-rails, and posits that the director has lost control by the time the fourth act has begun. Whilst the fifth act COULD be seen as the Day 12 Conclusion arcs, the game itself explicitly avoids this, and shows the stage as collapsed into chaos by the time of the General’s arrival, and your quest markers never update beyond a fourth act. Much of the behind-the-scenes story is lived out upon the event of dying in the game; unlike most other games, and unlike “Pathologic 1”, dying does not return you back to a main menu to re-load your game and try again. Instead, the game keeps track of the number of times you have died, regardless of whether you reload or not – there is no dodging the consequences of death via savescumming. Upon death, you awaken in the theater; there, you meet the director of the whole play, the ironically-named Mark Immortell. He informs you that Death is inevitable, suffering is a given, and, most importantly, that every “stage death” of the hero will cause irreversible consequences to the world. With every death comes a new change; your body is weaker, your maximum hit points or exhaustion limit or thirst limit is reduced, or dialogue options with important characters are removed – including your ability to hug anyone or express warmth. The game becomes harder as you die, making death itself more likely – the effect snowballs to an almost-unbearable degree. Each time you encounter Death, you encounter the stage director, or one of his assistants. Each of them speak to you, not as Artemiy Burakh, but as the person taking upon his role – you, the player, becoming a performer. The defining line that separates the player from their character becomes blurred, especially as the Stage itself becomes part of the game’s internal play, and the backstage characters venture forth into the world of the game; the Rat Prophet, particularly, is a major example of this. He brings knowledge of the backstage workings of the play onto the on-stage script itself; he is found acting as a Deus-Ex Machina on more than one occasion, and with enough player deaths, he will be found standing outside the theater itself, goading the player with knowledge that their failures and deaths are undermining the play and destroying the game’s world. By the fourth act of the game, this blurring of realities, and acknowledgement of the plot as a fictional play, is stated outright – it is explicitly acknowledged by Aglaya and Griff, who find their lives as characters without agency to be existentially distressing. It is forced upon the player, too, who encounters an actor that claims to be the next Artemiy. It is not only the protagonists and the player characters that experience this meta-narrative; the Plague itself takes form as a character to be spoken to on more than one occasion, changing form from an invisible, unknowable power to a personal nemesis. The antagonist shows up in other ways, too; the Fellow Traveller offers a faustian bargain if you continue to die repeatedly – offering you a deal to remove any penalties from Death, but at the cost of the “true” ending of the game. Indeed, if you take on this deal and get the ‘bad’ ending of the game, you see the other protagonists – Bachelor Dankovsky and Clara the Changeling – both standing on stage as actors, rehearsing their scripts to try again. The director uses his time spent with you to give voice to the developers’ intent; you are to understand that Death is inevitable, inscrutable, and yet can be overcome; detaching the self from the individual body, and subsuming oneself in something that lasts eternally – such as a culture, or a kindred, or a miracle project, or utopian ideals, or even just leaving the legacy of a story. Suffering is not only an inevitable part of life, but a trial, and such fictionalised suffering is a means of coming to understand this trial and understand oneself. This toying with theater technique and direct addressing of the audience is overtly metatextual; the play is explicitly not entirely real, it is a play. It is not like other games, in which the in-game world is presented as “real” – the nature of your character as An Actor Playing Artemiy Burakh or as Actually Artemiy Burakh is fluid. There is a fluctuation of boundaries between each layer of the fiction – and thus a blurring of those boundaries between fiction and reality. The game ITSELF is to be understood and examined as a fiction, and its characters are to be analyzed as fictional. The only “real” character amongst it is, explicitly, you. The play is self-evidently a tragedy with You, The Player as the protagonist; though Artemiy is your in-game avatar and has his own goals, the exploration of character flaws and weaknesses is an exploration of the player’s weaknesses – it isn’t just Artemiy that fails to save everyone, it’s YOU as a player. It is not only Artemiy’s flaws that are revealed through tragedy – it’s YOURS. I’m going to begin this next section of the analysis of the game with an overview of some of the major characters. This is by no means an exhaustive list – and, if you’re familiar with the structure of “Pathologic 1”, you might already anticipate the caveat here; all the character analyses from this route will be from Artemiy’s perspective. This means that there are some multifaceted figures whose arcs we have not yet been seen, and some characters with whom we hardly interact at all. I’m going to talk most in-depth about the characters relevant to this campaign, and will address the remaining cast when the Bachelor’s and Changeling’s scenarios are released. If any of these characters die, they will appear backstage in the theater, and tell you what their intended role in the play was. I will include these, so you may draw your own conclusions. The Olgimsky family are an unusual family within the town; headed by Big Vlad, or Vlad Olgimsky the Elder, this dynasty operates a bourgeois empire and is responsible for the town’s entire economic output to the outside world. The town, a newly crafted settlement in the outskirts of the steppe, was built over where the native Kin once lived, and once herded cattle in a nomadic kind of life. Now, this cattle-herding process has been settled and industrialised, and the profits of this enterprise return to elder Vlad Olgimsky. This vast man acts as a bull in his own right; a true patriarch, domineering to some, protective of his own, and operating as an indomitable pillar in a brutal and cut-throat world. He is evidently a dangerous man to cross, and holds power over the entire cattle production enterprise – and, therefore, over the entirety of the native Kin who work there, as well as the poorer townsfolk. Whilst not technically in a position of judicial or administrative authority, his economic stranglehold on the town places him amongst the great families. However, to cast him as another purely Villainous Member of the Bourgeoisie is far too simplistic; he is a man who expresses great affection and tenderness to his own family, and extends his definition of ‘family’ to protect Artemiy, as well. His humanity is clearly demonstrated in a scene where you find a looted shop – despite the profit that may be gained from re-opening it, Elder Vlad would prefer it remain as a memorial, both to the dead, and to his late wife, Victoria. He is also more than willing to die in the place of his son, and surrender himself to the Kin and face their vengeance, despite the Younger Vlad being the one actually responsible for the deaths within the Termitary. His final words; “My path was called "The Diaphragm." I thought I was free to decide the fate of the Kin.” “But fortune… heh… had something else in mind.” Vlad the Younger is of a different breed to his father, and yet retains many of his traits; instead of retaining power via fear and aggression, Vlad the Younger is of a laisses-faire mindset; his ethics and ideology are those of a businessman, and his goals are to continue to run the cattle enterprise according to colder economic principles – though he may lack the brashness and bluster of his father, and his mode of power is expressed differently, he still ultimately wishes to continue his father’s economic legacy, and wishes to use this to sustain the town. For a price, of course. Despite his outwardly capitalistic outlook, he still maintains more of a fascination with the native Kin than many other townsfolk do, going as far as to study their culture, language and taboos in far more depth than his contemporaries. He also engages, with the Kin’s assistance, in digging a well in the town – an act that is taboo, but is done with some degree of sensitivity as not to anger the Kin. He therefore sits in contrast with Rubin. He, also, is responsible for the locking of the Termitary – an act that dooms many of the Kin inside to infection and death, in the cramped and overcrowded living quarters. This act was done to prevent the rioting Kin from harming other townsfolk, and to protect the town – though, of course, it turns out to be a bad judgement call. Notably, the townsfolk believe his father would not have made such a grave error. Regardless, he is willing to meet the Kin’s justice for this act, and will do so, unless actively stopped. He remains a complex character, and cannot be easily judged as good or bad. His final words: “My path was called “The Blood of the Earth” – well, I found out what comes from where, and the conclusions are obvious.” The second Olgimsky child, Capella, is an adolescent during the events of the game – one foot in childhood, in the world of dreams and ambitions and games, the other in adulthood, responsibility, and in coming into her mother’s legacy. Her mother, a character who died before the events of the game, was one of the Clairvoyant Mistresses, able to divine the fate of the town. Capella may be beginning to share her mother’s abilities – though in many ways, it seems that they are less her own abilities, and more her mother’s spirit, returning to manifest itself through Capella. The ghost of Victoria Olgimskaya, Capella’s mother, returns in multiple points throughout the game. The most notable [example] comes with her influence on various townsfolk, including the Changeling Clara, to play a childhood melody that Capella recognizes – another example of the past never truly leaving the town. Capella’s journey is one of internalising and understanding her history and her mother’s legacy, yet choosing to create a new world, different from that of her parents; in the Diurnal ending, looking towards the future, she will be one of the new Mistresses of the town. In the Nocturnal ending, looking towards the past, she is absent, likely dead. Her final words: “My path was my namesake—"Capella." If not for the plague, I would have spread among the children a heathen cult.” “Our parents… would have lived forever…” The Nocturnal Ending shows a different set of mistresses to the town – one of which includes Grace, the gravekeeper. She, like Capella, is also prone to visions and Clairvoyance – however, hers is tied to the dead, to the Rat Prophet, and to the lost. She has compassion, yet that compassion is something that harms and erodes her. Those she speaks for, the Dead and the Lost, sap her strength – and yet, she has no source from which to replenish her own strength from. Her story is one of resilience and attrition. Though her story may have several different outcomes, depending on her survival. Her Diurnal ending, looking towards the future, sees her adopted by the Saburov family – perhaps to become the next faulty seer, walking in the footsteps of Katerina Saburova. Her nocturnal ending sees her become the True Mistress of the Dead – though whether this is for good or for ill is left uncertain. Her final words; “My path was called "The Burden of the Living." I… I just wanted to care for those leaving us behind.” The Saburovs themselves are given relatively little screen time in the game; we see Alexander Saburov as a hawk, a hard-headed and inflexible man with a penchant for draconian justice – on the one hand, attempting to show determination and strength in the face of overwhelming odds, but on the other, his pursuit of “justice” comes down to repeatedly trying to find a scapegoat for the catastrophe around him. We will see more of him in an upcoming route. I fell that we should not yet judge him too harshly. His final words; “My path was called "The Restoration of Power." I wanted to return strength and dignity to our country.” “I could have become the Ruler were it not for the plague.” Katerina Saburova, as I have alluded to earlier, is also a clairvoyant mistress – however, her clairvoyance was not as strong as that of the other old mistresses of the town – the now-deceased Nina Kaina and Victoria Olgimskaya. Unable to bear the pain of her visions, she slowly turned to morphine – and in her addictions became vulnerable to malevolent outside forces, such as the Rat Prophet. She is led to false conclusions in how to defeat the plague, and, despite her ragged-worn compassion, she ultimately does not succeed. Her role is also to be explored more in a an upcoming route. Her final words; “My path was called "The Rat Prophet." I didn't know that it was he who whispered to me in my dreams.” “Until the very end, I believed it was the Earth.” Lara Ravel is a character portrayed with more depth; a woman with seemingly boundless compassion and a childhood friend to Artemiy, she remains one of your most reliable confidants throughout the game. Unlike the Olgimsky family, her kindness and protection comes with no cost nor expectation of repayment; she only asks for your assistance in providing that same compassion to others. However, such limitless compassion has its drawbacks; much in the way that the player will falter and die if they overstretch themselves, Lara places herself in consistent danger and can easily become infected in her attempts to provide shelter for the poor of the town. Her actions through the mid-game involve requesting you provide her water for her shelter to the poor and the destitute – an action that WILL cause her district to become infected if it is carried out. Her family and home life is also presented with some complexity; the daughter of a celebrated war hero, she has inherited a house far too large for her, and she leaves the majority of the rooms boarded up and disused. Her respect for her dead father’s memory appears to be mixed with a sense of unaddressed grief; his death still hangs over her, a sword of Damocles in the making. Once the stresses of the plague reach their height, her role as a compassionate, caring and pacifistic figure fades; General Block, the military commander, was the man responsible for her father’s court martial and execution. Once the plague has burned away the town she cares about, there is nothing to stop her carrying out her revenge – she has very little to live for, and nothing to lose. She is barely stopped in time, and only escapes her own execution via luck. In the Diurnal Ending, she is found standing atop a ruined stairway, gazing out across what remains of the town. She appears hopeful, though her words are bittersweet – she expresses some affection towards you, and appears willing to help act as a maternal figure for the lost children you seem to have adopted. Whether that is to lead to anything more between her and Artemiy is left intentionally vague. Her final words; “My path was called “The Home For the Living”. Kindness guided me, but I could never know that I was to meet my father’s murderer.” Stakh Rubin, the second of your childhood friends, also presents a complex figure. He remained with your father, Isador, working as his student whilst you left home to study medicine in the capital. Your return to the town is met with anger and accusation by the townsfolk, whom Stakh agrees with. For the first few days, he meets you with open hostility, believing you are responsible for your father’s murder. Even once this rumour is decidedly disproven, he still regards you with hostility; he views your failure to return to the town in time to save your father as equivalent to being responsible for his death – the failure of responsibility of a doctor to save a patient, and of a man to save his family. He also stands in direct competition with you in many ways; he remained your father’s pupil whilst you did not, however you are the person to come into your father’s legacy and inheritance, whilst he is not. He is one of the few physicians with any skill in the town, and is also working on his own cure – albeit a different one that does not rely directly on the Kin. He also engages in self-destructive and dangerous actions in order to save the town – and, should you fail to find the cure, he will do so in your place and pay for it with his life. His means of salvation comes in the act of desecrating the body of Simon Kain – the second of the town’s old guard to die immediately before your arrival. Though the full reveal of what Simon Kain WAS will be revealed more in the Bachelor’s campaign, for the purposes of this discussion, Simon had a body that was somehow also immune to the plague. Rubin’s actions in the game involve exhuming this body and dissecting down its essence in order to build a vaccine – an act that involves the cutting of a body in a way the Kin regard as taboo. If he is left unprotected, the Kin will kill him. Eventually, Rubin comes around to begrudgingly respecting you again – and will work in the town’s hospital and cover your shifts whilst you exit to build your panacea. Following the arrival of the Inquisitor, [if] he remains alive, you may have your reconciliation as he sleeps, exhausted from a week of constant work. If he remains alive and does not leave the town to join the military, he can be found in the Diurnal Ending on the same steps as Lara – his final reconciliation with you, an admission that you have, truly, become the man worthy of your father’s legacy. His final words; “My path was called "The Warden", with the fruits of my sacrilege I sated the town.” Grigory Fillin – or Griff, your last childhood friend, took a rather different path in life; he has become the de-facto leader of the town’s criminal underworld, and your interactions with him take on a rather different tone – his first task for you is to patch up a murderer and retrieve his shiv from the man’s gut – however, his respect for you will not lessen even if you allow this murderer to die. Griff’s appearance as a dangerous man, however, is shown outright to be merely a mask; a stagehand above Griff, acting as his “conscience”, is explicit in telling you, the player, that the bravado Griff has shrouded himself in is a show, and that the ‘real’ Griff is the same child you once knew, now merely playing a role of a dangerous thug – consistent with his general attitude of irony and mockery. However, the dividing line of where a performance ends and authenticity begins is a difficult one; Griff is still indirectly responsible for much of the violence carried out by his men – and, though it rapidly escalates out of his control, he does not so much try to stop it, as regard it all through a lens of detached irony. This sense of ironic detachment is played upon and heightened further in the run up to meeting the Inquisitor; his response to your request to blow up the train tracks is to lead you to believe he’ll help you, then withdraw his assistance last-minute as a demonstration of how foolish an idea it is to fight fate. His sense of inevitability is broken in further when the Inquisitor arrives; the Inquisitor shows him the nature of reality – that he is merely a figure in a play, a part to be acted out, that he has no means to fight his own fate, and no means to have agency of his own. His inability to change his own fate stands in contrast to you, the player – or so it seems. You have some agency in your actions in the game, yet, you too are still acting out the part written for you – for Artemiy. His final words to you, in the Diurnal ending, reflect his changed views on his own fate; he can never quite go back to who he used to be, but will go into his future, ready to play his role once more – whatever that role may be. His final words; “My path was not called "The Spider," no, think wider — it was "The Silkworm."” “At the end of a railroad, I pulled strings firm… yet somehow unaware, someone more cunning pulled mine upstairs.” Aglaya Lilich, the Inquisitor herself, is a character unlike many of the others; she has no part in the backstage play, and, no matter what path the player chooses, she will always die. She has no means to escape her fate – and, most tragically, is aware of this. Much like a tragic Greek hero, she has had her destiny foretold, and every act of struggling against it only entangles her further in the web of her inevitable fate. She appears as cool, collected and dangerous; the Inquisitors in general are presented as agents of the Powers that Be, those they send in to address problems that are otherwise unsolvable. In a similar vein to Artemiy, a Menkhu, connecting the “lines” between living things, Inquisitors are presented as being able to also draw such patterns, such lines between seemingly unconnected events, and to use this as a way to intuit the solution to a problem. Her intuitions prove correct; she is aware that the Polyhedron – the enormous megastructure that seems to defy the laws of nature – is somehow, both, connected to the manufactured miracles of the Kain’s Utopian project, and to the catastrophic plague as the Earth’s reaction. She is aware that some characters are to have greater roles in the plague’s management than others – and, perhaps most telling, she is aware that you, Artemiy, and the player controlling him, are different to other townsfolk. Though Artemiy is as much bound by the strings of his fate – of the script he is playing – as anyone else, he demonstrates that this does not matter to him; what is important to him is to act according to his morals. If he is manipulated to an external force’s benefit, that doesn’t matter to him – so long as he has acted as he sees best. It is this quality that Aglaya believes sets Artemiy free – even if he is still tied to his destiny, his willingness to act as he sees fit gives him more solace than she has ever managed to have for herself. Her final acts in the game – to sign the writ of the Polyhedron’s destruction and to make her escape – are tragic; the last desperate attempt at demonstrating her agency, by a figure who’s already known that all her efforts would be fruitless, and yet she was compelled to try anyway. In the face of inevitability, it is sometimes better to stand and roar against your fate, against God – even if it seems pointless. To quote Dylan Thomas; “Do not go gentle into that good night – Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. The Utopians, as a group, have very little screen time in this iteration of the game – however, I feel it important to at least address each of them in short, here. They’ll get more coverage in the following routes of the Bachelor and the Changeling, but in the interim, they do still play some role in Artemiy’s view of the town and its people. Andrei Stamatin is a charismatic, dangerous and sharp owner of the local drinking establishment, and a dealer in twyrine. He and his troubled brother, Petr, are responsible for the creation of much of the town, and are the architects of the Polyhedron – the superstructure that defies nature. They, along with a third architect, were also responsible for the Cathedral – a great, looming structure in the Stone Yard that, for all its grandeur, remains empty and soulless. The various scattered staircases abandoned through the town are their creations, too – prototypes of their Polyhedron project. Andrei remains the more upbeat of the pair – regarding himself as the bulldozer that clears the way for his brother’s brilliance – though this has at times led to other dangerous problems, including the murder of the third architect. They have both fled to the town for various breaches of the law – though whether that is the law of the nation, the Laws of Nature and Physics, or both, is left deliberately unclear. During the Diurnal ending, he is seen angrily mourning the loss of the Polyhedron, swearing revenge for its destruction. His final words; “My path was called "Larger Than Life." There isn't a single boundary I haven't broken. I've done everything I ever wanted to!” Petr is the gentler of the pair – a troubled artist and addict to Twyrine, the town’s local hallucinogen of choice. His house is littered with paint and sketches, the feverish scrawls of both brilliance and madness. Where his brother’s role is to demolish old boundaries and rules, his role is to rebuild in brilliance – or hubris, depending on your perspective. He has some kindness and compassion in his heart, too, and will adopt Grace, the young gravekeeper, a fellow misfit, if they both survive long enough. His final words; “My path was called "The Calligrapher." They wouldn't let me forget what I'd done, but they couldn't kill me.” “That means this is just the beginning.” The Kain family, much like the Olgimskys and the Saburovs, are the third powerful family of the town. They also are not given as much screen time in this route as they’ll get in subsequent routes – however, their role in the events of the game is still important. With the creation of the Polyhedron by the Stamatin brothers, the Kains have come across the final means to build a utopia they’ve always dreamed of – a transformative immortality, and a perfect society, all in one. The true mastermind of the project, Simon Kain, is a brilliant, seemingly-immortal man, however he, along with your father Isador, dies immediately before the events of the game. The remaining Kain family are composed of Georgy, the eldest, and the town’s judge, Victor, the husband of the late Nina Kaina – one of the deceased Clairvoyant Mistresses of the old town, and Maria, Victor’s daughter, who is, much like Capella, also beginning to channel the spirit of her dead mother. Victor’s younger child, Caspar Kain – otherwise known as Khan, is a character that I’ll discuss later. Georgy Kain is shown relatively little in the game; his main objectives appear to be to ensure the survival of the Polyhedron and the miracles of the town, and to continue the project of the deceased Simon. To this end, despite knowing that Simon, and your father Isador Burakh, are responsible for returning the plague to the town, he does not stop them – in the Diurnal Ending, it is shown that he regards this as a necessary step, a sacrifice in order to advance humanity, and advance the miracles of the town, or a test that must be passed. His house is called the Crucible, and he is shown as a man in a workshop – a sculptor and creator, of both, physical things, and of people. His final words; “My path was called "Necrology." Few can survive the trial of death…” “I did everything I could so that a handful might pass the test.” Victor Kain is a man of few words – his interactions with Artemiy are very brief. He mourns for his loss of his wife, Nina Kaina, who was once one of the Great Mistresses of the town before. Under her guidance, the people were fearful, but loving – she was the perfect image of blood, passion and strength. Victor’s actions and desires were to return her memory to the town, in some small way or another – though, in the context of the Clairvoyant Mistresses, “returning” them to the town has a far more literal meaning than mere memory. His final words; “My path was called "The Mistress." I tried to anchor the memory of my unearthly wife here in this town.” Maria Kaina is met only a few times within the game; she is imperious, commanding and arrogant, assuming to wield great power – however, there are various instances where she seems to do this successfully. She interacts with Clara and Capella, presuming that they three will be the New Mistresses, and during at least one interaction alters the game’s mechanics, in order to prevent you from interrupting her further. Through the course of the game, she appears to become more and more detached from reality, and more involved with talking to the unseen ghost of her mother – how much of that is her genuine clairvoyance, and how much is her perceptions of reality slipping in response to stress, is left unclear. Her final words; “My path was called "The Return of Magic." I wanted the power to create a place of miracles, and precious anarchy.” The last of the Utopians, unrelated to the Kains, is Eva Yan – a dreamer and lost soul. Living in the abandoned Observatory – another experimental structure, like the Cathedral and the Polyhedron. This building, created by a man named Farkhad, the deceased architect that once worked with the Stamatin brothers, has its own curse; whilst the Polyhedron could preserve and augment a soul, the observatory “stretched it out”. Most were unable to stay in such a house for long – except for this young woman. Contrary to her provocatively-clad portrayal in “Pathologic 1”, Eva in “Pathologic 2” appears somewhat dishevelled – certainly not sexualised. Somewhat disconnected from reality, she appears somewhat innocent and very naive. Though it does not occur in this version of the story, her desires are still to provide the soul to the otherwise soulless Cathedral – an act that in the original game required her suicide for her spirit to provide meaning to otherwise sterile stonework – though whether this act was ever necessary is debatable. She presents as someone who romanticizes the world around her heavily, to the point of distorting her views of reality. In the Diurnal ending, she remains alive, keen to participate in the Kains’ project for a new town – though her potential suicide is referenced. In the Nocturnal ending, she can be seen dancing with Steppe girls – trying to immerse herself and find meaning in a culture that will never truly accept her. Her final words; “My path was once called "Goldilocks," but then I wanted to offer my soul to the Cathedral, so that it would hold something truly immortal.” Yulia Lyuricheva, whilst not one of the Utopians, is still adjacent to them in her role in the town; where Andrei and Petr Stamatin are the architects of the wondrous creations, Yulia is the engineer that built the roadmap of the town – the alleyways and streets, mapping them out more as vessels in an organism than crossroads in a planned city. Her role is also one of compassion, however, hers is more detached than Lara’s; she assists how she can in the hospital, though her role there is brief and limited. Her soul will be bared more in an upcoming route. Her final words; “My path was called the "Tripwires of Fate."” “I built the roads of this town such that humans became red blood cells in its veins, and I laid bare the logic of imminence.” Anna Angel, perhaps, is one of the characters most draped in mystery. A figure who never truly reveals any truth to anyone, she is a shallow, vain mysophobe. She is dressed in an enormous parka that entirely drenches her form and shields her from any real view throughout the game, and the fragments of her history learned from other figures paint a mixed and confusing picture; a woman who once travelled with a circus known as the Diamond Caravan, she was very likely involved in the kidnapping of children – and, according to some, may have been involved in their murder. She spends her time in the game berating you for leading the infection to her door, hiding in her room, and occasionally trying to break into infected houses to “rescue” a child – an act cynically done to earn pardon for past crimes, rather than for any sense of compassion. Wearing several layers of fake personas and false identities, it is unclear if she even knows who she really is, underneath it all – when performer and performance blend together, and the performances are all based on lies, the result beneath is a hollow shell of inauthenticity. Her actions appear only to have cynical motives; means of hiding herself further or avoiding discovery for who she really is. Even in the final moments of the game, she still only shows childish fear and further obfuscation of her identity. Though her story is to be explored further in an upcoming route, she remains the living embodiment of the phrase, “the mortifying ordeal of being known”. Her final words; “My path was called "The Angel of Death." I'm not sure, myself, why I was in the Caravan… ...forgive me, please! I promise I'll be good!” The remaining children of the town are the main group that Artemiy is destined to protect; in his goal of creating a future town where they may continue their culture and future, Artemiy’s path is distinctly a forward-facing one. His role in nurturing and protecting the town’s future is most closely seen in his actions to protect the other children. Notkin, the first of the kids that Artemiy interacts with, is presented as an adolescent, clad in too-big clothes, one foot still in childhood, and with a connection to simple, more earthly things, like playing with cats and dogs – and lies in opposition to the rival gang that plays with dreams and polyhedrons. He, like the adults before him, represents the town’s future connection to nature, and to its own humanity; his first interaction with you is one of imploring justice – a very human question of whether it is ever justified to kill another man. This question returns to haunt you at multiple parts throughout the game – and the fact that it is put to you by an earnest teenager, a child, albeit not an entirely innocent one, lends it more poignancy. Notkin’s childlike naivety is contrasted by his attempts to be a sombre and serious leader – going so far as to semi-adopt the stay kids of the town, and attempt to protect them and save their lives when plague breaks out. His attempts to investigate an infected house with you are a noble endeavour – though a costly one, likely to infect him. Of all the characters in the game, he is most likely to be the first that is infected – and, even if cured, the most likely to be re-infected and the most likely to die. In your dreams, the Powers that Be comment that they believe he will be the first to venture through the door to death. In the Diurnal Ending, he can be found listening to the words of Taya Tycheek – the future of the town’s earthly endeavours resting on his slender shoulders. His final words: “My path was called "A Half-Soul More." I wanted to create a real utopia, a fraternity of boys and pups, girls and kittens, tots and cubs…” Standing in opposition to Notkin is Caspar Kain – otherwise referred to as Khan. Much as Artemiy is of the earth and Daniil, the Bachelor, is of the Polyhedron and Utopian dreams, such is the dynamic of Notkin and Khan. Bold, assuming, and not entirely kind, he is far more a boy trying to play the role of a harsh king, than a forever-young Peter Pan in a forever-childish Polyhedron. He takes his responsibility with some seriousness, bordering on the precocious – reflected in the small snippets seen of him in interacting with Capella, and his sense of duty in clearing the House of the Dead. He is otherwise an unusual one for Artemiy to protect, more resembling the other Utopians than anyone else – however, he is to be part of the town’s future balance. His role, as seen in the Diurnal Ending, is to one day marry Capella Olgimskaya, and form a new dynasty – joining the Utopian dreamers to the future representative of the common townsfolk. His final words: “My path was called "The High Day."” “If not for the plague, I'd have seized power from the adults and instituted a dictatorship of the children. But Capella... Capella had a better idea.” The next two children that you encounter form the emotional core to the story; Sticky and Murky. These kids, their birth names forgotten, are both orphans, and both look to you as a father figure – and both, in turn, remind you of your own father’s actions. The first, Sticky, is a young boy, barely past twelve years old, and orphaned after his father went to war and his mother died due to sickness. In the years before your return to the town, your father, Isador, treated him with some kindness, and allowed him to stay in his warehouse and tinker with the potion-makers and equipment. Though lacking anything much of a formal education, he is sharp-witted and able to assist you on more than one occasion – the most memorable of which being when he offers to help sneak into a store and steal you vital equipment, whilst you distract the shop’s owner. Without fully understanding exactly what you’re doing, he still watches your work keenly, and can offer helpful advice on occasion. His memories of your father are fond ones – of a caring, paternal grandparent who looked after the town and its people. His role is both to act in place of a son and future pupil of yours, and to remind you of Isador’s kindness and compassion – the positivity with which he regards you as a father figure is the same positivity that you regarded your own father. Murky, in contrast, offers you a confused and conflicting relationship, reflecting the confused parts of your own relationship with Isador, your father. A young, homeless girl, she first meets you in Notkin’s lair, and seems wary and hostile towards you. Despite this hostility, she still seems to follow you, every so often latching onto you as a figure of strength – each time, letting you in a little bit, but each time also clamming up if pushed too far. Eventually, you come to realize she stays, homeless and alone, in a boxcar outside of town – littered with small tokens, childlike drawings, things of value to her – but still open to the elements, cold, and lonely. Her destitution is reflected in her appearance, too; unwashed, unkempt clothing and hair, dirt on her face, she is already in a position of vulnerability long before the game begins – and, in this regard, becomes the embodiment of those you need to protect within the town, acting as a “conscience on dirty feet”. This role as your de-facto conscience is revealed to be even more apt when her background becomes revealed to you; her homelessness, her destitution, her orphanhood were all things caused by your own father, Isador. During the previous outbreak of the plague, he quarantined an area of the poor district – dooming many people to death, including Murky’s mother and father. Her view of Isador is therefore far more tainted; she sees him as a monster, committing monstrous deeds, in the name of something she is too young to understand. In both the Nocturnal and Diurnal ending, Sticky and Murky remain your wards – they, as the children you have effectively adopted, will follow your path, wherever that may lead. In the Diurnal ending, Sticky is to become your future pupil, and Murky is given a home under your roof. In the Nocturnal ending, Sticky remains your pupil – though of a much different sort, and Murky, in some strange irony, is the one to offer YOU her boxcar as a roof over YOUR head. His final words: “My path was called "In Defiance." I almost tracked down that weird creature, but then I found a better goal. I'm going to become a real doctor.” Her final words; “And my path was called "Feed the Doll." I also wanted to be with Mom and Dad.” Taya Tycheek, the last of the children under your care, is found within the Termitary, and viewed as a Holy Child by the Kin who live there. The daughter of the now-deceased Overseer, she is afforded a leadership position – a strange contrast, as the biggest, most brutish and scariest of the peoples met in the game are led by the smallest and youngest girl. She is clearly adored by the Kin who follow her, and she and they feel a sense of solidarity; despite your best efforts at cajoling and persuading, she refuses to leave the Termitary unless all the Kin may leave with her. Despite her commanding the power over the entirety of the Kin, she is still, at heart, a very young and immature child – even in her final speeches in the Diurnal Ending of the game, her moral edicts are interspersed with commands about candy, and other such childish things. In many ways, this immaturity reflects the position of the Kin; in a new world, their old ways have died out, and their own rebirth and re-learning their place [in it] must also ensue. In the Diurnal ending, she is seen giving out her new commands as the moral and quasi-religious leader of what remains of the Kin – merely play-acting a role, but acting it with such confidence that it should eventually become a truly authentic one. In the Nocturnal ending, she is seen, sitting atop the Polyhedron, once more inheriting her role as a soon-to-be Clairvoyant Mistress of the town, the Mistress of the Bulls. Her final words; “My path was called… something or other. I forget. Had something… something to do with bulls.” Aspity, an unusual witch-like woman, scarred and haggard, with a blown pupil, is one of the few other members of the kin with whom you have closer interactions. She speaks for the Kin, and speaks for the future that she wishes for them. She is first met in the graveyard outside the town, burying your father’s body alongside the rest of the Kin, and approaches you afterwards to give you your father’s inheritance – both in his physical effects, and in the burden of his responsibility. She holds you with affection and compassion, and in you she rests the hopes of the future of the Kin – going as far as dying to protect you, if you let her treat the children in Notkin’s warehouse in your place. By nightfall, she is found in her burnt-out house on the edge of town, approached by various members of the Kin; in them, she speaks of ideals of rebellion, of reclaiming the land back from the town, and of allowing the Kin to return their world of Bulls, of Miracles and of Animism. Her predictions about the cause of the plague are not unfounded; the town and its leadership, in building the Polyhedron, did sink a spike deep into the heart of the Earth – a truth that you literally see for yourself. Her solution, however, is the unusual one; her ideals call for a return to the past, and not a pursuit of the future. In the Diurnal ending, she is one of the few characters that will berate you and mourn your choice to remove the Polyhedron and let the Earth’s blood spill. In the Nocturnal ending, in the return to the past world of Miracles, she lauds your choice; whilst nearly every other character has died or left, or been changed alongside the changed world, Aspity is finally at peace – her prophesies of a return to the old ways were carried out, and her hopes in you proved true. Her final words; “My path was called “Earth”. I could have told you all why the black soil is not to blame for this catastrophe.” Foreman Oyun – one of the last surviving members of the Kindred, appears relatively late in the game. A giant of a man, he is first seen dressed in steppe garb, wearing an enormous Bull-mask; every bit a half-man, half-animal minotaur. In this, he reflects the nature of the Kin themselves; one foot in humanity, one foot in the mythical past – a past that Oyun, himself, describes as an animalistic one. Whilst he is not an unintelligent character, his views are traditional and narrow; he understands the world in the Kin’s terms, and bids you engage in [his] tasks in the Kin’s ways. Despite his attempt at command, he is an unfortunately powerless character; where he feels his role should be one of respected strength within the Kin, he is in fact only to act as an overseer, an underling to the Olgimsky family. The world he understands is slowly dying out, and he, like the Aurochs before him, is soon to fade with it. He was, in fact, always your father’s murderer – though this was a mercy-killing of a feverish, infected and unwell man – the culling of a sick member to protect the herd as a whole. The world around him is moving on, whilst his ways are stagnant and unfruitful; despite believing in the Way of Strength, he is forced to kill Isador – a man he believes is wiser, stronger, and more worthy of leadership. He is locked away from the Termitary, unable to get back to his people. In his struggles to return, he is shot like a dog by the Olgimsky’s guards. He is unable to find the mythical Aurochs to save the town. His raw strength means little in a world more composed of machinery and industry than magic. On the discovery that he murdered your father, you may confront him about this; he does not fight you, and is willing to succumb to your judgement – the last marks of honor in his fading life. If you choose that he should die, he will be sacrificed within the Abattoir, and you will dig the grave for his corpse. If you allow him to live, he may be seen in the Diurnal ending, also listening to Taya Tycheek’s sermon. His final words; “I am a servant. Broken, by another’s will.” The Play itself is orchestrated by those backstage; on a meta level, the “true” backstage, in the real world, is the game’s developers – but, in true form to “Pathologic”, these boundaries are somewhat blurry; they have their own appearances within the game, and their avatars became characters in their own right. The Director of the whole play, Mark Immortell, is an enigmatic and aloof figure – eccentric in appearance, and sadistic in his outlook, his entire goal is to deliver the most engaging possible performance to his audience. He has no past, no future, and, if he should appear within the game, there is a distinct impression that it is part of an Intended Scene that he has arranged. There is some blurring of lines, as you, the player, are both Actor and Audience, all at once; the main times he will interact with you are if you should fail, die, and end up in his backstage arena. His ongoing discussions with you through these repeated encounters with death are of an interesting nature; on one level, he will criticise you for your failure to adequately play the role of Artemiy Burakh correctly, yet on the other, he will praise you for your individuality and ability to make your own decisions. On one hand, he will berate you for succumbing to death, but on the other, he will only discuss the MEANING of death with you, should you die enough times. His outlook is eventually laid bare; his Theater of Cruelty is, in a Brechtian sense, a critique of video games, of conventional storytelling, and even of most Western philosophy. It is difficult to fully say what his entire thesis is, as there are still two more campaigns to be released – but it is apparent that it is, in his view, only through facing suffering, death and inevitability that we can truly learn from it. In the Haruspex’s case, the eventual lesson is deceptively simple; Death can be avoided through something greater than the sum of one’s body; that it may be, in some senses, defeated through a community, through forging a future that extends beyond your own, and through your own sense of self becoming tied to more than just your single, frail, physical body. This lesson, however, is not likely to be the only one drawn; the Bachelor and the Changeling are likely to draw markedly different conclusions. Mark Immortell, for his part, is merely there to foster the analysis and the criticism – to guide you to your own conclusions, not to dictate answers. Though he is a voice of the developers, he is nevertheless distinct from them – both an in-universe character, and a real-world reference [point] to hang the story upon. The Fellow Traveller is another figure that blurs the boundaries between the stage, the backstage, and the role of the audience and player. In the opening tutorial, laced with metaphor, you find yourself in a traincar – a cramped wooden box. Within your traincar, the Fellow Traveller is first met as he steps out of a coffin – another cramped wooden box. Much in the vein of Russian folklore, he is travelling alongside you – perhaps to the same destination, and has his own agenda, too, and appears enigmatic, inscrutable, and very likely not someone to be trusted. Though it is never explicitly stated, the Fellow Traveller appears to be Death itself – on a meta level, Death comes to the town alongside you, the player; the game would not occur, the stage would not be set, and its characters wouldn’t be subjected to the plague unless you, the player, chose to play. The Traveller tells you that he is also coming to the town, to take something of a Harvest, of sorts – a harvest of lives, innocent or not. He, however, appears not only to be Death of the townsfolk, but the Death of the Play itself. His role is to disrupt the play – where Mark Immortell’s actions are to push the game into further levels of suffering, the Fellow Traveller appears, and will trade you extremely valuable items in return for junk, disrupting the intended tragedy. Where the game will prevent you from buying food after the Inquisitor’s arrival, and shops will only trade in food coupons, the Fellow Traveller will sell you these coupons at a vastly reduced rate. Perhaps though, most tellingly, where Mark Immortell will punish you for dying, and apply more and more penalties to your character, the Traveller will offer to remove all those penalties. For a price. With all the suffering removed, all the intended purpose of the Theatre of Cruelty, the purpose of Mark’s play, the purpose of tragedy itself becomes obsolete – the Fellow Traveller has killed it. On completion of the game under these terms, the final day, the ENDING of the game is removed. Death, in the end, won – and in the place of a narrative conclusion comes an abrupt cutoff, heralded by Mark Immortell and the other actors upon the stage informing you of your failure. In this, the Fellow Traveller provides the counter-thesis to Mark Immortell’s treatise on Death – he clarifies what Death IS. Death is not merely the ending of a life, or the absence of it – but the removal of meaning itself. Even in the suffering portrayed by Mark Immortell, all of it had meaning – tragedy, emotion, passion, despair, fate – all of it. In the world the Fellow Traveller brings, this meaning is snuffed out, and all that is left is a hollow Nihilism. The short version; don’t take the deal. It won’t help you. The Stagehands, too, form an equally important part of the running of the play – appearing as morph-suit clad Tragedeans, or tall, imposing, bird-beaked Executors. They form another blurred part of the stage’s boundaries – on one hand, within the stage play, orderlies dress themselves up with protective cloaks borrowed from the town’s local theater – bird-beaks and masks included. These protective cloaks serve to keep the orderlies moderately shielded from the plague, yet also appear as literal omens of death – carrion-fowl arriving to prey on the deceased. On another level, such stage-cloaks are worn by fourth-wall-breaking stagehands, who inform the player of what they are to do, and then return back to playing their assigned characters. To quote the game’s design documents; “There are the events taking place in the town, which are real. And there is their stage adaptation, which is also real.” “There are the actors who play the protagonists and re-enact the events of their lives” “(since upon loading, you’re reliving that short — or not so short — stretch of their deathbound journey).” “The actor walks out into the town, looking for inspiration, “walking the hero’s paths”.” “And there’s a fluid ambiguity in not having a clear way of telling who you are right now:” “the real Haruspex or Bachelor, living his life, about to die — or merely an actor playing his part and thus getting a chance to go back to the past?” The final character from the Backstage to appear is the Rat Prophet; an unusual figure, he also blurs the bounds between the fiction of the game and the meta-fiction of the stage. He appears to be, in some ways, demonic – yet he is not a Creature of the Steppe, as many of the magical beings in the game are – but more a Creature of the Stage that is accidentally let loose. On one level, his influence is terrifying – he is seen Eating the Dead with Grace, and seen poisoning the mind of Katerina Saburova – however, on another, he is often jovial, regularly breaking character, revealing himself to be merely a small actor, wearing a mask. He himself is a contradiction – and therein lies his power. Whether we will ever find out more about him is yet to be seen. In many recent works of fantasy fiction, Nature is presented as a passive force – a balance to be protected, oft composed of beautiful waterfalls and streams, or woodland glades. “Pathologic 2” instead presents the forces of Nature as far more awesome and terrible – things older than Humanity, and far stronger, far more dangerous. Death itself, and its manifestation in the Plague, is presented as an immutable force of this nature – a thing so powerful and beyond human understanding that it feels like a horrific eldritch deity. The setting of “Pathologic 2” during Russia’s industrialization therefore comes as no surprise; the beginning of the 20th century heralded a change in the way much of humanity lived. Where once individual people lived or died at the whims of a cold, callous world, new technology granted previously unknown degrees of freedom. People were living longer, travelling further, and becoming more interconnected with one another. Slowly, the forces of nature weren’t something to be hidden from, but things to be harnessed, or contained, or utilized. The magic of the unknown slowly gave way to reason and science. Humanity, no longer so bound by previous limitations, achieved many seemingly-impossible things; flight, quick worldwide travel, birth control, vastly extended life expectancies, minute calculations of the laws of physics – a myriad of human endeavor springing up in such a short space of time. In contrast to the confusing and chaotic natural world, humanity imposed order and regularity. This contrast is reflected in “Pathologic” – most clearly in its factions, their divisions, the superstructures that represent them, and even in the two major endings. On the one hand, the Kains, the Stamatins and the other Utopians subscribe to an ideal of reason, to the triumph of humanity over all else – a triumph represented in their immortal, pure Polyhedron, untainted by the plague. On the other stands the Kindred, their ancient Abattoir, soiled in blood and earth and clay, standing itself as another part of nature rather than in opposition to it. The Kin also view themselves on similar terms; the world is a bull, and humanity are merely creatures walking on the fur of its back. Oyun goes as far as to suggest that the Kin are also animals – a herd of people, to be corralled much like a herd of cattle. Though this may sound unnerving to a modern ear – the idea of treating people like animals – in this instance it is not a derogatory statement, but merely an expression of a different worldview; one in which humanity is a part of nature, and not distinct from it. By extension, the Town may be seen as either as an example of humanity’s progress, or humanity’s hubris – it is either an achievement of industry, bringing progress and light to a feudal peasant or nomadic backwater – or it is a cancer, burrowing into the back of the Earth. The Abattoir may be seen as the home of bloodshed and barbarism, or it may be seen as a part of the natural cycle – blood sacrificed to feed the blood of the Earth itself, the product of a native culture, and a means of balancing an ecosystem of the nomadic peoples. The conversion of such a sacred site into an enormous meat processing factory can be seen as barbaric in itself – or it may be seen as a means to bring industry, progress and education to a backwater community that otherwise would still believe in magic, and brutish displays of strength as the path to leadership and dominance. The Polyhedron itself may be seen as humanity’s crowning achievement – a pinnacle of architectural design that can, in itself, grant immortality and reflect a human soul – or it may be seen as an aberration, a cursed structure that has brought disbalance and deceit, piercing the earth’s heart for nothing. The Plague, too, may be seen in these terms – especially within the endings of the game. The Diurnal ending shows humanity’s survival – the survival of the town and its progress towards a new generation. However, this is achieved at the cost of miracles and at the cost of the wonders of the old Natural world, and at the cost of much of the Kin. Humanity withstood the test and bested Death, bested Nature’s Plague, and in so doing, nature’s Heart stopped beating. The Nocturnal end spells the end of the town and most of its most Human elements, and returns it to a state of Nature – the state the world existed in before the existence of industry. This state includes magic, miracles, enormous Aurochs the size of the sky – but at the cost of its people. Those that remain, the Kin, are themselves conforming back to Nature’s whims – returning to an older, bloodier, and more terrifying culture than the civilization brought by Industrial Humanity. Both of these endings are bittersweet, and both require sacrifice – either the future is sacrificed to preserve the past, or the past is lost, to make way for the future. An interrelated, though subtler conflict, is that of Tradition against Progress. Although often those closer to Nature, such as the Kin, are more inclined to stick to tradition, and the Utopians vie for Progress, this is a conflict that is experienced more on an interpersonal and internal level than a societal one. The Kin, as a whole, are undergoing a societal and cultural shift; their original steppe culture of nomadic herding is no longer viable, and in its place they have taken [on] work in the industrialized abattoir – uprooting their heritage in the process. There are some, like Aspity, who cling to the old ways, refusing to change as the world changes around them, rejecting the new world in its entirety – there are others, like Oyun, who attempt to engage in the new world whilst applying the values of the old, and remain lost and confused. The fact that the future of the Kin rests with a small, five year old girl is significant – Taya represents their only salvation, a move away from their stagnation whilst also not representing an outside, unwanted influence on their culture. The Kin, divided amongst a confused series of loyalties, quickly become fractured, and draw you into their internal violence – however, you, too are affected by this ideological conflict. The ideals of the Menkhu, the sacred surgeons, are also changing; the traditional roots of your father, Isador, are of dubious value in the modern world. In an effort to adapt and change, you, Artemiy, were sent to modern medical school in the capital, prior to the start of the game – and yet, this change is seen as an alienation from your culture. You have one foot in both worlds – looking towards the future, the prosperity of the town and of its people – and one in the past, of the Kin, of shamanistic practices, of blood sacrifices, magic and miracles. Many of your acts within the game are in efforts to balance these – of appealing to the Kin and their culture, whilst also trying to protect them with modern means. Your understanding of the plague and its cure all come from the old world; of herbs, and blood, and panaceas composed of mythic chimeras of Man and Bull, of knowing the sacred lines. However, those your father has asked you to protect – the children – are the representatives of the future, of the change to the new world. The final choice in this game is essentially this dichotomy; as Isador presents to you, you can look towards the future, and look towards the past, but you may never have both. The Diurnal Ending, composed of a new dawn and a bittersweet last look at the town, is the story of survival, grief, and rebuilding. The Nocturnal Ending, composed of twilight, darkness and magic, is a story where a future is torn from the town, and is replaced by its old, lost world. The children of the town also present a similar conflict of past and future; that of wishing to remain in childhood, or allowing oneself to become an adult. Childhood in “Pathologic 2” represents many complex things, although innocence certainly is not one of them – the children of this game are, much like Nature, presented as complex, violent, and oftentimes cruel. The very first interactions you have with the childhood gangs of the game involve an act of traipsing into the Steppe to sentence an adolescent to death – a teenager who, himself, was violent, and slaughtered innocent animals as a means of a gang-warfare power-plays. Notkin’s gang is also perceptive, too; Notkin himself is one of the first people to see past the rumours of your patricide, and seems to instinctively know your innocence of that particular crime – whilst also holding no illusions about the other blood on your hands. However, despite this, there is still a certain sense of naivety and wonder – half the children of the town are infatuated with the enormous Polyhedron superstructure – a tower composed of dreams and miracles, of wishing to stay within childhood forever. Khan, himself, is an interesting figure in this regard – an arrogant king of the children, yet also somehow halfway a Peter Pan figure – commanding and imperious like his sister, yet also still a child, still with simplistic and naïve hopes of a childhood takeover of the town. Both gangs of children, Notkin’s and Khan’s, participate in a game of finding secret caches, which you can participate in too. The laws of this game are both very innocent and very serious, all at once, in the way of all children’s games – their rules are clear that you must leave something of equal value to what is taken, which they implore you to listen to. The other games you run into are all equally filled with naivety and earnestness – the children even bid you to “summon a train”, which, if you try to do, may surprise you with the results. The other games the children play are not merely frivolity; they mimic the behaviours of the adults around them. On more than one occasion, the actions that adults have undertaken – such as the harassing of steppe girls, or the burning of suspected Witches at the stake – are then play-acted by children the following day. These become increasingly morbid – play-acting at murder and violence, or even harassing other children for the actions of their mothers and fathers. Though it is debatable whether any of the children are truly INNOCENT, they are certainly the products of their parents. The town’s future rests on their shoulders – and though there may be some changes, many cycles of ignorance, violence and confusion merely seem to replay themselves, over and over. This is not only shown with the young children in-game, but with the young adults, too; nearly every character is prone to making their parents’ mistakes. Younger Vlad, in his efforts to bring progress to the butcher business, ends up locking up and inadvertently killing nearly all the Kin – continuing Big Vlad’s callousness. Capella, in her efforts to be the maternal influence on the town’s lost children, begins to literally become and channel the soul of her own mother – as does Maria Kaina. Khan, retreating into the Polyhedron and establishing a Utopian Kingdom, is acting out the fantasies of his father and grandfather, and every other Kain before him. Even your childhood friends are not immune; Griff is mimicking the role of a crook, playing it out like a childhood game. Lara, in her increasing desperation, takes to the attempted murder of the military general – an act that would entrench her in the same position of court marshal and execution as her father, if it weren’t for your intervention. Stakh Rubin, and, of course, your player character, Artemiy Burakh, are both acting out the same role, and making the same mistakes as your father figure, Isador – on one hand, accepting responsibility for the town and its survival, and on the other, continuing on the legacy of the Kin and the Menkhu. The struggle between childhood and adulthood is not a simplistic one of past and future; it is one where adulthood often represents the same mistakes of the past, yet to remain in childhood represents stasis. To grow up is to try to forge your own path towards a new future, yet also to act in the way the adults before you have done, and potentially make their mistakes, too. What can a future mean, when it is rewritten, over and over, with the same mistakes of the past? I would argue, though, that the game still presents a hopeful view of the future – at least in its Diurnal Ending; although these children are re-treading the ground their parents walked, their cycle, their view of where their town should go, is eminently more positive than their plague-ridden past. With the catastrophe has come awareness, in many ways greater than that of the adults they interact with – and with that awareness, more compassion, and perhaps a better future. The debate of free will and agency against the concept of destiny and predetermination is an ancient philosophical question. It is played out, in full, in the events of the game, and reflected in the narrative and ludonarrative, engineered into the mechanics of how the game works. The emotional impact of the game’s systems contribute to an increasing sense of hopelessness, fear, and inevitability; survival becomes increasingly desperate as the game’s days progress forward, and you find yourself starving, infected, and barely able to save anyone else, let alone yourself. The difficulty is not within the technical skill of performing tasks, but in the management of the daily grind, and in sustaining the will to keep going – the game is designed as a marathon, not a sprint – and yet, in that marathon it is often difficult to see the light at the end of it all. Failure is not only expected, but intentional. The player is INTENDED to feel like there is no means to fight their destiny; even the cover art specifically advertises the fact that "you cannot save everyone". The game itself is set out to make sure that you know that the ending is, in some manners, already written; you begin in a nightmarish version of the game’s ending, where the plague has won, and the world is collapsing. You already know how the story is going to go – you know it’s going to be a tragedy, and you know you can’t avert fate. You are even told this by multiple members of the backstage crew, including the Fellow Traveller, and Mark Immortell – and, with each failure, each death, the game’s difficulty increases; the likelihood of this Bad Ending is increased at every turn. Yet, as a player, you’ll still naturally try, regardless. The act of continuing to play the game is an act of rebellion against this inevitability. You are not the only character in the game to wage this fight against Fate Itself; Aglaya, the Inquisitor, also plays against her fate. She knows, from the start of her role, that her fate is to die – and yet, despite this, continues to try to escape. She does not submit to inevitability, despite seeing the strings that bind her, and despite understanding that she is merely a puppet in a theatre. Instead, she convinces other characters of the strings that bind them, notably Griff, and tries to manipulate them. When performed on you, the player as Artemiy Burakh, however, this does not immediately work – Artemiy, too bull-headed to care that he is being manipulated, represents a freedom from these ties of fate; if he is being manipulated by the play’s directors into doing what he always wanted to do anyway, that is not REAL manipulation. Aglaya, however, is still not immune to her fate; regardless of whether she convinces you to escape with her or not, she will still be executed. Much as Oedipus could not escape his destiny, Aglaya’s role is like that of a tragic Greek hero – the more she attempted to escape her death, the closer she stepped towards it. The sense of inevitability – the sense of unavoidable pain, and loss, and suffering, compounded with a raw sense of chaos, and utterly uncaring gods in the form of The Plague and the Backstage Crew, leaves a sense of meaninglessness. In a world where there is only death and suffering, the struggle to find meaning starts to become lost; how can one find meaning as a citizen, in a state tearing itself apart? How can one find meaning as a parent, when ones’ child has abandoned them for Utopian Polyhedron Dreams – or has maybe even died? How can one believe in a sense of justice when good people are becoming infected and perishing in the streets – and you’re finding yourself becoming a looter and criminal, just like all the rest? This sense of meaninglessness and despair in the face of inevitable suffering is The Absurd – and “Pathologic 2” depicts a perfect emotional portrayal of it. The Absurd, as a philosophy, came into its own at the turn of the 20th century – around the time of the First World War. The industrial revolution was displacing traditional work and values, the horrors and completely meaningless suffering of the war caused most assumptions about values in Europe and elsewhere to be heavily questioned, and the "Death of God" brought with it both terrifying insecurity and new freedom. These are all themes represented in “Pathologic 2”; the setting, approximately at the turn of the century, is significant; one culture is giving way to another, rural life is becoming defunct, and native peoples and cultures are becoming swallowed by a newer, industrialized life. The machinery of heavy industry means that people are only so much cheap meat – the disposability of many of the factory workers and other poorer peoples of the town serve to reinforce this, as does the vast wealth inequality between them and the bourgeois Vlad Olgimsky. A needless, enormous slaughter, en-masse occurs – and the townspeople all display different responses to find meaning in such a cacophony of slaughter – some look for someone to blame, others look to establish justice, and many are merely becoming atomized as the greater society they’re in falters and breaks down. The game’s version of the Death of God is displayed in more than one way – in its most literal, the Earth itself, the great god upon which the world sits, has had its heart pierced and is slowly dying – and in its place, a fabricated paper deity of mirrors and dreams, the Polyhedron. [T]
and in its place, a fabricated paper deity of mirrors and dreams, the Polyhedron. and in its place, a fabricated paper deity of mirrors and dreams, the Polyhedron. At heart, much of the game is about facing existential dread and death itself, and the absurd, and coming to one’s own conclusions about how to wrestle with it. Within any game, there is often a sense of a narrative – the same as in any plotline in a movie or a book – which you, as a character in it, are SUPPOSED to follow. Though any game does offer some player agency in HOW the script is followed, ultimately, there remains the question of how much agency one can truly have when merely filling a role – thus dividing Player from Character. “Pathologic 2” outright lampshades this issue by showing that you are, quite literally, following the script of a play; the game itself is framed as a play, performed by actors upon a stage. The unique thing about this play, however, is that its main character – you – are also its main audience. The effect of this is to imply that you are not EXACTLY Artemiy Burakh – that you are merely an actor, playing his role. Death is presented as a failure to adequately play the role – and that you should return to the stage to re-play that part CORRECTLY. This directly addresses one of the main issues dividing players from their character avatars in any video game; the player knows that they are not the same person as the character, and that whatever the character suffers isn’t necessarily what they, as players will suffer. However, in acknowledging the difference, and in allowing the player to see the backstage, the game blurs the distinction between player and player character, the worlds they operate in and the real world itself. There is more inherent emotional investment as you, The Player, are just as much a character as Artemiy Burakh ever is. Once this is established, the game is able to hit home with further themes that strengthen its emotional impact; though you are stepping into Artemiy’s shoes, the game is presented from the outset as a “re-do”; you are merely another actor, playing the same role. You are not special. You, despite your efforts, are not heroic. You are no more inherently meaningful than anyone else. The meaning you come to in the face of the absurd – in the face of death and senseless suffering – is entirely your own. Though, perhaps, the Stage Play narrative’s greatest strength lies in its Brechtian aspects. Brecht, a playwright who lived through the upheaval of the 20th century, including both World Wars, wrote a method of theater that questioned established norms, highlighting internal contradictions within society. Whilst many aspects of “Pathologic 2” could be analyzed with a Brechtian lens, the one that most stands out to me is Verfremdung, or the process of making the familiar seem strange. This process is carried out effectively within the ludonarrative; the design of the town streets seems akin to any other town – until the odd back-alleys and stairways that lead to nowhere start to build a sense of the alien. The people themselves seem like any other NPC townsfolk in any other game, until their strange customs and outward hostility make the player feel isolated and alone. Even the mechanical acts within the game – like the autopsy of a body – are rendered strange, even as the player has become used to them; after a certain number of player deaths, organs are replaced with cotton wool – and, within the Abattoir, replaced with spindles and junk. The counterbalance to such hostility are other methods employed by Brecht – the direct address of the audience by the Tragedeans, acting as characters’ consciences, is a stylistic choice that allows a character to be hostile to Artemiy, yet still sympathetic to the player. This serves a dual function; it both emphasizes Artemiy’s return to a culture that he no longer fully identifies with, immersing the player deeper into his emotional state – and it serves to make the game’s world feel more hostile and enigmatic to the player themselves. Further elements of this process – of engendering strangeness in previously familiar scenes – are found in the backstage; where, should you fail the game entirely, you will find the Bachelor and the Changeling – no longer as their aloof and enigmatic characters respectively, but as actors, nervously rehearsing their lines on the stage, alongside the ghosts of those who died – those, under your care, whom you failed to save. The purpose in all of this is to present an emotionally harrowing experience; it is not only jarring to see the backstage so abruptly, but also harrowing to see what could have been, to have all your failures laid bare – and their cost, the cost not only of lives, but of futures, presented so directly. You are at once in Artemiy’s shoes, feeling a sense of discomfort alongside him at such failures, and also being spoken to separately, as a player, and as an audience; you have failed. It is now time to try again. The final theme to be addressed is selfishness against selflessness. This is an ongoing tension within the game, and is found on every level of its design; the narrative of being a doctor presumes a sense of altruism and ethics, yet the survival horror setting presumes selfish self-defence. The rewards of altruistic actions may serve to further the plot, yet may also place the player at a precarious step closer to failure and death, prompting them to instead hoard their resources. Hitherto unethical acts – like looting houses, or roaming the streets at night as an armed thug – are often justified by violent characters as a means to care for their dependents, as society and its normal protections start to crumble. Conversely, seemingly noble acts, like the rescue of a baby, are rendered cynical and cheap, when they are merely false appearances of altruism for personal profit. There are certain all-pervasive themes within the games of Eastern Europe, especially when compared to similar Western titles; in many Western games, it’s very easy to be the Big Hero – the narrative and game design are crafted for you to have the biggest guns, run the fastest, achieve the most cool-looking feats or swing the shiniest sword. Heroism does not often get this portrayal in Eastern European games; titles such as “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” are famous for their desperation and poverty – scrabbling together what little resources you can to make it as far as you dare. Whilst this is a sweeping generalisation, this still applies to “Pathologic”; in many Western games, being a Good, Altruistic Person is easy – any player sacrifices are minimal, and any gain from selfishness is often unnecessary. Altruism is, ironically, often rewarded in these kinds of games. Playing the figure of the hero, you are responded to as a hero – you are praised and rewarded, given gratitude and gifts for your actions. Selflessness is easy when there is no risk to the self. Heroism is easy when you have the means to be heroic. The reverse is also true; heroism is truly difficult, and often hardly seems worth it, when you lack material means to BE a hero. Is selfless heroism even possible when mired in an environment of poverty and hand-to-mouth survival? Yet, if you aren’t the selfless hero, what are you? What can your role, as a doctor in an outbreak, truly be, if not altruistic and boundlessly compassionate? Who ARE you, if you aren’t attempting to do good and save lives? Narratively, the game pushes you to make multiple difficult decisions; even when you finally have resources, how do you spend them? Do you choose to heal yourself, potentially increasing your capacity to save more lives, or do you use what precious cures you have on the kids you’re supposed to protect? Do you burn out your other resources saving the townsfolk you don’t even like? Do you steal food from a family’s home to survive another day – likely damning someone else to starve in the process? Or do you accept and use the food that the orphan kids give you – likely letting them starve, too? Will you submit to the plague, massively crippling yourself, to keep it from claiming Murky’s life instead? I should be clear, though; the game is not presenting selfishness as morally evil – but often a basic necessity. Without looking out for yourself, you will die. The oft-used metaphor of securing your own oxygen mask before helping another is present – and yet, in this world, if it were only possible to help others after achieving safety and security for yourself, you would never help anyone, and all would die to the plague. Every mechanic within the game is designed to make the player feel fragile, and I will discuss them in brief in the following section; how they contribute to the overall sense of desperation – and, by extension, how these push the player into facing the tension between selfishness and altruism. There are six major survival counters to manage within the game; health – which is self-explanatory, and serves as hit-points; hunger – a meter that is constantly trickling downward, and if left unaddressed will cause you to starve to death; thirst, which determines your max sprint-meter, and thus how effective you may be in a fight; exhaustion, which also trickles downward, and will cause you to collapse and die if you ignore your need for sleep; immunity, which provides you some resilience to the plague, though will start to burn low in infected areas; and, finally, infection – a tracker that only starts to appear once you have been infected with the plague. Aside from your own survival statistics, you also have your reputation to consider – if your reputation is high, people will allow you into their homes – if your reputation is low, you will be chased away, shops will refuse to trade with you, and people will assault you in the street. Each of these counters has a complex relationship with the others; your ability to keep going in the game is often limited by the necessity of eating – your precious little cash is often spent on trying to find food. If you can’t find enough in time, you may find yourself sacrificing your sleep – which, also, will eat away at your health if left unchecked. If you choose to sleep and manage your exhaustion instead, your hunger will still increase, and potentially kill you. You could take a gamble and satiate your hunger by eating higher-risk foods looted from infected houses, but this may well destroy your immunity, or even cause infection. You could fight other crooks and criminals and steal what foods they have, or loot burnt-out houses – but the likelihood of being severely injured or dying to knife-wounds in the process is high – and, even if you get away without being stabbed in return, fighting and sprinting will drain your thirst, limiting your ability to run away from other fights. Should you decide instead to steal food from an uninfected house, and uninfected family, instead, the fall in your reputation may make the town impossible to traverse – where townsfolk, and later even soldiers, will attack or shoot you on sight. Thus, the simple act of finding enough to eat in a day becomes steadily harder; like a house of cards, any single measure of your survival, if disrupted or left unchecked, can cause all the others to fall apart. Like most millennials know; self-care can be incredibly difficult, and once the first few pieces fall apart, the rest often follows. This can often lead to a death spiral – where a player has backed themselves into a corner, and find themselves starving, destitute, exhausted and alone. The steep difficulty of this survival matches the narrative themes of the game; life is often cheap and survival is not guaranteed – even for major characters. You are fragile, and your ability to keep yourself alive hangs by a thin thread – one in which you need to take every resource and advantage you can get, even if it means sacrificing your altruism or other morality to do so. Even if you do take advantage of everything you can, death and failure are still practically an inevitability; your destiny is to die, and die again. With such an emphasis on raw survival, the town’s material conditions and economy also become a central focus of the game. The most obvious example can, again, be found in dealing with hunger and food. Between the first and second days of the game, prices for essential resources, including basic food and medicine, skyrockets. As the town is isolated from the outside world and external trade halts, it becomes apparent that whatever the town has is ALL it has. The townsfolk panic-buy what little consumable resources there are, and money stops having meaning; when the price of bread is thirty coins on one day, and nearly three hundred on another, and three thousand on the following, cash has only as much value as people’s faith in it. This steadily goes further and further out of control, and eventually, by the mid-point of the game, cash is dispensed with altogether for buying food, and replaced only with Food Coupons. Of course, the daily reward in coupons, given by the shambles of governmental authority, is not actually sufficient to trade for enough food to survive. The various authorities are shown to attempt to divide what little remaining resources there are equitably, but as scarcity increases, it becomes inevitably apparent that they are unable to provision even basic necessities. You find yourself selling whatever you have on you, just in order not to starve. Once more, as noted in the reviews for the original 2005 “Pathologic”, you may often find yourself in a position where you’re trading away your only gun, just for a loaf of bread. As “legitimate” means of survival are slowly taken from you, you may find yourself treading steadily less and less ethical grounds; you can trade away the antibiotics and tinctures that you should be using to save people. You can go into infected districts, and trade basic medicine to sick townsfolk, at extortionate prices. Worse still, you may find yourself prowling the streets, breaking into houses just to find SOMETHING to eat for another day, or mugging people for what little resources they have. With just the slightest push, you find yourself acting just as violently as the night-time thugs, or the soot-covered looters. This, also, links back to the game’s themes of selfishness and altruism, and to the sense of the absurd; in facing such abject suffering, where basic survival requires compromising your morality, what can you hang your identity on? If one’s own morality and external material conditions are so intimately linked, can you truly claim to be a good person? Who ARE you, if you are merely acting a role – a role entirely subject to external circumstances? Combat within “Pathologic 2” is, as Hobbes put it; nasty, brutish and short. You are a doctor, not a soldier, and fist-fighting thirty men singlehandedly is not within your capabilities. You are fragile. Often, you are exhausted or starving – you are not the superman-style hero of most video games. Combat is unforgiving – though, not in the "Dark-Souls" sense of difficulty-and-then-triumph – but in that it is unfair, dishonourable, and extremely real. Street fighting is, much as it is in real life, dangerous, ignoble and unnecessary. As soon as a weapon is brought out, the fight is already over. Every person is fragile – and even a dulled knife will take a grown man down in seconds, yourself included. Fighting is, more often than not, about hiding in the shadows and getting the drop on your opponent, or running away from a fight altogether – or, if you’re displaying some measure of bravado, bringing a gun. Every scuffle is therefore laced with desperation; only a few hits will disorient and damage you, any wounds from a knife are likely to be fatal, and even if you don’t immediately die, the damage to your health only makes you MORE vulnerable to the hunger, the exhaustion, and the plague. Oftentimes, a “successful” fight, where you best or kill your opponent and make off with the loot, is still a loss; the damage to your health, even if you survive, is the recipe for your later demise when the other survival meters catch up with you. If you do decide to fight, the act of doing so is still costly; every slash of a knife degrades its quality, and eventually they become blunt and broken, forcing you to spend your own resources acquiring a new one, or to spend other resources re-sharpening the one you already own. Guns, too, suffer degradation with every shot fired; and, beyond this, each bullet you waste is worth a small fortune – which you may have instead spent on medicines or food. Fighting is expensive; protecting yourself is often better served with your feet than with your fists. The nature of this harsh combat explores, further, themes of selfishness; is it cowardice to not intervene when the townspeople are lynching one another? Is it possible to be brave, when the only reward for such bravery is either immediate death, or significant injury, or a slower death later? It forces, further, the themes of the absurd; there is no meaning in a fight without honour – it is merely desperation over dwindling resources. To hang one’s sense of self and one’s sense of morality over such a petty act seems childish, at best. In a game that features such consistent depictions of suffering, violence is handled as another tragedy, not as glory. This difficulty in daily survival is increased by several orders of magnitude if you become infected; the plague will increase the rate at which your exhaustion and your hunger run out, enhancing the sense of desperation. When infected, your health drains at a constant rate, placing you at constant risk of death; this rate at which you die increases, as the level of infection increases. In turn, the rate at which infection increases is determined by immunity – a temporary buffer against clouds of infection and touching dirty objects or infected people – but it is an easily-consumed buffer. Often, the mere act of walking through an infected district of town will entirely eat away all your immunity, rendering you extremely vulnerable to the plague. The plague, in turn, renders you extremely vulnerable to all manners of other death; starvation, exhaustion, or fighting in the street become much, much more dangerous. And, once infected, there is nearly no cure – certainly not one that can be found easily, and not without significant cost. Catching this deadly disease has other, non-physical costs, too; if you are identified as a carrier, arsonists will throw Molotov Cocktails at you in the streets. People will treat you as a pariah, shunning you away, refusing to trade with you, or, as the army arrives, may attack you, or target you in the sights of their flamethrowers. This death spiral caused by the infection is EXTREMELY difficult to manage; even if you have good sense of using resources and time efficiently, the antibiotics required merely to keep the pestilence AT BAY – not even to cure it – are expensive, and also damage your health; the painkillers and other medicines used to increase your health will cause exhaustion, and to manage the exhaustion requires sleep – which, in turn, allows more time to pass, and allows the infection to return. It becomes extremely easy to become overwhelmed, and soon you find yourself barely able to complete any of your objectives or quests – the simple act of Trying To See Tomorrow consumes all your resources and leaves you destitute, emotionally and physically. There is a sense of degradation in all of this; that this infection renders you less than the person you were before. This is reflected in the art design; those who are infected become shambling, bandaged creatures, faces covered as their identity is taken from them. Those who are adjacent to the infection, like the looters and the vandals, attempt to eke out a barely-sufficient survival – all these people, people who may once have been moral, or trying to do right by their loved ones, are reduced to mere roaming beasts – tearing at each other in some Dante-esque image of Hell. The Sand Plague, Nature, and Death itself – which, in many ways, are all the same thing – bring mankind low by forcing us to admit our most base instincts, abandoning lofty ideals – something that you, as a player, will also experience. Though you may cling to whatever ideal you wish and may avoid becoming a COMPLETE monster in the process, you will still confront yourself as an animal; mortal, vulnerable, and small. The fear, apprehension and sense of despair induced in the player is entirely intentional; the game tells you as much in the Theater of Cruelty. The sense of inevitability, of being destined to fail, of even almost finding some comfort in lying down and accepting fate, is played out as you face an insurmountable foe – not even a foe that you can train and become stronger and face with new knowledge. Your foe is your own decay. And, to me, that enemy causes me far more fear than any monster. There is one final mechanic I’d like to discuss here – which, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting mechanics of the game. Death, and a Game Over, is normally a sign that you failed in your role; you did not succeed, this is not how the story is supposed to go, reload and retry and do it right this time. But not quite so in “Pathologic”. You are not granted such a clean Game Over ending; death is not The End. Death is merely a part of life, and a part of the game. And it has permanent consequences; each time a player dies, they find themselves backstage – and, after a short conversation with the infernal master of the Theater of Cruelty, they find themselves punished. The first few deaths seem to pull their punches – until you quite quickly find that your maximum health points are being whittled away to fractions of what it was before – or your exhaustion or your hunger increases at an even faster rate than previously. At first this seems phenomenally cruel; if you found the game so difficult as to fail and die, the game’s response is to INCREASE ITS OWN DIFFICULTY. It also seems impossible to ignore the consequences of this – these penalties are applied retroactively to every save game on your profile. You cannot save-scum your way out of the punishment of death, and every last death is meaningful. There are multiple purposes to this; a player may not be so reckless with Artemiy as to throw his life away meaninglessly; there is also a further sense of immersion when there is a permanent punishment to the player, a greater sense of caution and care – and, as a consequence, a greater sense of fear and desperation when things are looking bad. When Artemiy starts to die, the frantic search for a way – ANY way to save yourself becomes that much more real for the player. The game further prevents you from save-scumming by presenting you only limited places you can save the game, and by forcing you to continue on even after you’ve died and been punished; you cannot undo the consequences of death, so there is no point in turning back. The game forces you, much as in real life, to live with your decisions – even the mistakes. It becomes apparent, though, that, despite the fact the game punishes you for dying, it also expects you to die. You are told not to fail, and yet EXPECTED to fail. But this, too, is part of the play. The emotionally harrowing effect is the intended effect – the fear and desperation that can only come from applying permanent, out-of-game, player consequences to in-game failure. Because you cannot understand the value of hope, or the value of determination, without understanding the lows of despair. And this is a fact that most reviewers completely fucking missed. Yes, I’m talking about you, Brendan. You’re a fucking moron. The Theater of Cruelty is a Theater of Death – a pantomime of suffering, and a look, directly in the eye, at existential dread. You cannot come to a conclusion of what to do in the face of the absurd without first encountering the absurd. And the game, quite blatantly, gives its conclusions; though you may die, though you may [fail], though you may be forced to endure and live with the permanent consequences of your mistakes, you’re still encouraged to pick yourself up and carry on. Though it presents a scenario in which victory seems impossible, it encourages you to keep trying anyway. Though it presents a world where doing the right thing and pressing on forward might have no guarantee of reward, it pushes you to keep going, regardless. The game tells you, openly, that you will lose; that you cannot save everyone, that it’s a fool’s errand to even try – and then, with a wink and a smile, it tells you to BE that fool. “Pathologic” is, ultimately, a game about hope and determination, in the face of complete existential destruction. It’s easy to have hope in a world of smiles and rainbows – in a world where you know the future is guaranteed to be fine. It’s so much harder to have hope when the world is falling apart around you, and so much harder to persuade yourself to carry on when you’ve already made so many mistakes, and so many are suffering, and everything seems so pointless. “Pathologic” shows you that, sometimes, you might just have it in you to carry on anyway – you, personally, the player on the other side of the screen. And that, to me, is the most potent message that any video game has ever had. I hope it’s apparent by now that I truly love this game – I love its scope, I love its literary ambitions, and I love that it challenges me in a genuinely deep, existential way. For me, the themes of this game spoke to my real, lived experience as an emergency physician; it portrayed a doctor, not as a heroic power fantasy, or some hyper-intelligent pseudo-Sherlock character, but as an exhausted, overwrought individual, trying to do their best and save who they can in a universe that, ultimately, does not care about anybody. It showed the nature of despair in the face of relentless, meaningless suffering, the frustrations of dealing with abject poverty, and the difficulty that can sometimes be faced in the simple acts of daily survival. But, more than just this, I feel that it also showed something important, about determination, and about hope. Despite encountering often-violent tragedy and death on a regular basis, I choose to carry on a very exhausting line of work – for reasons I sometimes find it difficult to fully articulate. Yet, these same reasons are what kept me coming back to this game – what kept me going, even after facing inevitable failure and loss. My own sense of Meaning, in the face of the Absurd, is the same sense of Meaning that “Pathologic” leads its players to; You have to live with your mistakes. Things go wrong – often outwith your control. You can only do so much. You cannot save everyone. It’d be foolish to even try. But hey. Let’s try anyway. And let’s keep trying, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll make it through. Special thanks in this video go out to Allamander for some incredibly dedicated editing work. I’d also like to thank Hbomberguy, LordMandalore and RagnarRox for reaching out to me or otherwise giving me a shout-out whilst I was working on this video. I’d like to thank the entire talented team at Ice Pick Lodge, with particular thanks to Khauvinkh, Alphyna and Mr. Dybowski himself for being kind enough to answer my questions, and to Kit for providing extra video material. I can’t recommend this game highly enough – if this excessively long video wasn’t testament to that, then I’m not sure there is anything else that I could do. But, genuinely, this game is wonderful. If you have the inclination, I’d really recommend that you buy it. I’ve put the link to its page on Steam and GOG on the description below. And, as well as the main game, “The Marble Nest”, which is a standalone DLC covering one day as the Bachelor. I’ll also link that in the description below. Thank you for listening, and thank you for going through this far, far too long essay. I wish the team the best, and I honestly really am looking forward to making the next videos about the Bachelor’s and Changeling’s campaigns. I don’t generally like doing the whole “youtuber call to action” thing, but if you did fancy giving this video a like or a comment, or subscribing, then please do hit that little “Subscribe” button. Thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed this rambling mess!
