I’m picking an angle here. I’m picking a side. Opportunity cost is an important part of arthouse video game developer Ice-Pick Lodge’s showstopping 2019 reprisal of their cult classic 2005 Pathologic (Мор. Утопия), but it’s only kind of what I’m gonna talk about. It’s on the way there. Pathologic 2 is a game with a lot of moving parts, a lot of interlocking machinery. Too much to talk about, I have to whittle it down.
There’s the gamified suffering, and the Brechtian theatrics, and the nihilism, and the question of what it means to heal a broken world. There’s the promise of utopia, and the divide between the world of children and the world of adults, and the whispers of armless rats and motes of plague, and the comedy antics of circus performers who are stealing babies. There’s sacrifice, and death, and love, and choosing. Like answering questions, like a test, like a trial, like an inquisition.
There are many things at the heart of Pathologic 2. It’s a game with a very big heart (*wink wink*). I can’t possibly talk about it all. But let me talk. Any choice is right so long as it is willed, after all.
Light spoilers ahead.
So, let’s start at the start.
What is happening in Pathologic 2?
You are Artemy Burakh, a surgeon whose education has been suspended by the arrival of a strange letter from your father telling you to come home. Your home is the Town-On-Gorkhon, a fictional steppe town based loosely on rural Russia bordering Kazakhstan and Mongolia but not actually Russian and with an alternate world history. Upon arrival you discover that your father and his colleague Simon Kain have been murdered and you have been framed for the crime. You must uncover the mystery of his murder and its connection to the strange happenings and omens of plague that have arisen in your absence. If you can survive, that is.
What is happening in Pathologic 2?
Mark Imortell is putting on a second showing of his ambitious play, after deeming his show’s first run a flop. He casts you, the player, the actor, as the star. Men in black are Tragedians, stagehands. Figures in bird masks, Executors, act as greek chorus and the voice of the play’s antagonist, the plague.
What is happening in Pathologic 2?
You’re playing a video game. Don’t let the bars fall to zero. Something bad might happen if you do.
Now all this might seem confusing but if you played the game, which I hope you did (and if you didn’t I hope you do), you’ll know that it doesn’t start at the start, it starts at the end. The town is ravaged, the children are dead, there is no more time to find a cure for the Sand Pest which has consumed all. Then Mark Imortell shows up and offers you another shot. But this time, things will be different.
Mise En Scene: A Journey Home
I’m a returning player to Pathologic. One of those weirdos who loved it when it was a low poly jankfest starvation simulator. And I love it now that it has returned as a high poly jankfest starvation simulator. I thought the casting of the Haruspex, Artemy Burakh, as the game’s first chapter this time around was very apt. His story is a story of an estranged homecoming. The strangeness of not knowing what to expect, not knowing who or what will be waiting for him.
I went through it experiencing a lot of synchronicity to the character in that way: Hey, is Grief still living in the warehouses? Oh, the bar that always plays that one song, I remember that place. What is a Fingernail and why does it look like a coin? Holy hell, there are gondolas on the river now!
Despite theatricality and postmodern flair abounding, there was an earnestness and an immediacy of storytelling that I hadn’t really been expecting. Pathologic was a game that wore its esotericism and intellectualism on its sleeve and I was expecting no different from the re-imagining. And it’s not that I didn’t get that but I also found myself surprised by how human it all was, the town, the Bound (the important NPCs), the problems and how you were asked to help fix them.
On the first day alone I found myself taking refuge from the townsmen trying to beat the dirt out of me by hiding in Lara Ravel’s house, under the care of her outwardly cold tenderness. Lara Ravel, the nicest girl in Town, one of Burakh’s dear childhood friends. Lara’s connection to Artemy is new to P2 but I was sold on it instantly, Lara’s first conversation filled with this stilted disappointment. She thought he was coming home because he had heard that her father, a general in some recently ended war, had been discharged disgracefully and sent to death. Artemy, and you the player, don’t know a damn thing about it, of course, and bumble through the conversation as gracelessly as only the protagonist of a video game can.
What struck me about the mood of that conversation was not the drama, not the disagreement, but how it wasn’t a disagreement, how it wasn’t an argument, it was just a human failure to connect where to say there were sides to be taken would be uncharitable, cruel. Lara was human. In a way that surprised me.
But sides are part and parcel of this whole affair you see. A question, left unanswered, will engender varying solutions.
Act I: Where the Lines Are Drawn
The world of Pathologic is a world of conflicting ideals. Beliefs that don’t get along being pushed to extremes of action are the game’s bread and blood. From the fundamental structure of having three viewpoints to play each belonging to a healer whose idea of healing often comes directly opposed to that of their colleagues, to the mythology and lore of the Town-on-Gorkhon.
A past marked by two dead Mistresses, one a weeping figure of mercy and the other a fearsome femme fatale. A future confused by rival gangs of children, one taking the stance that humans are connected invisibly to animals that can be heard but not seen, the other believing that humans themselves are unintelligent animals, and soon the time will come where they’ll be shedding their fur and experiencing what it truly means to be a person.
Nowhere is the strange duality of the game’s world more pronounced than in the presence of the Kin, the indigenous people who live among but not quite within the Town and its people.
See, the Town-on-Gorkhon is a colonial town on the verge of industrialization, or perhaps even more than that: transcendence, ascension. And it is being pulled two ways the way colonial settlements at the turn of the century often were.
That’s right, it’s Ye Olde Postcolonialism discourse.
On the one hand, the Kin are at best haphazardly integrated into the Town’s society and at worst they are reviled and actively brutalized. At the beginning of Artemy’s scenario he can witness one of the Herb Brides, a woman of the Kin, being burnt alive on the premise that Simon Kain and the Elder Burakh’s deaths are to be blamed on a she-demon of the Kin, a Shabnak-Adyr.
On the other hand, the fact of this belief in clay demons carrying through even the non-Kin townsfolk is one among many signs of how deeply ingrained the Kin and their culture truly are to the steppe town. The icons of the Kin’s sacred bulls and their tribal art are abundant, their charms hold good value in the game’s trade system, and the common townsfolk have adopted a lot of Kin beliefs that are quite religious in nature, such as the sacredness of bodies such that they shouldn’t be cut into other than by appointed Menkhu (High Doctor, Knower of Lines) or Yagarchin (Butchers).
The town has some rather… realistic relations with the Kin: uses their labor and turns to their medicine quite readily while seemingly relegating them as people to the slums and the outskirts while calling backwards their less palatable beliefs about pouring blood on the soil to make herbs grow and not being individuals but being part of a herd.
Lara Ravel is the nicest girl in town, unless you bring up the steppe women, swiftly and angrily correcting you if you ever refer to her as Basaghan (Woman in Kin Language).
The Bachelor as a big city doctor from the source of colonial force in the steppe seems to think of the Kin as far beneath him, and the Haruspex as beneath him for being one of them and practicing their medicines.
Oh? Did I forget to mention that? Artemy Burakh, the playable character, is half-Kin on his father’s side. Which makes him next in line for the status of Menkhu, provided he (well, you, the player) can figure out what that means. This backwards tribe of bull worshippers are your backwards tribe.
Big Vlad Olgimsky, owner of the town’s meat factory and thus richest man in town, reintroduces himself to Artemy as a benefactor by saying something to the effect of “There are no your people and my people anymore. Just people.” He locks his laborers, the majority of them Kin, inside one of his concrete factory blocks once the plague starts, his reasoning being that it would save them. It doesn’t.
Act II: There’s Nothing To Love About Me
I’m scared I’ve made it seem cut and dry. Binary thinking always works that way, where when you boil something down to two choices, it’s always going to seem like one side is good and therefore the other by default is evil. But Pathologic 2 is deft, it’s tremendous. The story is never as simple as one or the other. Never as simple as choosing an option and knowing that it is good because the text is blue. Because while there are two dead mistresses, one White and one Scarlet, there is a third which still lives as the game goes on, unsure of what kind of mistress she is meant to be.
There are three healers. One represents one side and one represents another and one represents how we have run out of sides. Wait that’s not right. Huh.
So I think it’s time to swerve here, let me talk about something I really love about this game. Let’s talk about the kids.
They’re good kids and I love them. I love them so much.
Now, I align heavily with the Haruspex among all the healers. He comes to the Town as a native but also as someone who doesn’t quite fit in and doesn’t quite agree with all the Town’s strange traditions. A man of two worlds, bears the privilege of a townsman, an educated one at that, but also the burden of his duty to the Kin and to his father’s legacy. He has a hard time connecting to even people he has long histories with. He’s uninterested in romantic love. He adores the town’s children, as his father did. He talks to bulls.
Maybe these aren’t true of everyone’s Artemy. But they’re true of mine.
So as I said I came to the game as a returning player. I played with these kids before, and what’s more I knew that of all the Bound, the children were the ones who actually “belonged” to me as the Haruspex. In the original game, you would have had to save all of them to access the Haruspex’s ending.
I expected to like them, or at least roleplay that I did. I primed myself for it. But I was surprised by how easy it was and how enjoyable it was. How believable I found Artemy’s relationship to this ragtag gang of Peanuts characters that the plague was threatening to take from me.
Every moment with them was such a joy, such an amazing experience. From the first time I had a real interaction with them, Notkin putting me on trial to figure out whether murder is acceptable, to the first time he got infected and I coughed up my one (1) singular sample of expensive magic cocaine to save him. From the moment Murky shows up on the street crying because Sticky got mad at her and she’s never had a brother before and she doesn’t want him to be mad, to when I meet her “friend” and then shout about how if my child told me there was a monster at her window I would go check. To trekking all the way across the map to make sure she was okay after.
I swear I spent a good few hours of the last few days of the game running around chewing coffee beans and screaming “You’re not taking my goddamn kidddddddds!” Nearly had a heart attack at the last round of infection-to-death rolls.
I saved all of them. I even saved my childhood friends and some of those other weirdos I had to do quests for. Even the baby stealer. Well, I wasn’t really trying to save the baby stealer, but she made it anyway, okay?
I look back at playing and I feel proud of saving what I loved. What seemed most important to me.
But what does that mean? Because there’s more to it than getting to the end of the game with your Bound still alive, though that in itself was a nightmare of a self-made challenge. Because the question stands, what does it mean to heal a world, a people? To mend a reality that’s being pulled in two directions, tearing strange wounds that someone would be lucky to witness for what they were, let alone pull the pieces back together again?
I had to decide what that meant. Over the original Pathologic, I think this is a great, unique virtue to its successor. I actually had to play doctor. Determine the nature of the illness, and prescribe a cure.
ENDING Spoilers ahead.
Act III: The Sky Is My Witness
I return to this sentiment: there is too much to be said about Pathologic. There is so much and so much of it is interconnected, woven in fantastic and unusual ways. I wish I could show people the whole tapestry, instead of one small piece I’ve curated so I can talk about it. But I guess I can. Just play the game.
And yes, I could sink another few thousand words into going over more of it, but I feel it does a better service to the game to say one thing about it and say it well. Or you know, acceptably. And there are other places out there covering the broad strokes. The downside of this philosophy is that I’m fairly deep into this essay and I haven’t even mentioned the impossible gravity defying spire that has been impaled into the earth on one side of the Town.
The Polyhedron. It’s kinda one of the first things you notice, really. There’s a bunch of kids living in it that are maybe altering reality.
Anyway, let’s talk about the end.
Twelve days, twelve long days. Long. Hard. Difficult. Grueling, really.
I had to restart the game because I died so many times during that Worm quest that I ended up taking the deal, Rubin, why did you put me through that. You pushed me to the devil’s hand, you stupid idiot —
The end, yes, the end. Right.
So as you play through the Haruspex’s campaign, you learn, in no uncertain terms, that well, the earth is alive.
The Earth is alive, the myths are true, there’s a giant heart which the Polyhedron’s construction has opened a wound to and what’s more is that the wound has already healed, and healed wrong.
See, the Earth is the source of the magic: the impossible towers, the strange architecture affecting people’s mental states, the herbs that you’ve been using to create cures, the inhuman creatures, the ancient bulls that reached the sky’s height, and most importantly, the Sand Pest.
The plague itself is the Earth’s will. Boddho, the Kin’s mother goddess, has unleashed it upon man. Should you ever be infected, you might in places even hear her plead her case, how men are body-worms on her body, parasites that imagine themselves to be sapient, and how killing them returns them to her, to oneness, to the Kin’s herd.
So expectations would indicate that this itself is an infection caused by the evil Polyhedron, symbol of modernity and colonization, right? And if you fulfill all your quests and destroy the Polyhedron, the Earth will be saved and Pocahontas will see Grandmother Willow one more time before going to England?
That’s what I thought anyway. And I was wrong. As I said, the wound had healed. There was no going back to a time before the tower was built. Before the Town and the Earth had merged into one body. Before the Kin and the townsfolk’s cultures became enmeshed beyond disentanglement. The Polyhedron was a fascinating lesion, and perhaps its intrusion set off the events, but now it and the cancer created in its wake were part of that form, irrevocably.
The blood I had been using to make the panacea that would cure my kids… it was the Earth’s blood. The blood of the immense living creature beneath the soil. To have enough of it to cure everyone, the Polyhedron would have to be toppled yes, at which point the Earth’s blood would gush out, and this miraculous body would die.
All of its magic would go with it. The Kin’s magic. Your magic.
Good, Evil. The Polyhedron, The Town. Children, Adults. Illness, Cure.
It is not as simple as one or the other. There is only one body shared among all these conflicting ideals. Whose body is it?
Who gets to inherit the earth?
On the final day of the Haruspex’s campaign, there is a moment where all of the creatures of miracle and magic, the plaguedancing Herb Brides and the worm-bodied Odonghs and the strange bone doll Albinos come to you, and plead that you don’t kill them. Let the plague take the town. Let the magic run free. Let the Polyhedron stand.
Shortly after you are spoken to by two children. They say the Polyhedron controls them, does something to them to make them love it so much that hundreds if not thousands of them have taken refuge inside it. They ask that you destroy it and return them to being just children, with children’s lives.
Before that, in a private conversation, Sticky, your beautiful adopted son, tells you about something he saw. Out on the steppe, far away, an Albino. This is a reference to the first game where he had some fairly comic quests involving him hunting the strange creatures. But here it takes on a different tone.
If you pull the plug, is there a hope that somewhere out there, magic will go on?
I thought about the Kin. I thought about how they loved me. Sacrificed for me. Showed up with illegal organs at my door one day knowing the punishment for cutting as a non-Menkhu was death.
The Kin wanted me to be Menkhu. Wanted me to be Isidor. To choose for them. To be the herdsman for their kine. In fact, it wasn’t until that last moment that they ever really expressed a plea for me to make a specific choice, rather than simply to choose.
Which was the illness? Which was the cure?
I chose. The Polyhedron fell.
I couldn’t sacrifice what was human for what was miraculous.
Act III, Again: A Machine That Makes Time
Taya and Oyun survived my playthrough. Both of them are Kin as Kin can be. So I don’t know where people get off saying the choice to destroy the Polyhedron kills all the Kin. Perhaps the thought is, as has been for a lot of colonialism, that if the nonwhite are not magical and they are clearly not people, then they must not exist at all. I thought that was comforting. That ultimately what I had decided was that the Kin were flesh and blood people and not just an expression of Boddho’s magic. I didn’t exactly have that thought before I pulled the trigger, but still.
Day 12, the postgame, where you wander around town and talk to all the Bound who made it, has a strange bittersweet quality to it. It’s not a resounding celebration. No firecrackers and clapping. You just walk around and talk to everyone. Introduce your kids to their new house. Catch up with your old friends. Get scolded by the Changeling who thinks she’s going to go back to being made of clay as a result of your decision. Find the Bachelor drunk as all hell and promise him that someday new magical towers will be built.
It’s nothing special. It’s an ordinary life. It’s boring. It’s precious.
Then, of course, you talk to Mark Imortell in the Theater and he spews some gibberish and like, dude, did you see I got the Imago achievement? Shut the fuck up for one second please, I’m tired of it.
It took me a few months before I went back, loaded up my save, and chose the other ending. Just to see it.
If I wanted some spectacle, hoo boy. Everything about the ending where you let the Town die over the Polyhedron is like your most vivid nightmare. Darkness and plague inherit the earth. The townsfolk are driven from the Steppe, potentially already dead. I walked up and talked to them wading in black water and realized they have no recollection of me, not my friends, not the elder children, not even the Bachelor Dankovsky who so badly wanted to save the Polyhedron. I teleported from place to place in a state of confusion, and Aspity, dead in my playthrough, returned just to congratulate me on having fulfilled my father’s legacy. Now the Kin had merged together into giant auroch bulls that towered over the buildings, the new mistresses overlooking them from atop the Polyhedron, speaking as if they were looking into a future I had no way of seeing. All that I had loved was gone. Even the Kin as I knew them were gone.
It didn’t say it was the Bad Ending but it made me feel worse than any Bad Ending ever could. And I realized, this is the power of the new Pathologic.
The original Pathologic was a game of ideas. Characters casually mentioning materialism, individualism, utopianism, truth. Big concepts, and I loved it because I was a pretentious teenager who read Plato and Nietzche and thought that justified me being a jerk to everyone. In other words, I used to be much more sympathetic to the Bachelor.
Pathologic 2 isn’t bereft of philosophizing. It doesn’t have less. People will still rant to you about what the nature of a town really is, or quiz you on what you think of the plague from a theoretical standpoint.
But it also makes you care. A lot. About people and doing right by them. About figuring out what you believe to be right and choosing, the game never telling you if what you chose is even the correct path.
Any choice is right, so long as it is willed. That’s the truth.
The game asked me on so many levels to take a look at how time is burning right through and think about what it means to do good, and it gave me all the reason to do good because like that first chat with Lara, I soon realized all these Bound, these people, they were just people. Humans. Not stand-ins for abstract concepts like I felt them to be in the first game, not explicit abstract concepts like in IPL’s other classic game, The Void. They’re kids and parents, husbands and wives, and lonely anime villains living in warehouses. They don’t deserve to die in plague-ridden agony and I knew it and when they did, I felt real failure, real loss.
And it’s truly new. In the original Pathologic I was killing people left, right, and center just to mug them for their stuff. Here, I can’t think of one moment I attacked not out of self defense or for quest reasons. Because I was trying to do good. There’s a game with the kids where they ask you to trade stuff through collection boxes that basically works on a “leave the money” honor system and I tried my best to keep to it even though there is no proof doing so does anything. Because I was trying to do good. I fought all those Worms for you Rubin, even though you’re an idiot, a stupid, stupid idiot. BECAUSE —
Imagine that. A game that asks you to think about what it means to be good in a world with limited resources. An apocalyptic world where the earth has been changed irrevocably by human action. By colonialism. By ecological interference. By industrialization. By war. Where there is no going back to a time when those things hadn’t changed who we are. Where the illness and the body are one and the same. Where being good sometimes, a lot of the time, makes you suffer. Where the choices you make are about what is worth saving, and who inherits the future.
Your choice may not be perfect, a lot of the time it’s wrong, but you must choose. The illness is yours to diagnose, and the cure yours to administer.
There are some people who probably feel as strongly about choosing to save the Polyhedron as I do about choosing to save the Town and that’s amazing to me. That both of those beliefs come from the sentiment of wanting to save something worth loving. Something human. Something miraculous. Something both and neither and like nothing else.
Get it? I’m talking about the game. I lov gam. Buy Pathologic 2, ya oynons.
