Review | Pathologic 3: Quarantine - Vicious, Painful, And Mesmerising
I have only myself to blame.
I'm sick of sensationalised descriptions of the Pathologic series. These games don’t hate you, nor are they “objectively the most important games ever made.” Removed from the endless hyperbole surrounding this cult series, whatever you’ve heard about the franchise is probably true. Pathologic is cruel. It’s delicately written yet often impossible to parse. It’s funny, terrifying, and frustrating. If someone tells you, “Pathologic 2 is the best game I've ever played,” and someone else tells you, “Pathologic 2 is the worst game I've ever played,” it's safe to assume neither is lying. As a fan of the series for many years, the word I would use above all else to describe Pathologic is “destabilising.” So it bears repeating. I have only myself to blame.
Pathologic 3: Quarantine has once again pulled the rug out from under me.
I suppose some context is required. Pathologic is a game where you're given 12 days to stop a plague from destroying a peculiar little town cut off from the rest of the world. This translates, in gameplay, to walking around doing sidequests and trading with the townsfolk for materials to survive, all the while the town devolves daily, and safety becomes a luxury you can't afford. It's mean. You'll go broke. You'll starve. You'll demolish your moral compass just to get by. You'll try to save people, and you'll often fail. You'll be forced to lie. You'll find yourself being lied to, not as a big twist before the final act, but simply because sometimes, people just do that. Promising leads will turn up dry and seemingly unimportant errands will be the deciding factor in a character's survival. Worst of all, there will never be enough time to do everything. Characters will go about their day, with or without you. Think Majora's Mask, except you can't rewind the clock, and missing a quest usually leads to someone dying — probably someone you really needed to stay alive.
Pathologic 2 is a remake of Pathologic 1. Kind of. You see, in Pathologic 1, there are three playable characters, each with unique abilities, quests, and methods of engaging with the town. Pathologic 2 only adapted one of these three routes, that of Artemy Burakh, also known as "the Haruspex." It's prettier and more accessible than Pathologic 1. It's also, miraculously, even meaner, in its own way. But at least they added a run button.
Pathologic 3 is yet another remake of the original, this time adapting the route of Daniil Dankovsky, or "the Bachelor." The game’s not out yet, but the studio, Ice-Pick Lodge, released a demo earlier this month — Pathologic 3: Quarantine. Of course, by "demo" I mean "standalone story set before, during, and after the events of Pathologic 3, which, as a reminder, isn't out yet." And that's what we're talking about today.
Simple, right? There's more. In the series, every day spent in the town is punctuated by an optional trip to the local theatre. There, players can watch the rehearsal of a new scene, depicting strangely prescient impressions of the day to follow. These scenes are spoken over by an unseen narrator who taunts the player directly with just how bad things are about to get. Things are always about to get bad. Both Pathologic and Pathologic 2 frequently suggest that who the player is really controlling is merely an actor in these plays, assigned the role of the Bachelor, the Haruspex, or the original title's third playable character, the Changeling. Pathologic 2, in particular, really hammers this idea in.
The games then contradict themselves — these games enjoy contradicting themselves — with the revelation that it's really all just been a game of pretend being played by two children, and the character you've been controlling is nothing more than a doll, "ruining the game" by refusing to submit to the plague even as the kids make things more and more unfair. Still not content, Pathologic then adds yet another twist, with the final word on its own canon stating that, actually, it's just a video game. Well, duh, right? Every game is just a video game. That may be true, but most games don't tell you that, nor do they drop their own developers in as characters, eager to lay bare the game's themes and mechanics.
So, what is it, then — a play, a game of pretend, or a piece of software? The series toys with the idea that all three of its contradictory truths can be accepted at once. The one unambiguous fact is that it isn't real. Learning to reckon with this and still find the resolve to fight the plague becomes one of the many torments Pathologic asks players to overcome. This is it. There is no life outside of these 12 days, and there is no world outside of the town.
Pathologic 3: Quarantine immediately shows us a glimpse into the Bachelor's life outside of these 12 days, spent in a world outside of the town. It's a brazen disregard of the game-within-a-game-within-a-game that has until now been the backbone of Pathologic’s idiosyncratic metanarrative. Backstories have always been established, but they've also been vague. Never before now have they been rendered in full, playable or otherwise. Undeniably, Dankovsky had a life before heading into the town, and he'll have one after he leaves. He may just be the only character to have ever graced the Pathologic series who can say this for himself.
It's a daring choice, but a sensible one for a game that seems concerned more than ever with humanising its protagonist. Pathologic 2's Haruspex had lore, sure, but in-game he was largely just a vessel for the player. Quarantine's Bachelor, by contrast, is a guy. He's got his own vibes going on. Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine, has, for the last twenty years, been depicted as a narcissist, a sceptic, and a generally very annoying person. One memorable quote from the first game calls him a "prickly prick who will bury us all." It's an accurate description. Now, Quarantine presents new facets of his personality. Desperation, paranoia, and an immense level of self-loathing in the face of his many failures bring to life a character who has endeared himself to me more in the demo’s brief run than the Haruspex ever managed across several playthroughs of the previous game's lengthy campaign.
Dankovsky's reimagined personality is best expressed in the web of thoughts we're given the opportunity to explore during Quarantine's opening. Shown to us in a sequence that takes place after the events of the upcoming Pathologic 3, this mental map — used in the previous game mostly as a means for keeping track of endless sidequests — shows us the Bachelor's thoughts throughout what is essentially a full run of the game where he made the worst possible choices at every turn, and suffered dearly for it. Dankovsky cycles through blaming anyone he can for the ungodly hardship he's been put through before placing a misanthropic distance between himself and the horrors of the town's demise. This new personality/defense mechanism is in turn repeatedly shattered by events that Dankovsky feels truly responsible for. Those with firsthand experience of the nightmarish 12 days that make up the story will be familiar with the events the Bachelor describes, but there's a shock in seeing one of the typically stoic Pathologic protagonists react with such volatility and desperation, a shock that stuck with me for the whole of my time with Quarantine.
More than a narrative device, Dankovsky's psychological state is given gameplay relevance through Quarantine (and by extension, Pathologic 3)'s replacement of the more traditional survival mechanics of the previous games. Here, his mental health takes centre stage, as the events surrounding him send him spiraling towards either apathy or mania. Players are tasked with keeping him in check, balancing a meter between the two extremes. An apathetic Bachelor will move slowly and struggle to speak to others. A manic Bachelor will sprint around, missing details that could be crucial to players even as they appear directly in front of him. It's a strange mechanic, and a poorly tutorialised one at that. That said, the first time I let Dankovsky's apathy get too low and he responded to my negligence by stopping in his tracks and putting a gun in his mouth, I understood in excruciating detail the importance of managing this meter. So, how do we do so? Drugs, mostly. Dankovsky is a man of medicine, and he's more than willing to take advantage of the myriad uppers and downers that can be scavenged or traded for. Trading with the townsfolk has always been a crucial element in the series, and that's no different here. In typical Pathologic fashion, there's a more outlandish alternative as well. Pushing a swing, standing by a fire, or kicking a garbage bin in petulant rage can also impact the mood meter, albeit usually with negligible results. Every interaction with the environment comes with a voice line from Dankovsky himself, further humanising him as he talks himself through his horrific ordeal.
Where Quarantine works best as a demo is when it threatens new challenges that may be seen in Pathologic 3. And make no mistake, these are threats. The occasional mention of the constantly mutating plague requiring a new vaccine to be produced every day nauseates more than it does thrill. Pathologic is a series where the promise of new mechanics isn't exciting so much as it is terrifying. This goes doubly so for Quarantine's limited sampling of the hospital system, where players will, by inspecting bodies and questioning patients, discover symptoms and diagnose other illnesses in the few townsfolk who manage to survive the plague for more than a few hours, all in the hope of producing a vaccine. It's simple in theory — check off all the symptoms you see until you come to a conclusion through process of elimination — but between the miserable conditions of the town and the townsfolk's obsession with lying for literally no reason, correct diagnoses rely on intuition, careful study, external investigation, and flat-out luck. Quarantine, graciously, makes successfully identifying the correct illnesses easy. The full release of Pathologic 3 most surely will not, and I shudder to imagine the consequences for failure.
It's hard to explain just how highly I'm anticipating Pathologic 3's full release after playing Quarantine. It's even harder to explain how I can so eagerly await an experience I know will be miserable, but that cognitive dissonance is what Pathologic excels at. Why play something "fun" when you can play something unforgettable?
If Quarantine is anything to go by, Pathologic 3 will be a return to form for the coldness of the original title. Where Pathologic 1 deals primarily in hollow mannequins who spew novel-length dialogues detailing intricate philosophies and arcane traditions in place of anyone halfway likeable, Pathologic 2 opts for simpler yet more compelling characters who offer up enough tender moments for players to truly care about them, and by extension, the town at large. Pathologic 3 seems aimed to breed nothing but contempt for its world with its changes to the formula. Available dialogue choices range from arrogant to scornful, often with no "nice" option available. The voice lines triggered by the Bachelor’s interactions with the environment convey disgust for the town. A newly implemented fast travel system means players will spend less time taking in the sights of the town as they rapidly bounce between districts completing tasks. The tradeoff is that you can't fast travel through infected districts. They'll have to be navigated by foot. This not only means that fast travel will become less and less useful as time goes on and the plague spreads, but also that players will, by necessity, be seeing the town at its worst much more often than at its best. This makes for a clever marriage of gameplay and story: Dankovsky is blind to all but the most alarmingly putrid of conditions. He hates this town, and by the end of Quarantine, so did I.
In a twist that seemingly undermines one of the signature elements of the series, it appears in Pathologic 3 that players will be able to rewind the clock and retry a day, at the cost of a new, extremely rare currency. I assume Ice-Pick Lodge heard my Majora's Mask comparison from earlier and thought it sounded like a good idea. In previous Pathologic entries, a power like this would be game-breaking, but it makes more sense when paired with Pathologic 3's new ordinance system. Like a mayoral decree in an Animal Crossing village from hell, the Bachelor now has the power to enact sweeping changes across the town — the availability of supplies, the way crime is handled, and much more. The demo’s titular quarantine refers to one of these ordinances, and we're shown in disturbing detail the consequences of a misguided decision. Rioters roam the streets aiming for the Bachelor's head, guards abandon their posts in fear, and entire districts are left for dead as the plague festers and grows in lethality. Pathologic would never introduce something that looks fun without first showing you just how wrong it can, and will, go. The ability to rewind time is a necessary concession for a game that might otherwise have been unplayably punishing.
The ordinance system in tandem with the ability to redo a day reinforces Pathologic 3's return to nihilism more than anything. Try something out, see if the citizens like it, and if not, rewind and try something else. The damage done and the lives lost are made insignificant when it can all be erased. True to the Bachelor's calculating worldview, the townsfolk in Pathologic 3 are reduced to a set of numbers on a graph — a suggestible herd of wild animals, here only to be studied and exploited.
It's all suggestive of a darker game to come, and Quarantine itself may be the darkest material to come out of this series so far. For all the twists present in Quarantine's short runtime, this was the one thing that did not come as a surprise. Each new entry in this series heads further into the abyss, with no sign of switching gears anytime soon. It's hard to imagine that, even beyond Pathologic 3, there's more on the horizon, new methods of torment lying on the road ahead.
Do I like it? I love it. Do I recommend it? If you've read this far, you likely already know whether or not this will be your type of thing.
Pathologic is a comedy, and it has precisely one joke, repeated across every day spent in its abominable town.
The setup: "Surely it can't get any worse."
The punchline: "Oh."
