Pathologic 2: Conversations with the Town
Disclaimer: People have already said fantastic things about the Pathologic games in ways that literally inspired me to go out, fund Pathologic 2, and play this fantastic experience to completion. I’d honestly recommend you go and see those things first if you’re not already informed about this game some amount. For those that want to partake in the conversation about Pathologic 2 being a woefully underappreciated masterpiece, read onwards. I’m here to engage in the conversation now that I have finally come out the other side a changed person.
Pathologic 2 is a game rooting for you to uncover the mysteries and oddities of its world, to come into understanding of why the cultures that inhabit its world are the way they are, to become a part of something else, not necessarily bigger, but different. It is a fantastic game that belongs among the big names that have pulled us all closer into experiences to get answers. The game steeps a nomadic steppe culture and early 1900s industrialized meat-production town into an environment of constant failure, unrest, and most importantly: Uncertainty. This writing will span three parts. I think it’s important to start by talking about the conversations I’ll never forget. Like Pathologic 2 though, we gotta do some work to get there.
The Town
The Haruspex, Artemy Burakh, the surgeon, your role, is one well designed to steadily present a mystery and a way of thinking to the player that they will either grow to accept or grow disgusted by. When you start the game you are coming home from the Capital after years of working as a surgeon at war. You are called home by a letter from your father, Isidor, who warns of a great trial coming. And when you find yourself home, your father is dead, you are blamed for murdering him. By not actually knowing Isidor in previous times and being a bit of an alien to him in recent years himself, players are able to meld into Artemy’s situation in which a town quickly becomes hostile to you and you’re not completely certain what your father really wanted. You are forced into relying on your childhood friends, now adults. Bad Grief now works as a lead gangster operating out of the town’s warehouses. He offers weapons and safety in the warehouse district and a shop that will always sell you food no matter how much the town hates you. Lara Ravel shows hospitality and a place to sleep as well as influence over the town, eventually convincing them you did no such thing as murder. Your third childhood friend, Rubin Stakh, hates you for leaving your father behind, and learned surgery under your father’s tutelage. He also started the rumor about you killing Isidor. These characters are your blood, your past, your history. And you get to determine and work on their futures each day, if you can keep them alive through the plague. I loved Lara, wanting to help her at every moment as she showed strong loyalty to me and a desire to help those in need. I regretted the hot headed anger between Rubin and I, but tried my best to help at the hospital where he worked when the plague hit the town. And I feared Bad Grief.
A few days into the experience, you’ll learn the town’s meat production has shut down, someone was burned at the stake for murdering your father (except they didn’t), and a large majority of the steppe people (the Kin) who are the town’s workforce have been sealed into their prison-like working quarters due to a riot. One jumped out of a window from it and splattered on the pavement in front of me one night. This is the social state of the town as you’re walking into it, its nerves, all determined by three different families that run the town’s wealthy elite estate, its production estate, and its judicial processes. They are the bones that hold its structure, but bones can falter too. Every bone in Pathologic failed me, save one. But that bone eventually also broke and died.
Then, there’s the steppe culture. You will learn your father did some unique things as the town’s only doctor. He befriended all of the children in town, who are all homeless and group together in three different gangs of their own (always three). And he made shady dealings with the steppe people, who respected your father’s own respect of their ways. One form of the steppe people, the Worms (yup, they’re called Worms) apparently used to deliver meat to my dad’s factory lab. And by meat, I mean human organs. And my dad would then sell those organs in a shady shop in the town’s wealthy elite district (the metaphor of which I only now just realized) for a fancy price. One of the only true havens for the steppe people in town is a little district in the south-east where a half-blind shaman lady named Aspity offers a place to rest for them and I. Early on she handles the funeral for my father, as the various town people don’t actually show up for it. Instead, the steppe people and children are there for my dad’s funeral. And Aspity tells me I need to “come into” his role as the town’s surgeon, to know “the lines”, a practice of healing by cutting, a practice of following sickness and problems to their root by the path that shows up for us. It’s a very cool and mindful way of legitimizing the way some answers are going to fall into your lap or require you to see where some uninteresting paths wind up in the end in this game. It’s also, speaking from the other end of the spectrum, a practice many would call barbaric, murder, and unethical. Following in my father’s footsteps by following the lines is a contradictory nature that led to horrific, unnerving, and just plain-ol’ messed up ways of thinking in Pathologic 2 that I have to share to some degree. While I won’t spoil the big twisting, knotted, completely wild moment that happens near the game’s end that reveals answers about the plague, I am going to talk about quite a few of the developments that take place across the game, especially in days 5–9. This is a big game with a lot of conversations that are at times far more interesting and creepy than the game’s most vividly presented moments. And it’s those conversations and radical changes that provoked thoughts, kept me up at night, and slowly puts a change of perspective in you the player.
The Conversations
The first one was when Aspity had her big speech with me about coming into my father’s role and following the lines. Then, Aspity gave me my father’s inheritance, which featured some very useful items and a piece of paper with a list. The list: Seven children’s names, and one ominously named “The 8th” with a symbol for it (not spoiling who the 8th is for sure). A great deal of the first few days of Pathologic 2 are spent trying to understand who the 8th is and who could’ve murdered my dad. Then the plague hits. Across those days you’ll also start to “befriend” some of the children. A boy named Sticky, a common street thief, takes up residence in my father’s old lab, where he kept workstations and medicine brewing devices. Sticky wants to help me make a cure and offers to help steal things to upgrade the equipment. Meanwhile a little wolf girl named Murky also takes residence there, but argues with Sticky a fair deal and tells you she doesn’t like you. She has a friend who doesn’t trust me, but no one has seen this friend.
It’s made clear pretty early on that the game likes its theatric presentations. The play mimes (Masks, Reflections) explain game mechanics and even reveal the hidden thoughts of characters as you converse with them while maintaining their blank facial demeanor. The Executors, in their giant beaks, personify the presence of the plague and engage in discussion with you about how you’re going to fail your task. I distinctly recall on the first full day of the plague outbreak that the plague presented itself to me as an Executor in a dream, with all the children hanging by ropes at the entrance to my lab. Constantly the Executors taunt me for failing, demand that I understand the plague while mocking my failure to comprehend what is happening. It also sometimes breaks its own rules to prove this lack of understanding. But since I don’t know the nature of this plague, yet, whenever I converse with the plague, it’s presented with just question marks for a name, and the Executor mask just makes it more unnerving.
Six days in, Rubin and I are working on separate ways to find our cure. I’ve tried brewing medicines together with infected organs but they’ve failed to cure those infected. By the craziest of fates the lines leads me to a small abandoned village far beyond the outskirts of the town. I find two giant slabs in the middle of the village, stained with the dried up remains of blood that has worked its way up from the ground between the two slabs. I collect the blood in just two vials, and begin to brew it mixed with antibiotics at my dad’s old lab. That same day Murky tells me her friend is finally ready to meet me, even though she still doesn’t like me. In the dead of night I meet Murky out in the fields, the wind blowing in the grass and tons of little mice scurrying about, Murky sits under a group of rocks that look like a crow perched and peering down at us with a small fire going. Murky tells me the friend won’t come out, and she’s coaxing something under the rock. She tells me the friend is just scared of me, and suggests I go around back so the friend will show up. I do and instead find the Changeling back there (a character I don’t even have the time to discuss in this piece), who scolds me for listening to the whims of a lonely child who lost everything in the last plague. The Changeling tells me she’s been protecting Murky from the plague. And when I go back to the front of the rocks, Murky is gone, and the Changeling is in her place, telling me Murky found out who her friend was and ran away. She told me to forget about Murky, that it was too late for her. I demanded Murky be saved and so the Changeling used her healing abilities to give me the plague, and spare Murky. Then, I found out the plague has a voice, the voice Murky’s been hearing all along. It’s a terrifying screech built out of multiple layers, speaking of a wound in the world that I must uncover. The plague has a voice and Murky could hear it. I go home, and find I’ve brewed two potential cures. And I test it on myself. It works, I’ve found a cure. But I only have one spare cure to prove to the world it is real.
And what was that blood? Where did it come from?
The next day the blood isn’t there anymore.
A couple days later, the mysteries really start getting thicker. At the old village is the foreman of the Abbatoir, an old friend of Isidors, and a harsh guide of the steppe people. He tells me to go talk to the steppe people in the worker quarters: The Termitary, now opened, a little girl is there who can provide guidance for me. But I also find the barely alive remains of a harshly mutilated people rotting in a building no more fit than a jail. With nothing coming in and out of this building for six days, they resorted to the cruelest of measures. I can still hear the screams. The steppe people refused to help me, demanded my own help to bring them Big Vlad, the meat production owner who was responsible for closing up the Termitary. And even after they seemingly have justice, a split in the steppe people’s opinions believes they shouldn’t leave the Termitary, where they have no future hope while the town is ridden with plague. I return to the Abbatoir Foreman, and he tells me something I’m still thinking about to this day.
Kill the ones who don’t listen to me, kill the apostates. I tell him it’s wrong.
He tells me death is meaningless. He tells me the steppe people are like a body and completely useless if not in unison. He compares the threat of the minority apostates to that of a broken bone in an arm and it is my duty to heal the body by cutting away the damaged bone.
I haven’t really stopped thinking about how wild and messed up a perspective that is. I resolved that there must be another way.
There was. As time has gone on since finishing Pathologic 2 I really think more and more about how people definitely were lying to me all along, giving me half truths and realities that were really just perspectives. At times I fell fell for it too. But others were more willing to express to me their woeful situations and somehow it mirrored mine all the more.
At this point in the story an Inquisitor has arrived, a judge of a higher power that is here not to cure the plague but instead to put an end to injustice. The town has been in a riot and justice must be delivered. So she sets up a gallows and makes judgement calls based on arbitrary hypothetical situations and sentences people to death based on those judgment calls. She takes some interest in the cure for the plague, asks me to report to her daily with updates and voices how if she fails at her task in this town her life is forfeit. I don’t remember the context of how this came up, but Inquisitor Lilich wound up asking me this question:
The Inquisitor, this cold and calculating individual sending people to such fates feels the same unsafe control over her own life. And I can’t answer her question, suddenly the sense of duty in the face of someone having an ulterior motive to what they’re telling you to do is almost as on par with constantly doubting everyone in a tireless effort to make sure your own actions ring pure and true.
As I got closer to the cure, closer to the answer, the plague decided to pay me a visit after a nap. And the game decided to have some fun with me and the name of the plague was revealed to me. It also threatened to take every child, all the kids that I held dear in the game, infect them, and kill them by the end of that day.
But it doesn’t end there. Mark Immortell runs the theater in town, which becomes a hospital when the plague hits. Every night the theater and its actors (a fill-in for you included) rehearse the next day’s most important events. These nightly plays are foreshadowing and foreboding all in one go. And every time you die you wake up in the theater, Mark scolds your performance and you’re often given some sort of a punishment as a result. Eventually, Mark stops scolding and instead becomes philosophical. After one of the last deaths I experienced in the game, near the most gut-wrenching horrific parts of it all, Mark asked me the following:
And I honestly don’t know what’s scarier: The idea posed by Mark, or the fact that my character sees, “Like…cutting them?” as a potential answer to how a person is divided to overcome death. Of course, this is all very meta as Mark more or less explains that we are defeating death by giving us multiple attempts, multiple lives, like any video game. But nothing in Pathologic 2 comes easily or without a fate that you cannot escape until you stop seeing things from your own narrow worldview. And so, on a screenshot my phone got a horrible picture of, Mark makes this statement to us:
Well, how very sad for you. As long as you perceive yourself as a body, you will die over and over.
In our play, a living creature is made of many bodies at once. Which is what makes observing the sand pest so fascinating! Like any epidemic, it’s structured according to the same principles.
Later I’m told by a character I don’t even remember, that the nature of the plague comes about when people, born of earth, start referring to themselves by “I”. When they abandon notions that they are all a part of a whole, when humanity abandons each other and its source, the plague arrives to destroy them.
Near the end, when the source of the cure is discovered, and the cogs are in motion to make sure it can be reproduced for everyone, the Inquisitor again questions my dedication to the town and the people I’ve fought so rigorously to protect and save from the plague (and so many I’ve failed). She asks me to run away with her from the town, from her impending death. The game is giving me this out, this moment to forsake the steppe, the children, the town, all of it. She says to me,
This was on day 10, the day before the last full day in the game. And part of me still wanted to give up at this point. I was rank with exhaustion in this game, literally needing to sleep at least every six hours otherwise I’d start losing health. Food had become impossible to find except at sky high prices due to a new ticketing system in the town where no one had enough tickets to buy food in the first place. And Lara, by this point, was dead earlier just that morning. I did literally everything I could for her, but I still didn’t find a cure in time.
I did save the town though. I found the cure, I saved the town. And when I took one last stroll through the nearly empty town on day 12, I ended in the theater and talked to Mark one last time. He asked me how does one overcome death again. And he said I could go back to the dressing room and take off the costume. Interestingly, the most compelling answer to me was one where I choose not to stop the act, and instead become part of the town for real. But instead of walking out the front door of the theater (which gives you a nice little cinematic for the ending), instead I went into a door behind the stage, and I was greeted with a black screen, the words “Thank you for your performance. You are free now.”
No credits.
And with that you have a third of the whole, a chunk of the mental and emotional conversations that take place across this game as you are pushed through awful experiences and horrible tasks. These are things I’m going to come back to in the next two parts. Because it’s not just about these conversations and choices that make the game so special. No, these conversations would be meaningless if not for the fact that this game is so stressful, difficult, and utterly debilitating. They made those conversations important. They made me stand on my answers and consider them deeply, because those questions and answers molded my understanding of this awful experience like biting into one’s own winter harvest.
The foreman didn’t lie to me. But he was wrong. Death, failure, struggle, means everything. In part two we’re going to take about the struggles and the failures.
Pathologic 2 is available on Steam and GOG right now, and there’s a DLC coming out very soon. If you buy the game before the DLC is out, you’ll get the DLC for free.
