Pathologic 2 challenges what it means to be a player

Preamble

This piece will be treating spoilers like a bull tramples grass, so consider this your point of ejection if you want to go into Pathologic 2 blind. Also, in the risk of reiterating anything clever someone else already said, here is a list of links that helped inform parts of my own experience with the game:

hbomberguy - Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why
SulMatul - Dissecting Pathologic 2, The Best Game of 2019
Jared Mitchell - A Body, Divided | Pathologic
Steven Nguyen Scaife - A Russian Crucible: Pathologic 2 and the Problem of Video Game Difficulty
JMCJEDI2 - Pathologic Vibes | Spotify Playlist

Ok, let’s get started.

Act I: Agency, Death, and the Conversation of Play

Pathologic 2’s (Ice Pick Lodge, 2019) best scene is a mistake. As the game’s 11th day concludes the sky suddenly turns black and the player is notified that the final day, the 12th, has been canceled. What Pathologic 2 had in plan for the end of this torturous journey will not be divulged; there will be no do-overs, no quicksave reloads, no exceptions to the rules which were laid out when this all began. Instead, the player boards a train with their eternal companion and the credits roll as the weight of what is happening slowly sets in.

This scene is a mistake, but it’s a mistake the player accepted hours - maybe dozens of hours - prior. Here is what’s happening: Pathologic 2 is a game about struggle, the inevitability of death and fate, and recognizing human fragility. To this effect, the game keeps a tally of every death the player makes, and with each adds a greater burden for them to fight against. Health bars shrivel and exhaustion sets in quicker and quicker. A challenging game becomes ever more so and not even reloading an earlier save will rewrite past mistakes. So when the player is offered a deal to remove these shackles - to let their companion take their place and their pain - it is almost impossible to resist. Even knowing it would come to haunt me, I accepted the deal.

The reason I am being denied the final day of the game, of any real ending to speak of, is not because I made the wrong dialogue choice or failed to save everyone. It’s because I didn’t play by the game’s rules. Pathologic 2 is constantly working on both the game level and through a metatextual conversation with the player, and this scene where the traveler tells the player straight up they got it wrong, is the culmination of what the game has been saying all along: the game and the conversation are the same. Cheating the system is cheating yourself.

Though highly demanding and unforgiving, Pathologic 2 is not sadistic. It does not occupy the same space as the deliberately punishing I Want to be The Guy (Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly, 2007) or the mechanically dense Dark Souls (From Software, 2011) but is challenging because it is thematically demanded. By attempting to weaken or remove this challenge by accepting the traveler’s bargain I had, in turn, removed myself from the story the game was trying to tell. I gave up my role in this play by trying to change the script.

This is so antithetical to the malleability and player centricity of nearly every game that it feels like a joke. And it is a joke, but one designed to challenge what we as players even perceive our role as being. In the game, it means protagonist Artemy Burakh never leaves the train and Pathologic 2 ends where it opens. To the player, it confronts the nature of play as being self-authored, empowering, and most defiantly, ours. We are not the most important person in this world. Our absence will not erase the game any more than setting a book on a shelf removes the words inside.

Video games have been perceived of, effectively since inception some fifty years ago, as extensions of classic games meant for amusement, escapism, empowerment. It is such a deeply entrenched belief that games should first and foremost be “fun” that it is rarely even questioned what kind of cognitive experience players should expect when a new game releases. This is greatly simplifying emotional arcs within traditionally fun game genres and non-authored player experiences, but the point I am fumbling for is that we expect games, on at least some base level, to be pleasurable. This expectation can at times be so strong that players demand revised endings, new modes, or changes to difficulty balancing (this happened with Pathologic 2 as well, and developer Ice Pick Lodge subsequently patched in robust difficulty options).

Pathologic 2 is a game that is fundamentally about rejecting the expectation of amusement, of player centrality, and of the ability to shallowly strip-mine the game for content. From the beginning, the player is told that Artemy’s fate is doomed, that they cannot save everyone, and that things will happen outside their control and beyond their view. The player cannot “win” so much as they can continue to exist. There is never enough time, resources, information, or persuasive force to accomplish everything, and this puts the player in a fundamentally different position than just about every other game I’ve played.

Though Pathologic 2 shares many features of the survival genre - hunger/thirst meters, the necessity to eat and sleep, a constantly moving in-game clock - there is never a point where death is not imminently possible. This is not a game about mastering the elements, but rather pushing through despite everything in the world fighting against you. To hurt is to understand what it means to live. Pathologic 2 needs you to know what is at stake. That changing people is hard and changing nature is all but impossible. The world is messy, it does not wait for us. Pathologic 2 doesn’t think games should be any different. Players are just people. The only god here is the text and the only way out is to fundamentally change that text.

So I cheated. I made a deal to write myself out of the story, and I got to see most of it anyway. But this was never going to be the same game if I refused to engage on its terms. The game and I were in conversation, but we could not agree on the script.

Act II: I Know that I Know Nothing

Clearly, Pathologic 2 doesn’t care to alienate the player. And yet, it is magnetic the way few games could hope to be. Set in a remote steppe town, Pathologic 2 runs over 12 days of an unknown plague ravaging the populace. As one of three (arguably four) doctors in the town, Artemy races to find a cure before he, the town, and the truth about the death of his father succumb to the disease.

Immediately, obstacles are introduced that turn a clear task - make a cure, find your father’s murderer - into a murky haze of interweaving lines and things there is no time to learn. Artemy is an outsider so he’s not trusted. A civil war is simmering between the town’s three ruling families. Paranoia and fear are turning neighbors against each other. A giant bull might know how to talk. And yet, the mess Artemy enters seems almost quaint compared to the horrors to come.

A fundamental tenet of Pathologic 2 is that you cannot see everything. Though Ice Pick Lodge has added an elegant mind map and waypoints for major plot points, time is never on your side. With each day the town changes, characters live and die, and the player is more and more at the mercy of what information they can pry out of people. Which is to say nothing of the possibility that someone may simply be lying to your face.

Pathologic 2’s structure is the inverse of Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011) presenting you with an apocalyptic catastrophe and then not caring at all if you decide to dick around in dungeons for a year. The dragons will wait. Again, Pathologic 2 rejects not only the notion that the plot can and should wait for the player’s engagement, it outright states that they should not attempt to see and do everything. What they don’t see can be just as important as the choices they actively make.

Games have never been bigger, every corner hiding a side quest, unlockable, developer in-joke, or just a grey square for the player to check off. The girth of a modern video game is insurmountable, unsustainable, and frequently discarded. But quantity is easy to measure, sell, and buy into so even as most players probably will never even finish a “main quest” let alone everything the most recent Assassin’s Creed or Witcher game contains, it is expected to be there.

Philosophically, Pathologic 2 is not interested in excess for excess’s sake. It is dense and large but it purposely imposes limits on not only what the player can do but what they can know. Characters might refuse to talk because of an earlier feud. Someone could die because the player ran out of medicine, and even if they make it on time a true panacea is rare enough to make survival as assured as a flip of a coin.

The choices that have to be made are both mechanically and narratively compromised, requiring not only moral fortitude but resourcefulness. It is easy to say you’d give up your meal for someone starving on the road, but what if that piece of bread is all that’s keeping you alive until tomorrow’s ration? If you die because you gave someone medicine and let yourself become infected, are you saving a life or dooming everyone who now have no doctor to care for them?

The philosophical and ethical questions of each character encounter carry so much more weight because there is never the assurance that choosing the “good” option will reward the player in the end. There will always be unknown consequences and wasting time on random errands may grant nothing but a thank you.

Late in the game, I received a letter from a group of children who live in the warehouses outside town. They had found my father’s murderer. Knowing the children to be crafty and frequently aware of elements on the town’s periphery, I sprinted to the chosen spot and found a nondescript man waiting to attack. I killed him, only to learn he was nobody, just a looter who had antagonized the kids. I had wasted almost a whole day chasing someone else’s petty revenge.

I am not sure if games can be brave, but they can certainly be bold. Pathologic 2 is surreal and horrifying, but it is its willingness to contradict player expectations, to waste their time for the sake of building a theme, that feels most unprecedented. My free time has recently grown uncomfortably short and less of it than ever is being devoted to games. Yet Pathologic 2 is all I could think about for the two weeks I spent inhabiting its world, knocking on doors begging for bread, finding myself choking and dead right as I was beginning to understand, and being relentlessly toyed with by both the inhabitants and the game’s text itself.

This is not an accessible game, but it is one that treats the player as capable of engaging on levels beyond base enjoyment; to recognize that the frustration they feel when they are lead astray or die in meaningless scuffles is not a failure of design, but explicitly bridging the reality of player and character. It is unpleasant, and that is the point.

Tragedy as a genre has been falling out of fashion for years but video games are especially devoid of experiences that push players to confront their failures. To endure past the point of recoiling and embody characters who are broken, imperfect, ordinary.

That the town and A-plot of Pathologic 2 may ultimately be nothing but an elaborate theater production is not just a commentary on the player’s role as an actor, but an examination of the value we asign to entertainment as fictitious. How many games have been discarded because a lack of fun was mistaken as a flaw? Is the dialogue surrounding games toxic to the types of games allowed to be made? Are we complicit in the commodification and flattening of a medium we propose to love?

Conclusions

Pathologic 2 does not offer answers to these questions so much as alternatives. It opens a door that, frankly, I did not know was there. It feels hyperbolic to say it has changed how I view games as a medium, but at the same time, I cannot recall the last game which so harshly confronted my expectations of what it would and should be.

It is also only one-third of what was meant to be a three-character experience. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly not be finished due to monetary issues, which through some cruel irony perhaps sums up the game’s notion that there are many things we cannot foresee or control.

Pathologic 2 is an anomaly in every regard, but one which I can only hope will not remain as such. I am awful at choosing personal favorites or liking things in general, but I can easily say no game has affected me as deeply since I was too young to string coherent ideas together. Please play this game. That is all.