Pathologic: The Game That Wants You to Lose

Most games that describe themselves as difficult are describing an execution problem. You died to the boss; do it again with better inputs. Pathologic, which Ice-Pick Lodge released in Russia in 2005 and in an English edition in 2006 with a translation that reads like a hostage note, has no execution problem worth the name. Its combat is bad. Its shooting is worse. You will never be asked to do anything with your hands that a competent player couldn’t manage on the first try.

It is still the hardest game I’ve finished, because the difficulty is arithmetic and the arithmetic doesn’t care how good you are. There are twelve days. There is a plague. There are more people who need you than there are hours, and the hours run whether you’re doing something with them or standing in a doorway reading a menu.

The clock is the antagonist

Pathologic’s core mechanism is that time is real and unpaused. Each of the twelve in-game days runs on a wall clock. Shops open and close. Districts get infected on a schedule. A character who needs a medicine before noon needs it before noon, and the town is large, and you walk everywhere, and there is no fast travel, and the walking is deliberately slow.

The consequence is that every quest is priced in the only currency the game refuses to inflate. Accepting a task in the north-east means declining whatever was happening in the south. The game will happily let you spend a whole day walking to the wrong side of town for an item that turns out to be worthless, and it will not tell you it was worthless until you get there.

Layer on the meters. You have hunger, exhaustion, health, immunity and infection, and they drain at rates calibrated to be genuinely oppressive. Bread costs money. Money barely exists — the town runs on barter, and the most reliable traders are children, who will swap you a scalpel for a fistful of nuts and walnuts with the flat pragmatism of people who have already worked out that the adults are finished. Your inventory is a grid you are always losing a fight with.

None of this is friction for its own sake. It’s the machine that produces the game’s actual subject: triage. You cannot save everyone. You are given a list of named people bound to you, and the game’s honest position is that some of them are going to die of a disease you don’t understand, in a town you don’t know, while you are elsewhere doing something you thought was more important. Every survival meter exists to guarantee that you are always spending. A game where you could stockpile would be a game where you could be blameless.

The town itself does the other half of the work, and it does it by being memorable rather than convenient. The districts have names — the Stone Yard, the Warehouses, the Tanners — and the buildings have silhouettes you learn because you have walked past them forty times. There is a map, and it is a map rather than a satnav: it shows you where a place is and leaves the route to you. The Polyhedron is visible from most of the town, which means you always know roughly where you are by looking up.

That’s the exchange Pathologic makes for its cruelty. It takes away your fast travel and your markers, and it gives you a town you actually know by day four — the shortcut through the Bridge Square, the pharmacy that opens late, the streets where the infected districts start. Very few games trade in that direction, and the ones that do tend to be remembered.

Losing as a designed outcome

The phrase people reach for is “the game wants you to lose”, and it’s nearly right. What Pathologic wants is for the loss to be legible as your loss. It builds that with two decisions.

The first is that it refuses to hide the accounting. When a bound character dies, they’re dead, and the game keeps going, and their absence is a hole in the quest structure you feel for the remaining days. Nothing rewinds. This is where Pathologic sits in the same argument as permadeath and the stories it buys — except that Pathologic doesn’t end your run when it takes something from you. It makes you keep playing the diminished version. That’s crueller than a game over screen and it’s the whole point: a game over lets you flinch, and living with the consequence doesn’t.

The second is that saving is unrestricted. You can quicksave constantly, and the game knows it, and it has arranged itself so that saving doesn’t help much. You cannot save-scum a disease that spreads on a district-by-district schedule irrespective of your decisions. You can only save-scum the small tactical stuff, which is the stuff Pathologic has already made unimportant. It’s a demonstration of something I keep coming back to about save systems being ideology: the restriction was never what created the stakes. The stakes come from whether the systems can be rewound at all.

Three games, one town

The structure is the other reason people still write about it eighteen years on. There are three protagonists, each with a full twelve-day campaign, and the other two are non-player characters in each other’s stories.

Daniil Dankovsky, the Bachelor, is a metropolitan scientist who arrives to investigate immortality and finds an epidemic. Artemy Burakh, the Haruspex, is a local surgeon’s son who comes home to a murder charge and a town he half-belongs to. Clara, the Changeling, is a girl with healing hands and no papers, and her campaign is the strangest of the three.

The trick is that they explain each other. The Bachelor’s campaign presents the steppe folk and their rituals as superstition to be catalogued. The Haruspex’s campaign is inside that culture and treats the Bachelor’s rationalism as a foreign object doing damage. Neither is the corrective. Each is a set of assumptions with a walking speed and a hunger bar, and playing the second campaign is an exercise in watching your previous forty hours of certainty get looked at from outside.

That’s an expensive design. It’s three times the writing and a fraction of the players will ever see two thirds of it. Almost nobody has tried it since, and the closest recent relation is Disco Elysium, which arrives at the same distrust of the confident interpreter by different means.

Where to play it, and which door to use

Pathologic 2, from 2019, is a remake of the Haruspex route with modern controls, a proper translation, and a difficulty philosophy that’s arguably even more pointed. It’s the better game and the sensible entry point, and it’s also incomplete as a whole — the other two routes remain in the original.

Pathologic Classic HD tidies the 2005 game’s translation and resolution without touching its bones. If you want the full triptych, it’s the only way to get it, and the jank is a price rather than a charm. Go in expecting to consult a guide about shop hours, and don’t confuse that with the game beating you.

Spoilers below

The plague isn’t a plague in the sense the Bachelor spends his campaign assuming.

The town sits on the steppe over something the Kin call the earth’s living body, and the Abattoir is where they cut it. The Polyhedron — the impossible tower on its needle-thin spike, which is the game’s one piece of pure image and the thing every screenshot is of — is driven into that body like a nail. The disease is a response. The town has a wound in it and the wound is the town’s own foundation, which means every solution on offer is a choice about what to amputate.

That’s what the endgame makes you do. The military want to burn the town. You can talk them out of it, and the price is the Polyhedron: bring it down, and the children who live inside it lose the only thing that was theirs. Or you keep the tower and the town goes. Three protagonists, three arguments about which body matters, and no arrangement in which all of it survives.

Then the last turn. The Powers That Be receive you in a theatre, and they’re children, and the town is a set of clay figures on a floor. Mark Immortell’s Bound Theatre — which has been staging summaries of your day in a building you probably ignored — turns out to have been the frame all along. The authors admit, to your face, that they built the whole thing and that they’re going to lose it.

It sounds like a cheap postmodern shrug and it lands as the opposite, because of the twelve days you just spent. The game has already made you complicit in triage: you chose who ate, you chose which district to walk to, you have a list of your dead. Then it tells you they were toys. And the twelve days are still there, in your memory, weighing exactly what they weighed an hour ago. Pathologic’s last move is to prove that the fiction was never doing the work. The clock was.