Bachelor of dark arts

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / HypeTrain Digital

This is proving to be one of the worst weeks of my life, for various reasons (no, not because Jason Schreier is mad at me). In my time of need, I open the magic portal of escapism and find Pathologic 3 looking back at me like a poison toad.

Hello, Pathologic 3! You are that game about saving a town of butchers from the worst of all plagues. You are the Stoppardian fantasy about interrogating the bodies and souls of tricksters, oligarchs and killers. You are the inner wobble between mania and apathy. You are the doomed mayoral enterprise in which players impose quarantines and roadblocks, while trying to maintain the trust of some powerful factions. You are out now-ish on Steam.

You’ve got a time-rewinding feature these days, so that players can reverse their foolish decisions without starting afresh? You’re giving players the ability to clear away miasma using some kind of refillable doohickey? Generous of you, Pathologic 3, but I can see the rusty meat cleaver in your other hand.

RPS has an ancient, fraught relationship with the Pathologic series. We are beloved among the elder Pathologgers for Quintin Smith’s three-part essay on the original 2005 game, and we are also... disliked, to put it gently, for being somewhat ambivalent about Pathologic 2 – the sequel-turned-remake dedicated to just one of the original game’s three playable protagonists. I’m likely going to be reviewing Pathologic 3, and I’m already dreading the fallout if I conclude that I am Not Keen. Still, duty calls. Something’s calling, anyway. I hear it in the basement. It sounds like it has a voicebox made entirely of teeth.

Where Pathologic 2 concerned the doings of the Haruspex, a returning local son who fights the plague using a mixture of surgery and steppe lore, Pathologic 3 focuses on the Bachelor, an academic doctor who is pursuing a rumoured immortal man. While it has similar rancid geography, and the same atmosphere of phantasmagorical confusion and despair, it’s a very different and perhaps an easier game in many respects, as Brendy found when playing the demo last year.

The often-exhausting open world format is gone. You don’t have to worry as much about the bare necessities of survival, either, and the time-jumping feature allows for some trial and error, though this isn’t exactly routine savescumming – as Brendy summarised, “you earn time travel gunge by playing a euthanasia minigame where you ease the passing of dying people in the street by administering morphine or other drugs”. A Tardis powered by human souls? How very pathological of you, Pathologic 3.

Developers Ice-Pick Lodge appear to be in a difficult place at the moment. Last year, founder Nikolay Dybowski left the studio after players discovered allegations of abuse and kidnapping. The remaining staff have yet to really comment on these reports. It’s not clear they ever will. I can imagine the painful legalities that may be involved.

Ice Pick are Russian-founded, and you may wish to avoid their games if you’re concerned about indirectly funding Russia’s vicious, zealous and cynical attack on Ukraine. They are currently based in Kazakhstan, however, who appear cautiously supportive of Ukraine’s independence and are calling for peace (I am no expert on the geopolitics here). The developers have also spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, commenting back in 2022 that "a crime is being committed in our name”.

If Pathologic 3 is a success, Ice-Pick will hopefully make Pathologic 4. This will star the Changeling, a young girl who can restore life or take it away through touch. Pathologic aside, Ice Pick are partnering with Hooded Horse and Acid Wizard to make Darkwood 2.