Butchering "Butchering Pathologic" - Part 1: The Clock

Image credit: Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

The following contains abstracted discussion of my own experiences of disease.

When you are caring for people fighting a long illness, it can feel as though time has stopped, not just because you are living a day at a time, but because each day needs to be built from scratch. Days no longer simply happen to you. Time is a personal regime, put in place to maximise the odds of more time, in the face of symptoms that worsen and abate.

When things are better, the horizon pulls back and you think in whole weeks and months, joining the dots at a stroke, like you’re charging into the retreating tide. When things are worse, there’s only today and surviving it. Your mind is a ratio of dull frenzy - a klaxon that has blared on for so long it sounds like silence - and practised disregard, a windowing of yourself that allows you to plod forward in the face of battering indignity. Cushioned by its fog, the machine does what it can to make and keep time, reserving part of itself for the moment a door closes and you can let time fall at your feet.

Image credit: Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

In Pathologic 3, time itself is sick. Not just out of joint, though that certainly fits the English script’s arch fondness for Shakespeare, but palsied and delirious. Time is a huge, shrinking, seizured, broken dream. The days are all piled on top of each other, their causality in rags, curled protectively around a groaning bellyful of people, decisions and consequences. The game’s terrible epidemic doesn’t march tidily toward total obliteration, but skips and reverses as you try to pull the Town from the mangler.

You are the Bachelor, a creature of reason and contempt, who arrives by train from the Capital seeking endless time. Alighting a couple of days prior to the outbreak, he is investigating rumours of an immortal man, from whose tissues he will cultivate a cure for death. In a sense, he is immediately successful. Early in the story, the Bachelor procures the ability to time-shift, jumping between the days as he organises the Town’s battle with the plague and pursues his own histrionic research. This ability is to some degree a metaphysical negotiation with the Town itself: a geography of mystics, architects and butchers that proves to be a time machine of another sort, shipping hours on demand like the meat that emerges from the humped and neolithic Abattoir.

The Stillwater observatory is where you’ll jump between days, care of a grandfather clock. It’s also where you’ll drag out the theatrical piano interlude at the end of each day, before tampering with that clock (technically, the Bachelor never sleeps through the night). The Cathedral is a dispensary, both taking away time and increasing your capacity for it. The Theatre may enclose the events of the game, reducing the story to a cycling dress rehearsal. The streets are full of querulous mummers and tragedians who offer gameplay tips, and who appear to inhabit a timeframe of their own - unsure whether they are living, acting, symbolising, or heckling.

Image credit: Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

Even the dumpsters and playground swings of the Town are mechanisms of time control, used to modulate the Bachelor’s unstable emotions. Red-tinted objects increase his Mania, speeding his steps while eroding his heart. Blue-tinted objects make him Apathetic, curdling his movements to the point that he becomes too depressed to speak. In place of the hunger, infection and fatigue systems from previous Pathologics, surviving minute to minute is about finding balance between these states. You’ll barter for, manufacture and, most often, loot drugs that offer a quick fix for an excess of excitement or gloom, their efficacy lessening with each dose. Still, it’s always tempting to abuse Mania and risk self-harm or cardiac arrest when you need to pack a few more footfalls into each day.

The time-shifting mechanics, together with the removal of generic survival gauges, make Pathologic 3 ‘easier’ in some ways than its predecessors, with less risk of running aground because you neglected to stock up hours before. In general, I’ve not had to worry much about basic resource-gathering in my opening 12 hours with the game. True, inventory items are lost when you change days, unless you store them inside a grandfather clock, but crates of morphine, caffeine and other commodities spawn generously throughout the world, and there’s a ‘concentration’ mode that highlights them for discovery.

Even so, Pathologic 3’s new emphasis on time control isn’t just a bid to win over people deterred by Pathologic’s vicious pedantry about the bare necessities. The first game and Pathologic 2 are themselves works of temporal disorder. Pathologic is three parallel attempts to tell the same story from clashing perspectives, while Pathologic 2 is at once a remake and a sequel and a bleeding third of the original story, waiting to be healed by the launch of Pathologic 3 and Pathologic 4. Still, the older games are, at least, works of steady escalation: the plague expands, the streets grow less tractable, and your mistakes return to haunt you with mostly logical severity. In Pathologic 3, a gentler, ‘rewritable’, ‘pick-up-and-play’ format is obtained at the cost of feverish unreality.

Image credit: Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

The plague is an apocalyptic terror, reducing districts to echoing underwater ensembles of green silt and stacked bone, but then you roll back a few days and it dwindles to nubs of viral activity in the hindparts of the Town – a coffee stain on the map screen. As the Bachelor winds and rewinds from morning to morning, he must think about each stage of the pandemic at once, chewing over his mistakes as he tries to save critical individuals, solve smaller mysteries, diagnose the disease, and learn the precise order of interventions that leads to the aftermath.

The Bachelor keeps mind maps of events and decisions on each day: these persist across the time jumps, much like the ship log in Outer Wilds. Individual event chains may be preserved or reset without disturbing all of the others, allowing the Bachelor to act in tandem with fractions of his own past, re-assembling the world from splinters of many others. Again, this saves you some labour – no need to complete every daily objective in one fell swoop - but it is intrinsically a threat to the Bachelor’s sanity. Or a manifestation of his insanity, as you might decide from dialogue responses. He must remember what he isn’t supposed to know yet, and forget what has no longer taken place, and he must do this in the shadow of judgement and shame.

Before each day begins, the Bachelor is dragged back to the Capital and into the future, where he is interrogated for his overall failure by an obnoxious Inspector. The evidence presented obviously changes as you replay each day, trying to avoid that failure. This has a deranging effect on the sober process of elimination that is the traditional whodunnit. As the timelines fray and reknit, he Inspector’s accusations slide between hard truth and malicious gossip, without altering a word. The Bachelor’s wild evasions and self-aggrandisements are either outright lies, or corrections of reports that have become/were always false.

Image credit: Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

The price the Bachelor must pay for ‘defeating’ death at the outset of Pathologic 3 is to forever play out his inability to defeat death. Death has become his neighbour, never quite confronted. The price the player must pay for being freed from Pathologic 2’s relentless attrition is to oscillate between degrees of suffering and reprieve, to build each day anew and see every part of the Town as simultaneously bright and clouded and burning and flowering and pillaged and breathing and buried. It’s not just ‘convenience’, though it definitely makes the game more approachable: it’s punishment. It’s horror like you’ll find nowhere else.

It’s hard to know how much of what’s happening is the Bachelor’s projection, a prospect toyed with by writing that commits to self-referentiality early on and, so far, marries this effectively to grotesque, wry or callous, naturalistic descriptions of ulcers and stabbings and squalor. The Town’s brittle disarray reflects the character’s own rigidity: it’s what you see when you are too clever by half, too sure of your own brilliance and so, easily shattered by anything you consider impossible, irrational.

The Bachelor is a sneering big city toff, attempting to apply the imperial scientific method to a carrier bag of motes and threads that is being devoured from within by mold. His tools are appropriately megalomaniacal, childishly direct when compared to the indigenous methods and twisted ‘family stakes’ of Pathologic 2’s Haruspex: curfews, quarantines, a ratcheting gasgun that can be used to disperse plague clouds, as though you were playing a very reluctant first-person shooter. The Bachelor has an ordinary pistol, as well, but you’ll seldom have much ammo for it – as such, it’s best wielded as a bluff to keep desperate people at bay.

One conversation suggests to you that the very layout of Pathologic 3’s Town - the slicing of the old open world into separately loading districts, accessed via fast travel - is an expression of the Bachelor’s professional tendency to split things up, their parts atomised for safer appraisal. Where do we draw the line between dissecting, and smashing? Or to put that more forgivingly, at what point does compartmentalisation become self-sabotage?

The ability to rewind time is fuelled by ‘amalgam’, a mercury alloy used in the manufacture of mirrors, which is here obtained by breaking them, freeing up their stored hours. I don’t need to belabour the psychological implications of breaking a reflection: the Bachelor himself spells it out for you in various unkind notes-to-self. It actually seems healthier to obtain time from acts of euthanasia. You will encounter townsfolk in Pathologic 3 who are beyond rescue: persuade them to accept their deaths, and their remaining time is yours, providing you grant the victim a peaceful passing.

Image credit: Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

Pathologic 3 is a retreatment of Pathologics gone by, and this series of articles on Pathologic 3 is a retreatment - probably, a mistreatment - of an older article series, Quintin Smith’s brilliant Butchering Pathologic. Quinns wrote that series as a post-mortem, an invaluable recutting of a game many will bounce off in the first hour; I’m not sure we’d be reviewing, or even playing Pathologic 3 without his writing. Both because it seems apt and because I, myself, do not have enough time, I am approaching this new series like the Bachelor himself, combing the fog for a diagnosis and a throughline, unable to see the cracks in my own thinking.

Like the Bachelor, I arrogantly reserve the right to revisit and edit my misapprehensions, developing my thesis as I push through the game and write each instalment, calibrating my own mind map. What I have written today will be altered when my horizons expand and I realise what’s wrong with the time machine described above, and how I need to build today better. Next up, Part 2 – The People.