Pathologic 2, Crisis, and the Contingency of Things
Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
Long nights go hand in hand with trepidation. They may also accompany transformation. The longest nights happen right on the cusp of transformative events. Walking through nearly deserted streets on a night like that can produce long stretches of quiet, punctuated with flashes of dread in the darkness.
Some people say there’s opportunity in those moments. Maybe there is. It’s always good to have a reminder that things could be otherwise, that the world is full of contingency.
In Pathologic 2, each night is shorter than the last. That’s a bare, mechanical fact– as players progress through the game’s story, in-game time accelerates. That first night in the game’s setting of Town-on-Gorkhon seems all the longer for how little there is to do and how many barriers there are to doing it. The in-game clock moves slowly, and various meters related to survival tick away. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion. Tick, tick, tick. All the meter-draining signs of inevitability.
These are just a few of the things that Pathologic 2 requires the player to pay attention to, or risk the pain of death. There’s also the politics and relationships within the town, made up of a volatile mix of industrial business interests and natives from the surrounding steppe. Artemy Burakh, the protagonist, is a doctor. At the start of the game, he travels an interminable, indeterminably long journey by train. When he arrives, he finds Town-on-Gorkhon’s fuse has already been lit by his father’s death. The elder Burakh held a special position within the traditional structures of the town and the steppe, able to break the taboo against cutting into flesh. Practicing medicine in both traditional and (to most players) more familiar means, Artemy finds that his father was holding much of the physical and metaphysical fabric of the town together.
At the time of his arrival, Artemy has not lived in the town for many years. He is immediately suspected by the locals of patricide, despite arriving after his father’s death. In a fight in the train yard, players must immediately spill blood in self-defense upon Artemy’s arrival in town. As with many taboo actions, an unnamed “they” knows. Soon, the townsfolk know, too, and Artemy becomes a hunted man. By nightfall, he stumbles through the darkness, fatigued and starving, seeking refuge. It’s not easily found.
Artemy must wrestle with the town and its occupants every step of the way. This is only partly due to the occupants. As new players will likely find, the open spaces of their map are full of obstacles in practice. What seems to represent passages between houses or bridges across the Gorkhon river are, in actuality, separated by walls or the rise and fall of the town’s hilly topography. As Julie Muncy has explained, the town has a hostile, challenging layout. It is itself a spur for unanticipated changes of plan, blocking some expectations and re-routing others.
The gap between two-dimensional map and three-dimensional game-world reflects further gaps in the game’s setting and story. The town is a body with organs, a machine of production and consumption. The game’s designers make this explicit in their naming conventions: most of the town’s neighborhoods are named for bits of animal anatomy. This is reflective of the massive slaughterhouse that anchors the town’s industry. It is also symbolic of the town itself as a single body, with organs that fail with sickness and death as the game goes on. But on that first, long night, there is no visible plague, not yet - only the prefiguring of it in the form of mob violence and murder.
Something is wrong in between the town and the steppe, but nobody’s quite sure what. But that uncertainty is coupled with the surety of the mob, town-dwellers who burn one of the women of the steppe on the first day. The mob believes she is a Shabnak-adyr, a creature made of clay and bone, yet another being who is blamed for the death of Artemy’s father. Yet the person who the mob burns is just a different kind of human, just another person murdered as the town plunges into despair.
The story and setting of Pathologic 2 are powered by dualities -- humans and non-humans, sky and earth, night and day, town and steppe. It doesn’t leave these as neat oppositions. Friction and rupture are power, too. The people of the steppe have been brought into the factory, and the town is made to resist easy traversal and function. Gangs of parentless children mark themselves by metaphysical positions, one group with attachment to the earth and to animism, one group to the sky and transcendence. The machine of Town-on-Gorkhon does not function smoothly, and Artemy doesn’t have the resources to repair all its functions and gears. The player must make choices, but in a system and society as complex as the one presented in Pathologic 2, it’s hard to predict what effects will emerge from helping one group or another. The only thing that can be known for sure is that some parts of the town will continue to grow sick and decay.
Crises are moments of transformation, one way or another. On the first night of Pathologic 2, Town-on-Gorkhon has just begun to violently rupture. It won’t end happily for someone or other - either the town will be ravaged by the plague, freeing the steppe from its industrial bleeding, or the living earth will be bled, becoming bare material for human consumption. That conflict was brewing long before Artemy returns to the town, and he arrives as a pivotal component of its climax.
That first night back in the town is full of potential energy. It’s a boulder on a hill, being momentarily held back by a twig. It’s almost as though you can hear the wood strain, bending, starting to splinter. Maybe it’s better to stay in that moment, leaving the possibilities open, multiple, proliferating, even if that leaves the player alone in the dark. But the story can’t stay there. Morning is coming, and nothing is in stasis. Transformation demands itself.
For more in our “Shortest Day, Longest Night” series, read Roger Whitson on keeping the company of cats in game and in life, Jason Mical on the power of Kind Words in a struggle for mental health, and Christian Haines on learning to mourn from What Remains of Edith Finch.
