The Bachelor reflects that there is a relationship between stopping the plague and finding immortality, between preventing Death and preventing deaths—the abstract and concrete versions of it. This is an unusual synthesis for a man who usually spends most of his time torn between dilemmas: his desire to discover immortality versus his duty to stop the plague, his condescending dismissal of the town and its traditions versus the slow realization that curing the plague might require a holistic understanding of the town, his scientific pursuit of truth versus the political and social reality that limits that truth, and the vanity of academic recognition versus the quiet honor of doing what is necessary. The Bachelor has been trained to dissect and analyze—to see things in terms of the cells that make them up—but he faces something that may only be understood as a complex, indivisible whole. What if the town itself is the primitive, unanalyzable concept that provides the means to understand the phenomena within it?

This internal struggle is familiar. Raskolnikov convinced himself intellectually that he had the right to murder to elevate himself, but could not cope with it spiritually. Bazarov dismissed love as a relic incompatible with his nihilistic rejection of the old social order, but could not help falling in love. These are the struggles of intellectual detachment against the realities of life. Pathologic 3 channels these literary classics, especially by placing its town at the turn of the 20th century, but Dankovsky’s character study benefits from the unique tools of the video game medium.

Unlike Pathologic 2, which was an open world, travel in Pathologic 3 is done between city areas

That all-consuming craving for intellectual fulfillment should be familiar to anyone who has been absorbed in a big project, when the only thing that seems to matter is that project. In that context, the idea of time as a re

Appropriately, your play with time rarely works out quite the way you would like. The game does not simulate a full butterfly effect, of course, but nudging one thing tends to dislodge something else, create unintended consequences, spiral into a causal chain whose links become too difficult to isolate with any certainty, despite the game’s helpful mind map UI. Instead, the overall effect is to communicate a sense of a man consumed by his work, dashing around in manic fits and starts to try to finish everything, prone to depression when things go against him, slowly losing momentum as the days go on and things slip increasingly out of his control.

Take a step back to reflect on how the apathy-mania meter works and you also start to suspect that Dankovsky is unwell. It is possible to stimulate apathy or mania by touching certain objects in the town, but often you are forced to use amphetamines and opioids to keep yourself balanced. In later days, it is pointed out repeatedly that Dankovsky has a reputation around town as a drug addict. Here, Pathologic 3 trades on established gaming conventions to lull you into a sense of denial: I can’t be a drug addict, because I don’t have buffs applied when I’ve taken drugs or debuffs when I suffer withdrawal, the way I might do, say, in Fallout. Yet the apathy-mania meter is dynamic, moving constantly, and the need to feed it with this or that stimulant is likewise a ceaseless struggle.

Pathologic 3 also plays with its own tropes here. Fourth wall breaks and bends are a staple of the series, usually delivered through extensive, beautifully written dialogue. The games rely heavily on a Gogol-like sense of surrealism and defamiliarization—of ordinary things given a tinge of the extraordinary or absurd, or the extraordinary presented as everyday—to put the player into a sense of permanent ambiguity. So when Pathologic 3 introduces one of its new dialogue mechanics, where the camera suddenly switches perspectives to Dankovsky’s interlocutor and you see Dankovsky, it is tempting to view it as another fourth wall break. What if, however, these episodes are intended to be taken literally, as out-of-body experiences that are symptomatic of Dankovsky’s general condition?

Dankovsky’s individual apathy-mania meter mirrors a grander balancing act: keeping the infection rate low typically involves sanitary measures that raise disorder in the town, leading to a riot if not kept in check. Town management, therefore, is also a matter of weaving between the extremes of physical and social sickness. Sometimes, Dankovsky has to take a literal fight to the plague in infected regions. These nightmarish sequences involve shooting a monstrous physical manifestation of the plague, even as Dankovsky grapples with whether he is witnessing genuine phenomena in a town that doesn’t comply with known natural laws, or slowly losing his sanity.

The picture that emerges, then, is of a conflicted, overly analytical, detached man, obsessed with his work to the point of sickness. It is a picture that feels sadly relevant in a time when the popular image of the intellectual, gnawed by a rising wave of populism, is somewhere between an ineffectual navel-gazer and a cold elitist. It is not the full story, however. Pathologic 3 reminds us that it is precisely Dankovsky’s intellectualism that makes him an effective antidote to the plague. His training and research supply the faculties necessary to establish a hospital, to diagnose patients and develop daily vaccines to slow the plague’s progress, to work out the appropriate quarantine and hygiene methods for the town—all nuances that are conveyed through their own gameplay systems. For all his arrogance, and the prejudice against the town’s supernatural phenomena, it is ultimately the Bachelor’s commitment to the scientific method that leaves the door open for him to consider them.

The parallels between Pathologic and the Covid pandemic are too obvious; in the case of Pathologic 2, which came out less than a year before the outbreak, they are uncanny. Nonetheless, Dankovsky’s political trajectory in Pathologic 3 is instructive. The authorities are initially all too eager to rely on his scientific expertise and status, to put trust and power in his hands, until the social and economic necessities catch up to them and turn scientific fact into an inconvenient thorn of objectivity. And if scientific facts cannot be manipulated to fit their agendas, then perhaps Dankovsky, as the fallible mouthpiece for those facts, can be. In the later stages of the game, in the increasingly dogged attacks on Dankovsky’s projects by an all-powerful special bureau, there is a sinister hint of an older breed of anti-intellectualism—the systematic persecution of allegedly bourgeois intelligentsia under the Soviet regime. The insinuation of a link between modern day populist anti-intellectualism and historic state-sanctioned persecution of thought may not be an explicit theme, but it is difficult to avoid drawing the parallel.

Disease diagnosis has a similar feel to it as deduction in Return of the Obra Dinn. It is the