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I’ve been slow on writing out the big essays I’ve wanted to tackle, but a recent game has really got my brain running and I wanted to write stuff out for it.
Anyone who has read this blog before knows that I became a big fan of Pathologic 2. I did a breakdown of its themes in a prior essay, and I’ve talked about the game in the contexts of trying to describe “fun” and how games can invite the player to engage in a metacommentary. I never played the original game, only experiencing it from a YouTube essay, and I have gone back and forth about trying it (still leaning towards “no”).
But I was looking forward to Pathologic 3. In all honesty I wasn’t sure that it would come out. For context, the original game had three characters for the player to choose from, each with a different storyline but otherwise roughly equivalent gameplay. The original intent of the second game was presumably to be a remake of the first with various changes, and in particular that rather than just a single game played through three different perspectives, they would instead be three distinct games. But that was a rather significant project, so the sequel only featured one character (which is still a pretty significant game on its own).
However, the second game did not sell particularly well, and the developer Ice Pick Lodge was somewhat cagey about the fate of the series. There was no claim that it wouldn’t happen, but it also seemed like the developer might eventually drop the project because it didn’t have sufficient appeal. So I was surprised when the third game was officially confirmed and a demo eventually released.
My experience with the game’s demo was…not great. It’s a bit tough to play a sequel to a game that is designed to play differently. If you fall in love with a game, any significant change will feel strange. And so was the case here. Though it didn’t help that the demo didn’t do a great job of explaining what you were doing, and the demo crashed on me. I wasn’t sure I’d end up enjoying the actual game.
But after it came out I started streaming it. And the actual game felt clearer and it started showing off those elements that I had fallen in love with in Pathologic 2. So much so that I decided I needed to do another thematic breakdown. Because this game more so than its predecessors feels like it is wearing its theme on its sleeve, and yet that theme still requires a lot of engagement from the player to pull forth the meaning behind it.
Revising a Story
The obvious conclusion we might draw if we were to play a remake of a game is that it is, at some fundamental level, the same game. Things may be reworked in terms of visuals and gameplay, but you’re still moving through territory that is meant to be familiar.
But what if that familiar territory changes? Not just in minor cosmetic ways, but in a substantive manner?
There is a tendency among players to focus on game stories as collections of lore. To wonder “what are the precise details of how things played out and what people did at what time?” Discrepancies can happen as a story is told and retold, and so players will begin to ask which of those events is the “real” story. If a character is presented in three different ways, which of those three characters is the “right” version?
That line of thinking is one that I see as something the developers intended for you to go down. Because to start the game differs in a way that you could easily write off as merely mechanical differences. Sure, your character might behave a little bit differently as a consequence, but that’s just the nature of having a new game to navigate. It’s still the same story at heart.
But then some pretty core components of the story change. Enough so that this feels in some ways like a different story, despite it all taking place in the same town under the same circumstances. Like your main character isn’t necessarily the same one from the first game.
And so it might be natural to ask: is this an entirely separate story from what we got before, or is this supposed to be an updated version to better fit the intention of what the developers wanted?
Time and Repetition
Let’s take that prior question and save it for later. Instead, let’s dig into the mechanics of the game for a moment.
The first game let you choose between three different characters – Daniil Dankovsky, a scientist studying how to prevent death; Artemy Burakh, a surgeon trying to find his father’s killer; Clara, a mysterious girl claiming to have divine powers. Pathologic 2 followed Burakh alone, and Pathologic 3 follows Dankovsky.
The core of Pathologic is survival. In the first two games, you were juggling a handful of different resources. Your health, your sleep, your hunger, your immunity from the infection, and your time. Commonly your biggest issue was struggling to do everything you needed while staying alive, as you might need to go out of your way to get food or avoid danger, which meant you couldn’t tackle some important task.
In Pathologic 3, however, a lot of that micromanaging is done away with. You still have to be careful about your health, but you’re not worried about getting infected and sleeping and eating and all that. You are freed from all of those concerns.
Even the core concern over time is somewhat illusory. Because Pathologic takes place over the course of 12 days. But rather than those days playing out sequentially like in the first two games, in the third you find yourself able to replay and jump between those days. You may have more tasks on a given day than you can take care of, but you can always just start the day over. When you do, threads you have completed will be resolved, leaving you free to tackle your other tasks.
Jumping between days does require a resource called “Amalgam,” which is referred to as liquified time. Replaying the same day is free, but jumping to a different day costs Amalgam – the further the jump, the greater the cost. And Amalgam is functionally limited, so there are only so many jumps you can take.[1]
The core gameplay involves three distinct objectives.
The first is running around pulling on various threads of thought each day. You hear about some weird happening going on in town, or you need to talk to a particular character. You pull on that thread, usually sending you to different parts of the town, until you reach a resolution. Sometimes there may be multiple potential resolutions, and so you can choose what will happen. This choice will likely impact later events in other days.
And of course those threads aren’t always linear. You may learn of something on Day 4 that happened on Day 2, so you need to transport back to Day 2. Which may impact something else on Day 3, and so on.
To note, this replaying of days is not simply a gameplay device. Characters refer to Dankovsky seemingly being able to be everywhere at once, solving all sorts of problems. You are told something that Dankovsky did something in the past that you can then undo as you play, unraveling the game’s framing device. One of the major characters is aware of Amalgam itself and helps to provide some explanation about it. Your movement throughout the timeline is “real” to the game’s world.
The second objective you carry out is a sort of puzzle/investigation game. There’s a plague in town, and one of your leading theories is that you can create vaccines by studying people who are sick with the plague and some other disease. So you talk to the patients about their symptoms, examine their bodies, perhaps take samples, and in some cases rummage around their houses. All to try and figure out what symptoms they have and what their secondary disease is.
The final objective is fighting the plague more directly. Certain districts of the town are infected, and the plague takes on the form of a womanlike monster that chases after you. This monster (and the concept of the plague as a living thing) is prevalent throughout the other versions of Pathologic, though this particular rendition is unique. Each day you can locate a special flower in an infected district to make a weapon to banish the monster for that day, thereby reducing the amount of plague.
The overall mechanic of replaying days ties back into an overall theme of reflecting the world. Each path you can take is a series of events that can play out, which is not meant to be seen as something you didn’t choose. Rather those other events are meant to be seen as possible worlds or timelines that exist. You are, so to speak, surrounded by a bunch of mirrors showcasing different reflections of the world, and you are simply choosing the reflection you want to see.
I use that metaphor because it is a common one in the game itself. Mirrors are scattered throughout the town that can be broken to gather Amalgam – the resource that lets Dankovsky hop across the timeline. Dialogue references to mirrors often talk about the relationship between the reflected and reflection – that the reflection is not a mere image, but a thing in itself. To break a mirror is to also break the world within it and take the potentiality for yourself.
And in turn the characters in that world are endlessly reflected in different ways through your choices. Including Dankovsky. Is this character willing to steal or kill for something, or will they refrain? Do they like you or hate you? All sorts of questions become, to borrow from the game, a matter of perspective. The way the world is reflected changes how the characters interact with it.
And so we pick back up that question from earlier. Which version of the world or character is “the real one?” To which the answer becomes clearer – they are all equally real.
A Plague Town on a River
The Greek philosopher Heracleitus had an aphorism that is presented a few different ways, but usually goes something along these lines: “you cannot step into the same river twice.”
The aphorism usually has two components to it: the change in the river and the change in the person. The world is constantly in flux, and that flux means that everyone and everything changes from moment to moment.
Though caught within that aphorism is a sort of paradoxical sentiment. While things change, they can also be recognized in another capacity as being similar. The exact you may not step into the exact same river twice, but someone that we recognize as you can step into something that we recognize as the same river twice.
All of this to say that the idea of reflections of characters touches on this idea of shifting persons. That the events of the game and the choices being made change the character we are playing. The version of the main character who would choose to escape the town and leave it to suffer a plague is not the same version that would stay behind to help.
Indeed, that is part of the premise of the game’s framing device. When you visit a day for the first time you are confronted by an interrogator who tells you what you, supposedly, did on that day. For example, the game forces you to begin Day 5, where you wake up in a jail cell, as you were caught trying to escape the town the previous day. You have the opportunity to deny that you would do that, but of course the events of the day as they play out require that you did try to escape.
Yet once you complete the day you are able to move back to Day 4, where you can try to set up events to escape – which will of course lead to your arrest – or you can try to tackle the plague. Likewise on Day 3 you are told that you didn’t show up to an emergency meeting of the town’s leaders about how to handle the plague. But you can instead show up and take control, which provides you with many of your daily objectives to fight the plague.
These events are important because they are meant to be departures from Dankovsky’s character. One of your main quests in Pathologic is to try and escape the town on Day 4, and you wind up in jail on Day 5. But now you are specifically trying to change those events. Indeed, you can choose dialogue options where Dankovsky denies he would ever be so selfish. And in making those choices, your Dankovsky becomes a different Dankovsky.
And indeed the game comments on this kind of change all the time, from multiple angles. Some of Dankovsky’s fellow academics talk about their worry that his adventure might change who he is. Indeed the major narrative line throughout the game is about Dankovsky becoming the kind of the person who can understand the town from a certain perspective. Whether he should or should not change is less relevant than the fact that he can and does.
And again, the temptation is to ask which of these various versions is “the right one.” Is the real Dankovsky the one who would try to escape, or the one who would stay behind? And the answer is “yes.” Both Dankovskys are the real one. Which choice he would make is a matter of perspective about who he is and what he cares about.
This change does not simply apply to the main character. It also applies to the events of the game itself. The most impactful is what happens on Day 7. In prior games the town would be visited by an Inquisitor, a powerful individual with the authority of the state behind them. In Pathologic and Pathologic 2, this Inquisitor is named Aglaya Lilich, a character desperately trying to solve the plague, believing it is her last chance to prove herself before she is cast aside by “The Powers that Be.”
But in Pathologic 3 Lilich is replaced by a character named Mark Karminsky. To my knowledge Karminsky is never mentioned in Pathologic 2, and apparently is only briefly named in Pathologic 1.
So this replacement is a major event in the game’s story, as Karminsky is meant to be an entirely different Inquisitor with a different approach. And the game is, so to speak, aware of this difference. At one point you are brought to talk to Karminsky, who discusses how in another timeline Lilich arrives in his stead to handle the town, which he sees as “his worst fate.”
So the town itself is just as subject to the changes of fate as the characters within it. And again, rather than asking which of these events is “real,” we are instead invited to see them all as real.
The Concept of “Canon”
So now let’s step back again and talk about the idea of canon.
Canon is basically a way of describing what happened in a fictional world. It can exist on two levels.
The first level is what happens within a work of fiction directly. On this level canon is meant to distinguish the events within the work from any reimaginings created by fans. There is the version of events that happened in a book or movie or game, and there is the version of events that a given fan wishes would have happened. The former is canon, the latter is not.
The second level is what happens within the wider world established by the work, but is not necessarily described by that particular work. These other details can be laid out by a different work (book, show, game, etc.), or an implied detail cobbled together from pieces of information, or elaborated by a creator outside the context of the work itself.
The second level is the one we usually talk about when we argue about whether something is or is not canon. Because the first level is straightforward, whereas the second level can be more ambiguous.
As an example, if a book mentions a character being from a faraway land that is not described in any real detail, we may wonder what that land is like. Perhaps we get a few snippets as the character talks about that homeland. We might wonder about the accuracy of those details (i.e. is our character a reliable narrator), but even if we trust everything we’re told we still have all sorts of gaps is our understanding. We might draw a variety of conclusions from what details we have, and attempt to support those conclusions from the implications provided by those details.
And these kinds of debates are most prevalent where details clash. If one book relates a series of events in one way, and another book relates the same events in another way, we are left to wonder which of them is “real.” Maybe one character is unreliable in their retelling. Maybe one character has more knowledge than the other. Maybe the creator just forgot the details or wanted to rewrite those details. Whatever the case, trying to fit it all together causes a conflict, as various fans struggle to determine which events they are supposed to believe.
However the error that people fall into is seeing these works as elements of a totality. That a single mind envisioned an entire cosmos and then painstakingly recorded every detail. The assumption that every detail must fit together leads people to force various square pegs into round holes, twisting themselves or the stories in whatever way is necessary to reach this conclusion.
That it is merely an assumption does not mean that there aren’t authors who try to create and maintain an internal consistency within a fictional universe. It isn’t that it never occurs, but that we must be careful in our approach. Because the act of creation is not quite the same as the act of consumption. The details that might be important to a reader might not be as important to an author. The rules that we desire to be clear and logical and consistent might need to give way for some element of plot. It is necessary to set that assumption aside when it runs against the walls of reality.
And here Pathologic 3 suggests that the solution lies not in treating details like some kind of puzzle box or buffet – warping or discarding statements and details until they all align perfectly. Rather, the solution lies in treating everything as true. It is all canon, because it is nothing more than different perspectives at different times.
As the creators evolve their opinions and perspectives may change, but that does not eliminate the old versions that existed. Those older versions still existed and had an impact. It is by treating that existence as something significant rather than discarding it that we bring everything into harmony. Where so much of the effort to dissect a world’s canon involves cutting out or morphing anything that does not fit neatly into a box, Pathologic 3 asks us to stand back and let all of the details form their own shape before our eyes.
And the idea of them all being equally “real” is important because at the same point they are all “not real.” They are all creations of the developers of the game. There is not a true canon to the game, a true town and true Dankovsky and true ending. All of the various different outcomes and choices made by the player are as canon as any other. All the different versions of Dankovsky and the town presented in the different games are as canon as any other. They are all equally fake.
Thus the relationship with the story ceases to be a search for canon – to arrange a series of details and compare them against everything known to discover some “truth” that lurks at the bottom. Instead meaning is to be found through the experience of the game itself and its impact. What choices did you make? Why did you make those choices? What do those choices say about your Dankovsky and about you as a player? Canon is something made together by the player and the creator.
Concluding Remarks
I’ve written quite a few essays on the techniques of interpretation. A lot of those techniques are focused, admittedly, on how to pull an “intention” from a work. Now and then I’ve done thematic essays on various games. But it feels particularly fresh when those two tasks get to overlap.
This is a concept I want to explore in the future, but I think the way in which “canon” is treated has a harmful impact on our relationship with media. The intense focus on minute details prevents us from seeing those details within a wider scope – to miss the forest for the trees. Which is not to say that those details are irrelevant. But without a grasp of big and small together the small winds up being twisted to serve some new end.
One way of reading Pathologic 3’s discussion of canon is to see it as a complete rejection of any concept of canon. That there is nothing at the bottom of any discussion of what is “true” in a work of art, and thus we can say whatever we wish.
I think that conclusion would be premature, however. I don’t think it is rejecting the idea of canon outright. Instead it is challenging the idea that canon must be a specific set of events and choices and characters that are locked in time forever. Indeed it is particularly strange to take an inherently interactive medium such as video games – especially when that game’s world and story can change according to the player’s choices – and insist that only one of those myriad worlds can be the “right” one.
[1] As a small asterisk to this statement, I do have a theory that there is a way you can infinitely farm Amalgam. However, doing so relies on something that doesn’t always work, can sometimes backfire if you aren’t careful, and would take a lot of time and effort. So even if this theory were to pan out, it would be so much effort that it would be basically pointless to try.
Abstracting Games 