Pathologic 2

How a tale of sickness and displacement inspired by Russian literature became a chilling prophecy

- Andrei PechAlin

The four years since Pathologic 2’s release have made the act of donning its face mask a rather uncanny experience, something only underscored by the item’s inventory description: “This mask resembles those worn by medical personnel, but instead of sterile gauze, it’s made of dirty cloth, and instead of clinging tightly to my face, it hangs loose”. It’s a reminder that sometimes, if the world twists the right way, even a game as unusual as this – rooted equally in the Russian literary tradition and the weirdest speculative fiction – can turn into a kind of gospel.

The mask is far from alien to player character Artemy Burakh. A native of the game’s setting, known only as the Town, he returns after years away training as a surgeon, and upon arrival is accused of patricide. The initial hours are spent avoiding vigilantes convinced of your guilt while chasing leads on the real killer and familiarising yourself with the open map. From the urbanised centre, peopled with characters who wouldn’t be out of place in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, you can journey to the Steppe outback with its native Kin, whose disastrous naïvety in the face of industrialisation have something of Mikhail Sholokhov’s peasant class in And Quiet Flows The Don. Murder accusation aside, it’s a relatively sedate couple of days of in-game time – before an epidemic grips the community, forcing you into an increasingly miserable struggle to keep people alive and find a cure.

That sense of misery is built up through a set of punishing systems that place