Pathologic: Infected Zones

I wrote this article for Kill Screen. So here it is--a piece on Pathologic. Like it on the website and your facebook page to get some buzz.


Read the original here.

In 1770, a strain of bubonic plague tore through Russian quarantine and infected Moscow. The plague took out maybe a third of the population of Moscow. As the dead piled up, city limits were extended to accommodate new graveyards. Quarantines were enforced and the economic paralysis sent shockwaves through the food supplies, until an army of starving and enraged Muscovites broke out into the streets and began the infamous Plague Riot. Once quarantine began to take effect, the plague died out relatively quickly, but at its peak, it was claiming a thousand lives per day. The event—both plague and riot—induced a complete breakdown of the infrastructure of Russian society, killing weak and strong, breaking down the economy, citizens’ rights, and basic human dignity.

In the manual for Pathologic, Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge (which also madeThe Void) introduces its game with an appeal. Cataclysms and outbreaks of new diseases are the natural mechanism of pruning an overpopulated planet, it writes.Pathologic is a prototype of a “simulator of human behavior in the condition of pandemic”: it purports to test the user’s ability to make right decisions in times of crisis. It’s also agonizing to play, shoddily translated, and ugly as sin. Eurogamer’s John Walker called it “Oblivion with cancer ... a fascinating game. And a very broken one.” The game has cultivated a fiercely devoted fan base despite its poor reception in the West.

Pathologic shows the devolution of a society over the course of 12 days as plague overtakes a small, nameless Settlement. Events of the game closely mirror the real-world events of an epidemic. As the Sand Plague breaks, grows, and gradually consumes the settlement, characters research the cure and quarantine infected sections, until the military is summoned to suppress the growing chaos. By the end, it becomes nearly impossible to walk three steps without seeing a murder, as starvation drives people from their homes to be either infected or looted by raiders, and those raiders are in turn exterminated by soldiers.

Ice-Pick Lodge furnishes a mythologized restitching of the pandemic. Among the entrails of the Settlement’s history and the skeletal narrative, Pathologic paints a stirring portrait of the human condition and asks how we, as humans, have infected the earth. The Settlement in Pathologic is torn between past and future: the symbiosis of simple life on the steppe has been exchanged for modern life in the city. Innovation is bought by polluting the environment. In Pathologic, the environment retaliates through the natural mechanism of the Sand Plague.

It’s not surprising that a piece like Pathologic is distinctly Russian. Ice-Pick Lodge’s game functions as a sort of stylized reaction to key events in Russia and the Soviet Union’s history. Consider Chernobyl: the destruction of the reactor in 1986 scattered radioactive waste to the wind, resulting in untold deaths worldwide (the book Chernobyl estimates nearly a million premature deaths from the disaster). The testing, under direct orders from Moscow, is infamous. We won’t know the full effect of the disaster for years. It was inhumanly impossible to contain the radioactive fallout—400 times that of Hiroshima.

The Aral Sea was one of the world’s largest inbound bodies of water, yet 50 years of abuse under Soviet authority have reduced it to a fraction of its former breadth. Long piers extend over barren salt flats where the Aral has retreated. Between 1960 and 2008, the sea shrank from 26,300 square miles to a couple thousand, spread between several disparate lakes. The remaining waters are heavily polluted from chemical waste: the whole thing has been called one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.

When viewed specifically as a Russian work, Pathologic becomes an apologetic of remorse. Mistakes made in the Soviet era were often glossed over or denied: Ice-Pick Lodge seeds Pathologic with increasingly overt symbolism. The Settlement’s districts are named for parts of the body, and the player’s map constantly evolves, tracking infected zones and objectives, until symbolism is thrown out the window and the map is replaced with a cutaway of the internal workings of a bull. The most powerful moments in the game lie in discovering, bit by bit, the extent to which the Settlement has ravaged the ground on which it was built. 

Pathologic acts as a statement, rising out of the Russian consciousness, that attempts to peel back the scars history has left and force players to ask questions. While it invites cliches like “humans are evil because they destroy the environment,” it doesn’t deserve such a simple interpretation. The developer invites players to spend 40 agonizing hours in a pandemic simulator not just to show how depraved and craven the human animal can become in such extreme circumstances, but to ask players what it is they want to believe. Do you believe in the power of logic and science? Do you cling to tradition? Or are you willing to trust in something more?

Pathologic: The Ending, according to the Bachelor

If you haven't read the write-ups for Day 12 I suggest you go read them right now unless you've played the game through already. What we'd like to present to you right now is an overview of the endings.

As the Bachelor, I found three "choices" presented to me at the end of the game. I didn't have enough panacea to cure everyone's adherents, so the Devotress couldn't give me her input. So what I had--what I have to analyze here--is not the complete picture, though Kevin and Rory have filled me in, more or less.

The three choices I had were:

1. Let the Settlement be destroyed. But [the] Polyhedron may not be touched. The surviv[ors] will [rest] there until we vaccinate them, and the epidemic will finally [. . .] come to the end.
2. It is enough to destroy [the] Polyhedron to stop spreading of the infection. There is no sense to destroy the whole town.
3. So, I declare my decision to you. I refuse the choice. I shall not decide about the destiny of this town and [. . .] show my arguments to you.

Here's a quick summation of the results of each decision:

Destroy the Polyhedron; Save the Settlement.
We see the model of the town with the water jug that functions as the Polyhedron being slowly wrenched free.

It falls and lies, useless, on the ground. Then a vision of the Settlement with bluish skies, healthy. The kids, the Haruspicus, the turning of the wagon wheel: it looks like everything has turned out well.

"We aren't dying!"

After this, we're treated to an unsettling vision of the theatre, the three protagonists lying on stage like rag dolls with button eyes.

The game specifically notes that it "acknowledges the player's victory". We can walk around on stage, look at the dolls close up, before walking to the exit at stage left. Shimmering lights wait, suspended, in the void beyond the door, which slowly slips into the distance.

Destroy the Settlement; Save the Polyhedron.
The cutscene at the end shows the two Authorities--little kids--bashing the model of the town.

The artillery fires, the sun rises and Maria Kain stands looking very smug at the front of her entourage.

After a lovely view of the Polyhedron at dawn, silhouetted against the umber sky, the perspective shifts to the theater again, button-eyed dolls, the three protagonists arrayed at the back of the stage.

The game doesn't acknowledge the player's victory in this ending scenario. There's no text, no script. This ending is a defeat. The Kains won. The player let himself be manipulated, took the bait.

Again, floating lights, door, fade to black.

Refuse the choice.
The cutscene that plays exudes "bad ending vibes". The camera pans across the interior of a plague-ridden house, the light lingering on bloodstained bookshelves, the dirty floors, and so on.

Then we pull away to see the town bathed in red.

And eventually we see the corpses of the dead townsfolk.

The last shot is a fade-out on the Authorities' model of the town.

And then it's back to the town Theatre, on the stage with all the crumpled forms of the protagonists, buttons on their eyes. Door, fuzzy lights, fade to black.

Get this, though: at the end of this scenario, the game notes the player's victory.

(Others)
I'll let Kevin fill you in on the other ending--the one supplied by the Devotress. For now I have some thoughts.

Concerning Victory.
There's a lot of conjecture about what the endings mean, but it's pretty easy to see the trajectory of each character and how it lines up with their "ending"--the one they contribute to the final reckoning if you save all their adherents.

Artemiy Burakh, the Haruspicus, has grown from the steppe dirt and inherited his father's legacy as shaman and curate of the Settlement. His relationships with the town's children, the way the scenario is shaped, leads him to demonize the Polyhedron. His "ending", so to speak, is to destroy the Polyhedron so that the town can return to the status quo. While the cinematic paints the ending in a positive light, I can't help but be grieved, because it's just as it was before--no better, no worse. The ending is reflective of the traditions and perpetuity of life the Haruspicus seeks so desperately to protect: it's stayed the same.

There are so many unanswered questions I have about Klara, the Devotress, having not played her story myself. She's an enigma. She's a miracle, a curse: she's a cookie-cutter messiah, loved by some and hated by the rest. And apparently her ending functions as a sort of deus-ex-machina, allowing the town to both sustain its own life, do away with the plague, and keep the Polyhedron. Rory's playthrough on his blog will certainly explore this in-depth when he writes up Day 12. Like the Haruspicus' ending, Klara's ending fits with her character: enigmatic, paradoxical, out of the blue.

Daniel Dankovskiy, the Bachelor, is an outsider, a scientist: a reserved and judgmental young man who thinks he knows best. It quickly becomes evident that he has neither the experience nor the wisdom to defend the town against the plague, so the Inquisitor, and later the General, are brought in to mop up his mess. He views the Sand Plague as an enemy: winning is the goal here, rather than curing the disease.

The suggestion the Bachelor brings to the final decision in the other games is to preserve the Polyhedron. This decision leads to the Kains building their "utopia". However, this choice doesn't acknowledge the player's victory. It's not the right decision to make; in fact, I believe it's the only patently wrong choice the player can make at the end of the game. I don't say this out of opinion: every ending except the Kains' Victory has an explicit statement of the player's victory.

If you've read through my playthrough as the Bachelor, you should see how my thinking, both as character and player, shifted over the course of the game. I began bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so happy to save the town, save the world, and somehow, around midway through, I decided I hated the town. They were not worth saving. The crime, the politics, the horror of basic human nature. The problem was not the plague: it was the humans who were scarring the earth, doing violence by their very existence. I resolved that, on the final day, I would destroy the town when the decision was presented to me. The Polyhedron was a happy little coincidence--an inhuman marvel--that I wanted to save, and in the end, it was only a tool that would be misused.

The true enemy in this was never the Plague. The Bachelor realized it. His character introduction at the start of the game reads, "This is the story of a man who performed a miracle and defeated an opponent when victory seemed impossible." Could the conniving, clamoring people of the Settlement be this opponent?

Nukes and artillery aren't enough to kill the enemy, though. Men can escape shells. They can hide, reproduce, and rebuild. But the Sand Plague is a natural mechanism that, perhaps, was never evil to begin with. How does the Bachelor achieve the victory he has worked so hard to obtain? He walks away and allows the human parasite to devour itself. He lets the fever burn out.

Mother Nature: 7,776  -   Humanity: 0

Is this the "right" ending? For the Bachelor, who calculates in cold math, whose empathy has been steadily burned away by the shit-storm that is human nature, this ending makes perfect sense.

Edit [1-27-2013]: We've been hearing from other players who have differing reports about the way the Bachelor's scenario ends. If you are interested in reading about them, a few of our readers have kindly posted their own experiences in the comments below (and elsewhere on this site). Feel free to join the conversation, fellow players!

The Pathologic Dialogues - Part I

Having finished the game, Duke and Kevin (Bachelor and Haruspicus, respectively) ask some questions and try to unpack Pathologic. Add your thoughts / questions in the comments section!

For those new to the blog, go here.

What was it all for?

Duke: Pathologic exists as a tightly-wound mechanism--exactly as Aglaja the Inquisitor put it in the game. I stick by what Ice Pick Lodge wrote in the first page of the game manual: Pathologic is an epidemic simulator. The game is constituted of many parts: an emotionally-draining scenario, mythology and meta-narrative, with symbols, philosophical rants, all adhering to gaming conventions. The game is an "epidemic simulator." Its purpose is to test players' moral fibre. We simulate the epidemic to test whether or not we would make right decisions amidst crisis.

At its base, Pathologic shares the same goal as good art: to show us something of ourselves we did not understand before.

Kevin: I'm not sure I'm fully on board with the idea that the point of Pathologic is "to test whether or not we would make right decisions" in certain situations. I tried to think about it that way at first and came away unsatisfied. It seemed to have the same problem as Bioshock: I would be presented with a choice between two mutually exclusive options, but the long-term outcome was the same regardless of which one I chose. As long as I completed all the main quests and made sure to save enough panacea for everyone's Adherents at the end, the in-game repercussions of my actions were fairly negligible (better/worse quest rewards, missed dialogue trees, etc.). Even when I was doing horrible things like stabbing innocent people for shopping discounts, the hit to my reputation meter was relatively small and my relations with other characters remained unchanged. Even the much-vaunted final dilemma at the Cathedral felt like more of a choice between abstractions than a genuine moral quandary. Where were the consequences? Where were the situations that forced me to pick the lesser of two evils? Pathologic never gave me a mind-blowing, everything-you-know-is-wrong twist like Bioshock's "Would you kindly?" reveal. I felt cheated.

But the more I thought about the experience after finishing the game, the more I realized that the consequences and morality I thought I was missing actually were there; they just weren't present in the game-narrative itself. When I killed that guy on Day Two, I felt like a monster, and it wasn't because the game punished me with a "bad" ending or decreased resources. I felt like a monster because my character had just acted like a monster. Somehow Pathologic had made me identify with my character much more closely than any other videogame had, to the point where my character's behavior and my behavior were one and the same. There was no comfortable distance between me and Artemiy Burakh. I couldn't act with reckless abandon and laugh it off as "just a game."

I think this gets at your larger point: Pathologic, like lots of other art, revealed me to myself. By playing as an organ-thieving shamanistic weirdo in an extreme setting, I was suddenly thinking about myself and my approach to games in whole new ways. Did it test whether I would make "right" decisions during a plague outbreak? Who cares. The point is, it made me think about what the concepts of "rightness" and "morality" actually mean to me. It made me engage in a far more immersive form of role-playing than any so-called RPG ever has. As you can probably attest, given the weird arguments we had with each other after our game sessions.

Duke: Those arguments were huge. I think that set the game apart to me more than anything else. I've gotten involved in some games before--I remember screaming in unison with some friends on the most intense scenes in Heavy Rain--but I've never fully synced with a character like I did with the Bachelor. This was a characterization that was carefully cultivated, both through situation and gameplay. Pathologic is engineered to make players desperate. It's not very hard to make a person care. Look at the success of Farmville. Millions of Facebook users are given an arbitrary set of assets at the start of the game--all of them the same--and suddenly people are waking up at 2 in the morning to feed their cows.

Most games give you a health bar you have to keep filled. Pathologic gives you hunger, exhaustion, infection and immunity in addition to health. Maintaining the survival of your character is a chore. Through that maintenance, you take ownership much more completely. The simulation is more demanding. Is this manipulative? Yes. But manipulation is gaming's specialty: as we affect the simulated reality, it affects us.

My state of mind in Pathologic is something that's difficult to translate into writing. I found myself in a constant state of tension. I was stressed at the mounting conflict in the town, the annoyance of the tasks with which I was being presented, while constantly worrying about the Bachelor's health. It follows naturally that I would become impatient with the petty squabbles I had to deal with. I think of myself as a compassionate person, yet by Day 6 I had settled into the cold, calculating method of the Bachelor, and had deemed the town not worth saving. Which, strangely enough, was exactly what the developers had intended for the Bachelor. It was not by choice but necessity that I started to hate the town--both as a player and character--and it follows that I would latch on to the one thing that made sense: simulated life, anesthesia, as embodied in the Polyhedron. I wasn't forced to dream of a better world--I chose to. With the simulated reality crumbling around me, I gravitated toward the closest thing to perfect that the game had to offer: the Polyhedron.

That's where it gets me, Kevin. As people, we have to impose some kind of order on the world around us. As ethical, empathic people, we brought our sensibilities to bear on Pathologic. And because of our different roles, our different treatments, we shored up different suppositions, different conclusions than the other. You turned into a weird mix of Pavel and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, burying stray cats while espousing a universal hope--whereas I turned Ivan, the intellectual nihilist, consumed by the evil of the world around me.

Kevin: Consumed by evil, huh? I thought there was something different about you.

It was definitely interesting how we both could be absolutely convinced of our rightness despite being on completely opposite sides. Again, I can't think of another game that comes even close to offering that kind of multivalent storytelling (Deus Ex does, based on what I've heard, but I haven't played it myself—I know, I know). We both had good reasons for picking the sides we did, too. When I said in my final entry that I was almost swayed by the Bachelor to destroy the town, I wasn't exaggerating, and part of my uncertainty was due to the points you made during our discussions. You argued passionately for your side, probably because, at least at the time, you sincerely believed you were right. Neither of us was playing make-believe: we were in it for real. Pathologic made us feel that we genuinely had skin in the game.

So why did we care so much? As you said, part of it's because you and I have at least a basic sense of empathy and morals, and part of it's because we had to work so hard just to keep our characters alive. The big thing for me, though, was the fact that the whole game was predicated on the goal of saving lives. Most adult-oriented narratives in games these days have violence as the engine driving the story forward, as in "those aliens are attacking me so I must blast them in the face with my space-shotgun." There's violent combat in Pathologic, sure, but combat isn't the focus (I tried to avoid it whenever possible, if only because the control system made me want to throw my laptop through a window). At the beginning of each day, the game reminds you how many people have died, how many are close to dying. That's a great device; it was a constant reminder to me that the Plague was winning. It lent urgency to everything I did; even when I wasn't close to death myself (a relatively rare situation to begin with), I knew that other people were. Every quest and action felt terribly important, and I was constantly stressed out about the epidemic's tireless advance. No wonder I got so sucked in: lives were at stake.

Pathologic: The story continues . . .

Hey all. If you've been reading through these posts, we'd like to thank you. It was an incredible ride, and one we've enjoyed writing about. We'll be posting a few more things in the coming weeks--including a look at the other endings as well as a dialog about our reactions and interpretations as players.

Also, there's a project continuing, in a similar vein, that chronicles the Devotress' part of the story. You can read about it at this link: devotress.blogspot.com.

We'd love to hear your reactions in the comments--thoughts, rants, whatever. If you just randomly clicked on this blog, then by all means start reading from the beginning.

Thanks for reading.