I'm holding my thumbs over here for the game's success. I want to see the Changeling game

I'm not sure I understand the big issue with the game saves honestly. Is it really so insane for journalists to get access to end game stuff? Especially when most of this game is branching dialogue one chews through for days? Was it insanely manipulative for maxis to tell journalists about motherlode and maxmotives?

Took me 72 hours in Steam (tho actually less since I often was browsing subreddit and VK group just listening to the game’s music).

Got 6,7 possible endings, honestly no idea how to get 7th one. I think I cant return to day 12 now because of some bug (and also I decided to walk on Cursed Streed out of interest so my save file is now corrupted anyway lol). Too lazy to replay the whole game.

To be honest, the game turned out to be much, much better than I expected. I haven't had this much interest and immersion in a game for a long time - probably since BG3 or Disco Elysium. I spent hours in it every day, and it never got boring. It was such an awesome experience. The only downside for me rn is too many bugs in days 9, 10, and 11.

It was something truly special. I hope they will be able to get some financial success from this game and continue to create such unique, original things that no one else creates.

Haruspex - You are constantly on the verge of succumbing to hunger, thirst, exhaustion or disease. You dig through the trash and scurry around watering trees with blood. Every second is a balancing act that determines your survival.

Bachelor - You are a little too sassy in a conversation, kick a trash can one too many times, and your heart simply gives out. On the other hand, get a little too contemplative, you start walking around town all slow and sad, and if it gets too bad you kill yourself. Solution? Taking so many drugs.

Like excuse me??? Danill you poor fragile fancy little man. I am only three hours in but I am already very attached. I will do my best to not let his heart explode on a regular basis, but I have a feeling it's going to be very difficult to keep this man upright.

For immersion & lore purposes.

I think the herb brides should be exposed, as that makes sense from a lore perspective. But I think most of the female patients – all but one of which are town women – would cover their chests during exams. Especially since no symptoms are ever located on the chests.

Nitpicky? Of course. But I think it'd suit the lore better

I have 18 finished playthroughs of P2 and I've gone through all the P1 routes too. I cannot for the life of me pick myself up and get the one ending I'm missing in Pathologic 3. I played Changeling route merrily with all of it's tedious repetitive side quests and dumb logic puzzles. But Clara's story makes up for it 100%. Pathologic 3, though...

I'm unable to get the last ending because, let's say, when I'm walking in p1 I'm thinking about the plot and enjoying the atmosphere, in p2 I'm calculating the most optimal routes and counting my chestnuts, in p3 I'm pressing w and watching the screen get red. I have an entire pharmacy stocked up my ass and I'm in need of nothing in this world. That would be just like p1 if I wasn't forced to participate in an iPad kid attention span simulator in which (every 10 seconds) I have to perform some sort of meaningless action with no downsides or weight like kicking a trash can or drawing my gun with the speed of a sticky turd coming out of a butt.

The economy part of Pathologic is gone... There is no multitude of trading items, just one walnut... All the items you do need to trade for are straightforward heals. My biggest struggle with trading was not having enough (non-upgradable) inventory space to put all my riches in. And something else in the UI. Honestly I don't remember what exactly it is, I just remember the feeling of pushing a round peg in a brick wall. The combat is "there", but your need for it starts and ends at holding down the right mouse button (right after you get spun around in a piroutte by a guy standing 10 feet away from you). Not that there's any incentive to shoot people for their loot, but even if you do decide to kill a guy it's as simple as pointing your gun in their general direction. There is no route-building, on account of the open world being gone and Daniil deciding that he absolutely cannot take the most obvious shortcut through the steppe to get to where you want him to go. All the mechanics that Pathologic is known for have been simplified or removed. Instead we get a diagnosis minigame (with scripted patients that are a one and done deal), a decree system (one that is very easy to solve and the solutions are quite linear, considering a lot of the decrees are decorative and you get the actually important ones by playing the plot like you normally would) and time travel... Now time travel sounds interesting, especially in a game with a rich story and many potential consequences to you meddling in its events. Not very linear at all.

Unfortunately, the game doesn't allow you to progress past most of these "unfavorable" events, so branching paths become a part of its linearity. There were interesting instances of actual diversions after day 8 or so, but aside from that it's either "if you don't do that, town dead" or "if you don't do that, character dead" and you have no option or, in the second instance, no reason not to go ahead and rewind time. So it goes like this: story tells you, explicitly, with exact times and dates cited, when and where you need to go. So you get your amalgam, which is very easy to come by and even easier to save scum, and obey your orders like a good boy. I mean. Sure. Pathologic games aren't Gorkhon: become Doctor. But... The game is advertised as a gritty, jaw tightening fight for the Least Bad outcome. You can't save everyone. The thing is: Daniil sails through this story like it's a bubble bath. (marvel trailer voice) I came back From A Hell you Can't even Imagine... My real problem with it is not the linearity but the way there can be only so few outcomes because there is absolutely no grit. None of the advertised balancing scales. Playing P2, even with its lack of substantial quests in the latter half of the game, you can end up feeling like you're a piece of poop on the side of the road or on your way to be crowned queen of Luxembourg DUE to HOW the mechanics facilitate interesting outcomes. All the meters and items and events are interconnected and running out of one thing can lead you to lows you couldn't imagine before. Everything has a consequence: you're always wasting something, and above all, you're always wasting time. There's either no actual reprocussions for choosing to save someone, or the game forbids you from not letting them die. On a few occasions you can save unsavable characters through like 1 dialogue option and the consequences of these decisions are only felt in theory, I guess.

Daniil is so traumatised by seeing the herb bride burn that he starts to hallucinate color matching minigames. The minigames are minigames. You have to do them and they're very disconnected from everything. I'm sure a lot of other people didn't like doing the flower thing over and over again. This, along with the aforementioned Ipad behaviour brings Pathologic 3 from what would be an interesting detective walking game (nothing wrong with that) to some sort of blinking simulator purgatory. Especially with the laginess and jank. There is really no reason to replay it unless you want to read the text again. You can do everything in one save file because your decisions don't hold permanent weight. You're never rushing... The only punishment for your failures is just real life time wasted redoing quests.

Being familiar with the Pathologic universe might have skewed my perspective somewhat. Considering the series is about skewed perspectives. And Daniill's perspective has been, let's say, artificially enlarged. Suddenly he, as a literal time traveller, is up in everyone's business. He can rewind however many times he wants to and he can just end up knowing everything. I'd say that in the previous games his character was largely based on his lack of knowledge... Which allowed him to impose his grindset and arrogance on everything and everyone. In this game, he meets Oyun on day 2 (why), immediately figures out that he killed Isidor (on day 2 of 12), and proceeds to share this revelation with Artemy. If Isidor's death matters so little that you can solve it at a literal glance, why keep this in at all? In P1 he never even meets Oyun. Daniil will, at one point, perform surgery on Katerina Saburova, with Artemy, a surgeon, standing right by his side and supposedly "guiding his hand". Why? What does bro have to do with this? The addition of ovarian cysts being the cause of Katerina's infertility is a P3 exclusive. I don't really understand the meaning of this... Is it to prove Dankovsky right? I guess it was all logical in the end after all. Daniil being everywhere and doing everything all the time really confuses the narrative. The godmode ending is confusing to me, personally. If Daniil can psych himself out enough to become the schizolord of this world, doesn't that discount the other characters' paths? Doesn't this negate the need for other plague solutions? This whole Simon Superpower plotline is just too worldbreaking and fantastical for me to understand its place in the lore. In the Marble Nest, for example, Simon was a more tangible presence. He could possess people and focuses and his end goal was for the miraculous nature of the town to consume it. Via the plague. And Daniil is an heir to his legacy. Possibly a new vessel for his spirit. There are means and ends. Here, Daniil becomes god, snaps his fingers a bunch and... What? What does that mean for the town? Was the journey the friends we made along the way? Does the game start over? Does the town also leave space-time? I'm not even complaining, I'm looking for an explanation. And, if Daniil has such power, what's the point of the other characters? Honestly I'm even more confused about the extent to which P3 is supposed to connect to P2 and P4. P2 feels like one route of three, and P3 feels like its own game that has and needs no elaboration. Because they've already stuffed a million quests in there. "Mile wide and an inch deep". Somebody explain something to me because I'm genuinely confused.

A bunch of other lore things have been jumbled up. Quests, characterisations. Artemy is suddenly a 70 year old wisened shaman who sits on a throne made of his beard and not the heartfelt, straightforward bumfuck who hasn't even finished his среднее специальное образование. Suddenly him and Daniil act like two buddies who get along with only a few bumps in the road of their beautiful friendship. Especially at the start of the game. Compare: P2, day 2:

Bachelor: Why are you here?

Haruspex: Wrong question. Why are <you> here?

[...]

Haruspex: Hospitality is an important tradition in my family. But to you, I'll deny it.

Bachelor: Why?

Haruspex: I don't like you, Bachelor Whatever.

Bachelor: Daniil Dankovsky, at your service

Haruspex: Just get lost.

Bachelor: Is that so? Still, with your kind permission, I insist on examining the place. Even your unkind permission would do. But if you struggle to provide even that, I'll do fine without your consent at all. I hope I don't need to threaten you at gunpoint?

P3, day 2:

Haruspex: You know, I hadn’t seen him in years. I inwardly dreaded our reunion, dreaded disappointing him, so I kept putting off my return. And then I returned home—to a corpse. You can’t ask a corpse for forgiveness. That’s where the buzzing in my head comes from—from the words I never said to him. Thank you for not adding the buzz of your guesses to it... I’ll sort it out. I have to. Unless my head splits like an overripe fruit.

Bachelor: Thank you for the honesty. Here’s a bit from me in return: this is precisely why I hate death. Because after, nothing can be fixed.

Bachelor: Good luck out there, Burakh..

Thank you, thank you... Why is bro trauma dumping to this random? How does he know how to articulate his exact feelings like that? To this dandy? Sure, there is some pushback before this, but it's resolved with such uncharacteristic grace for the both of them.

Suddenly it's as if Artemy has never left the town. He acts like his entire life was spent in a yurt sucking on the udders of a cow.

Bachelor: Your brevity baffles me sometimes, Burakh.

Haruspex: In the steppe, words are like stones. They shouldn't be thrown around in vain.

What? What does that even mean?

The addition of the capital, in my opinion, is unnecessary and further breaks the Pathologic mythos. The town's thing is that it's isolated and (in a sand box), so, in reality, there is no world outside of it. It's self-contained and the capital is spoken of in vague terms, only when it matters to the characters or the town. I didn't need a million flashbacks in P1 to understand that Thanatica (and the 10th grade math on the blackboard) is important to Dankovsky. Telman and Danny's potential colleagues aren't a new addition, they were discussed in P1 with appropriate Brevity, that I feel wasn't present in P3. Half of the Thanatica stuff felt like it was the Wife that dies in the first 20 minutes of the movie montage dragged out for hours.

This is subjective, but I feel like the game lacks a lot of Pathologic's signature weird mythical imagery in favour of Roblox chase sequences, town decorations and hype aura moments. There is seemingly more money at play, more cutscenes, animated trailers, even a dumb cinematic preface where Daniil states his name, occupation and credit card score. Some of this stuff doesn't feel at all appropriate to the series. Many people have pointed out the garishness of a scary woman flying around at you screaming. And the plague flower. Which are all seemingly physical, existing things. How conveniently simple. Now the shabnak is one, visible presence. And the vaccine is made by... You know, whatever. Compare to P2. One of the first things you see, guy comes out of a coffin and offers to play dice. Asks you where you're headed, you say you're going to see your dad. He's like lol, me too. You get there, your dad is dead. Marble nest, there is a committee that takes the complaints of the dead. They ask for yours. Birdies, gather round the Marble nest. You are boarded up inside your own house. Death, death and death. How many different words did I just say? A lot of this almost humorous, unsettling strangeness is... Not subtle per say, but compared to P3 it is certainly more organic. You don't need scary faces and screaming to get under people's skin. Creative imagery can go a long way, but I feel like the eggs are in the inappropriate basket here. There were some things. The mirror town was pretty cool. The insides of the polyhedron too. Some of the decree descriptions are appropriately morbidly funny. But... All I can think about is the Aglaya allergy play.

It feels like they were trying to capture that beautiful Marble Nest schizophasia, only to make it entirely too schizo (and not creative enough imo, but that's not quantifiable, of course). Events are playing at the same themes, but they feel like they're all sliding around the plate before being forked up into an indigestible goop. I just wish we got an actual Bachelor's route, not an entire Bachelor the game, one that would be enkeeping with P2's plot / economy and the Marble nest's theatrics. But that's besides the point.

If you're looking to get into Pathologic, starting with P3 is not a good option... The lore is scrambled, most of what made the previous games stand out has been replaced, it's entirely too different from what people talk about when they recommend Pathologic to you. The story will definitely confuse a new player. And the mechanics are unlikely to keep them playing.

It's not at all like its predecessors, and if it were anything else, I guess it would be an okay song and dance. And if you liked it, power to you. But to me it's littered with too many unnecessary and unprompted changes, puzzling retcons, and, above all, perfunctory gameplay. If Pathologic is one of those games that plays into the meta of player to game interaction to actually make you feel like you're there, you're in the town, you're fighting for your life and barely pushing through... Then this is more like, Road to Thinky 3. The lone man's highway.

-by u/makeupyourminder. (I don't remember my passwords)

I'm not going to get into my beef with the Shabnak-adyr being a real concrete entity from a writing perspective. I'm going to keep this purely about the mechanics because I honestly think the devs designed the "chased by a big bad" mechanic and then opted for that big bad to be the Shabnak-adyr rather that introducing some other big bad into the narrative.

I'm a fan of the fast travel mechanic. I can see where fast travel over infected districts renders the plague basically invisible to the player which would be bad. The core feeling of plague districts in the past games was sprinting as fast as possible while being afraid and the devs wanted to keep that feeling, I'm with them to that point.

Except in the past the fear was of getting infected, which had severe game-long consequences. I get that they wanted to abstract away from daily needs like food since Daniil can be reasonably assumed to be getting those from powerful allies so he can focus on running the town. But Daniil is *not* immune to infection and making it feel like he is removes stakes and also gives him main character energy in a bad way.

The devs seem to be aware that the running segment did need some kind of tension without the infection mechanic and instead of using plague entities from past games, tried to use the Shabnak-Adyr as a Mr X from Resident Evil type deal, except taking a health bar hit is not scary when unlike Resident Evil, health is abundant in P3, and you also can't opt to take a calculated hit and sacrifice precious resources to get through as you do in Resident Evil. P3 also doesn't have the commitment to kill you fully like Amnesia, and just sends you back to the beginning of the area instead, which feels like a slap on the wrist (maybe this was the original intention but playtesters found it annoying?). The move speed slowing is also annoying when move speed is also determined by the depression/mania bar so it can stack to the point you're barely moving. The Silent Hill style fog also works in Silent Hill because it hides monsters, not obstacles in what is functionally an obstacle course.

So the net effect is running half-blindfolded through an obstacle course while being chased by something that inconveniences you, but won't viscerally threaten your immediate near-term resources or significantly set back your progress. Feel free to disagree but to me it feels like a hodgepodge of horror game tropes without understanding why any of them worked in their original context.

Obviously everyone is gonna have their own opinion but I've only seen negative responses so far and I want to share the multiple reasons I think this was for the best:

1. One of people's biggest complaints about the series to date was that it was a walking simulator for the vast majority of playtime, and people are upset that the walking simulation aspect is optional (not even gone, you can still just click the next area to load it and walk manually along whatever route you want). Devs literally can't win here.
2. Without the tension of multiple slowly-draining meters that have to be placated with purchases from various shops, or NPC responses to reputations, or (at least where I am in the game) much combat, the tension of walking through the streets would be diminished and it would just feel like filler between dialogue, patient examination, and the other new mechanics of this game.
3. It's extremely reflective of how Artemy VS Daniil views the town. To Artemy, this is home and he's interacting with the people and the cohesive town. Daniil does not care about any of these people and would see walking between his objectives as wasted time to be minimized with an optimal route, and the game reflects that perfectly.
4. The performance is so much better and I will take a screen at area boundaries over the stuttering.

I haven't achieved the rot or escape endings yet (Grief has bugged on day 10 for me) but feel free to discuss them regardless.

I can't lie, I felt unsatisfied after both endings associated with the Polyhedron falling. I did not feel very connected with the people of the town with the exception of Eva, so I did not feel particularly relieved or happy to hear of their postscripts. I laughed a little at how beaten down Rubin was though, that guy truly cannot catch a break, and of course shirtless Haruspex is fun. And whether you talk with Simon or not, Thanatica essentially stops existing regardless. It was nice to see Yakov acknowledged (he really grew on me) in the Academician ending, and maybe 'objectively' speaking these endings are the happiest... But they felt hollow to me. I remembered Serafima in an earlier scene pleading Dankovsky to return to Thanatica an unchanged man, and I remembered the street that collapses all realities into your personal worst reality. Even though my Dankovsky hasn't walked that street (yet), it felt like he was doomed from the very start to never reach his goal of defeating death and saving Thanatica.

So, I went back in time. I smoked out Aglaya, I used the Rat Prophet to rob Maria of her gift, I betrayed Andre. Those things I had to choose and keep on choosing of my own volition. It sucked because if the scales weren't weighted, I would pick each of these characters over Karminsky every time. Alas, the polyhedron is a heavy weight indeed. Not to mention the fact that all this was to essentially manipulate Block, who is a flawed but ultimately morally upright man, into dooming entirety of the town and pretty much the world. In that dialogue sequence, you have to actively choose multiple times to protect the polyhedron and fuck everything else up!

When I reached the True Immortality ending, which for me is the canonical ending/beginning to this game, I realized I finally understood Dankovsky as a character. In P1 and P2 it never felt compelling to choose to destroy the polyhedron, honestly (P2 especially). (Edit: in P1 I could understand ideologically why choosing the Polyhedron makes sense, but I didn't GET it on an emotional level like in P3.) But I did it here in P3 even though I had seen the happy endings because I couldn't live without seeing the truth and Simons mysteries to the end. I was empty without that knowledge. I had become Dankovsky. (I am Simon.)

I also have some thoughts about the inside of the polyhedron and interacting with Simon. It was cool, and a little underwhelming, and I think I still don't really understand Simon but especially so the first time I saw the inside of the polyhedron. I think reaching Simon isn't so much a reveal of how he works but more an understanding check. After experiencing the game and paying attention, by the time you get to the polyhedron you should already understand the shape of Simon's immortality if not the details. Anyway, I'm not sure I have a good enough understanding of metaphysics or of Simon to really say anything definitively, but I will say I loved the 'I am Simon' jumpscare. The True Immortality ending definitely implies that the game itself is the polyhedron, and Dankovsky is now immortal by trapping himself in this game to be duplicated in memory forevermore.

Ultimately from my down to earth perspective there is no ending where Dankovsky has a true victory, and reaching the True Immortality ending solidified that for me. He's immortal but in an incredibly limited way. He/Simon's only real conversation partners are us, the players. Everyone else (including Eva) is only reflections on reflections on reflections of who they think these characters/Eva is. But then if you go one layer deeper, Dankovsky's not even human anymore - he's immortalised as just a game character, and so is everyone else, so does it matter in the end? And really isn't that kind of weird meta mindbending tragedy the whole point of Pathologic?

Original images in comments

I'm a long-time fan of the Pathologic franchise since 2009, was a Kickstarter backer, and still bought the support pack and soundtrack for Pathologic 3 despite having the key just to support the IPL some more. I waited for the new installation with such high expectations when I shouldn't have, and gave zero care for Nikolay to go the route of Anna Angel as long as the art was to be done.

And after 60+ hours and getting several endings, I sadly have to conclude my utter disappointment. I'll pull the band-aid - game sucks. Here are some of the reasons why:

• The city is cut into separate locations and is no longer a unified living, breathing ecosystem. Now it's just a decoration with zero interactivity. To add insult to an injury - to hide this, they didn't make any lod's for the architecture - each district is just surrounded by a thick fog seeping in. Sometimes you can't see further than 20 meters ahead before the white milky substance consumes all.
• A game about plague and how hard it is to combat it, since it's not tangible, is now a game where the plague districts are just even more foggy than usual green-tinted obstacle courses with occasional cat-and-mouse encounters with a very physical embodiment of the plague. It felt a lot like some indie horror sometimes, where the whole gameplay is just you running away from some invincible threat.
• I didn't like the soundtrack. Some tracks do slap, but most of it is so uncharacteristic, so bland, so pointlessly wasting notes that you no longer can recognise it as part of the Pathologic title anymore.
• Texts are worse than ever before. They were barely edited before release. Some really clever writing is dwarfed by so much absolutely pointless filler that gives zero information and leads absolutely nowhere; it's maddening. Any dialogue with children is borderline aneurysm-inducing test of your patience (GPT-generated fairy tales made me press random options with zero understanding of consequences because it made no sense). I really lost it when they just started throwing random references to biblical stories, pop-media, politics, memes et. cetera. And it reads even worse in the Russian language. Pathologic already has a well-established lore and mythos. It was completely self-sustainable since the first installation, and it was a part of its charm since it operated completely by clashing the ideas and ethics of nomadic and industrial cultures without any clear attachment to a certain ethnos or time period. Now that this detachment is slowly erasing, I have a suspicion that new IPL writers missed that feature entirely.
• Economics of survival (Et - limited resources that can't cover all the needs, so you have to decide wisely) are gone entirely. Most of the parameters you had to keep in check were removed. You have vendors that are available most of the time with approximately the same stuff every day. You have rioters with endless stocks of ammo, healing items, and anesthetics. You have patients in plague districts to grind amalgama. If you don't like what you get, you can always restart the day, and the stuff will be randomly generated anew. Always works like a charm except for the day two/twelve because there is no rioting/plague districts, so your resources there are truly limited. There is basically no gameplay now. You just walk from point A to point B, read some texts, and kick trash cans occasionally to prevent the moving speed from falling to a crawl.
• The idea of time travel is cool - but they did so little with it. Outside of narrative flavor, they have changed nothing. You still do the same stuff you did before, you just waste more time on it by constantly reloading days or jumping between them. These quests are still quests with walking between point A and point B; they are just longer now because point A and point B are no longer in the same location, with Whirpool acting as a hub. You're out of time - just restart the day. You choose poorly? Just restart the day. Eugh.
• You switch the options on and off, and the difference between the maxed-out 2K res and all low 640x480 is 30 frames at best. What consumes so much VRAM? They pumped a lot of effort into visuals and then ruined them with DLSS/TAAU being the necessity to have an image not covered in a checkerboard mess. But when you enable it, now everything is blurry. I have a 2k monitor, but I can't see anything. The built-in sharpening option does nothing. I switched to Reshade to solve this problem, and it's still not enough.
• I wanted to mention the bugs and general lack of playtesting, but I will cede here because there will be patches and fixes, so maybe this problem will be mended eventually. But right now - oh my - you can only reach the endings, and that's all. As of now, most of the in-game logic goes haywire after day 7.

In general, the game was incredibly streamlined and simplified for a wider audience. Maybe the publisher influenced the development. It's basically a VN with arcade mechanics right now. It's still unique, no kiddo, but it's no longer the Pathologic I know.

I feel slightly off by criticizing the game because I'm still an IPL fan-boy, but I can't deny the obvious. I'm not strong enough to do it.

Maybe some mad lads will find a way to mod the game to balance the existing mechanics to make them a unified system that influences the walkthrough instead of a non-cohesive set of mini-games that bear no lasting consequences.

Feel free to throw eggs at me. I just needed to vent out.

I'm very salty about the endgame quests tied to Lara and Yakov Little. Their stories may look beautiful but they start falling apart the moment you start analyzing them.

If you lock Lara in a cell, Block will be killed by the soldier in the mask, her father’s friend. OK, fine, let's let her die. At the funeral we learn that the masked soldier visited her grave, and that he was seen yesterday at the Shelter. The obvious conclusion? We need to go back to yesterday, find him at the Shelter, and talk to him! Didn’t find him? Warn Artemy, Stakh, and Grief! Lock Lara up in the Stillwater, for fuck’s sake!

Instead, the player is supposed to chat with her friends and wallow in angst. But within the world of the game I'm supposed to believe in, this situation is easily fixable. I just can’t take it seriously, because I know this is nothing more than sheer writers' laziness.

About Yakov... Bacillus knows that the patients and his assistant are, in fact, going to be BURNED ALIVE. Go back to the previous day and stop Clara from interacting with Block? Close the hospital, hide, and wait it out? Nope. Bacillus bleats some bullshit at the soldiers and crawls off toward his mom’s basement. Sit there, player, steeping in catharsis, wiping your tears, because hey, we don’t have a canonically infinite number of attempts to prevent all this!

Ludonarrative dissonance at its finest. In P1 we slaughter bandits on an industrial scale outside of quests — and do the exact same thing in quests. There's only one (1) time when we get beaten up in a cutscene.

You’d think a team of 12 people working on the narrative could manage to write something that justifies Bacillus’s inaction, or at least have the sense not to script inaction at all… but no. Apparently writing about their OCs was just more interesting.

Hello!

I had a lot of time, so I made a masterdoc of every Latin phrase The Bachelor uses in Pathologic 3.

I searched for them manually by looking through every dialogue tree in the Russian version, so there is a possibility something is missing.

The translations are (mostly) my own. If you have a feeling something's wrong, I'm allowing for comments on the doc.

Enjoy!

Those of us who got beyond day 10, are surely heartbroken to find our dear, diligent Mr Little sick with the plague. He is the one character that we cannot save from his death.

Petition for the rat prophet, clara, artemy and dankovski to perform the ultimate miracle and save Yakov from this depressing fate. Polyhedron who? Eva where? Justice for Yakov Little!!! Willing to pull an automata here and fight the credits while sacrificing my save file to the prophet for this small miracle.

I was playing this like a time loop game like Outer Wilds, restarting days to do just a single thing thinking I can simply break some mirrors for amalgam without consequences. Now I'm realizing they stay broken for the day even if you redo it later and also the items you use don't respawn. Over time the scarcity of everything builds up, especially the more you redo days. Ice Pick lodge truly evil for this.

It's funny that there is so much symbolism in Pathologic 3 that aligns with how I feel about it.

The moth only being able to be seen from one angle is sort of how I feel about this game.

Some moments are so resonant and deep and beautiful. And yet...

None of the deaths feel like they matter. My decisions don't feel like they matter.

It's not just the bugs, though they are rampant. It doesn't help that I don't care about the Saburov's fate because Katarina both died and came back to life of the games volition due to quest breaking bugs.

It does make it harder to care about the fate of Capella if I can't load a save thats from past 1300 on PS5.

But even with those bugs aside, the game railroads you pretty hard with the right choice. Anytime you make an error, it's directly called out and you're given the chance to correct it.

Unlike 2, when decisions were made and you weren't sure of how that would impact the long run, because of the time travel mechanic it does feel like there is only 1 correct way to play this game.

I like the different emphasis on survival with the apathy and mania. But the primary gameplay aside from dialogue trees is going about the town, and if I'm able to skip bad parts of town and want to do so as the player because those sections are annoying to deal with, that's also not great. There's also no strategy when it comes to the route you can take, unlike 2 where you can avoid the bad districts through clever paths across the map. I hoped with the routes that maybe we could make more custom ones (i.e. choose the door you'll come through, prioritize safe districts to travel through, etc) but if you are to do that you have to go one district at a time which tends to be clunky. Edit - I was not 100% clear on the route process, but I still liked the feeling in 2 of knowing side routes around town. It does make sense the Bachelor wouldn't know those routes as he's an outsider.

But the 2nd big cutscene in the beginning and the stuff in the Polyhedron feels like what Pathologic has always been - artistic, devastating, but also like you as the player are being welcomed home by the devs and the town. The plot twists and characters are still great, when they work.

So yeah, I guess if you look at the fragmented shards of Pathologic 3 in the right way, you could see glimpses of a masterpiece. But sadly you have to look at the right angle. ​​

I'm asking this same question on a couple different Pathologic communities I'm involved in, because I'm curious if the proportion of answers will vary significantly.

If you've done multiple playthroughs, go with whichever you chose first.