#patho meta

in short, dankovskys path to “victory” (utopia) was always doomed by both his fundamental failure of understanding and by aiming for things beyond his scope. most literally: his inability to accept himself as a doll (thing with no agency, animated by the player). this, to me, is his central dilemma.

the core mechanic of p3 is the manipulation/undoing of choices and rewriting time to achieve a "better" - or more optimized for "succeeding" - outcome. if we see pathologic as a game, or more picturesquely, a recurring re-staging of a loosely scripted play, this is a staging within which the actor is allowed limited freedom to alter the script on the go, with the audience stuck in the theatre until he runs himself dry. but it is still a staging (playthrough). 

I’m not a religious person, as a matter of fact for a very long time I looked down upon and mocked organized religion as cult for people unable to find their own reason to live. Of course I realize now that that’s a wrong elitist way of thinking and I’m ashamed of ever holding that perspective. But it’s the perspective I had when this event happened to me. My family and I traveled to New York, and we visited st. Patrick’s cathedral. And I cannot fully describe the feeling that stepping into that building gave me. It was…majesty. I was utterly shaken beholding something so incredibly beautiful and powerful, and at the same time unwelcoming. I was not supposed to be there. I, someone who doesn’t believe in god and scoffed upon the idea should not be allowed to see this majesty of humanity, belief and engineering, I should be ashamed of thinking it was nothing more than a building. And holy shit can I tell you how TERRIFYING that feeling is? Because it’s deeply scary to think a building doesn’t want you there.

That building was fucking alive.

It was a great art and masterpiece built as a place of worship out of worship. It was deeply human but at the same time some evidence of a higher power, or at least such a powerful belief in a higher power that the ghost of it lived inside.

buildings are alive, not every building to such a powerful extent as that cathedral, but alive in the way that they carry the memory of something that happened in them, people who lived or died there. Have you ever entered a home and felt unwelcome? Or distinctly warm? That’s the human elements and life that have been put in that building. And that’s what a focus is I think-a pure memory of a person that can exist…physically. So maybe that’s why the buildings the stamatins designed are so strange-because they’re brand new buildings trying to capture years of human emotion and history all at once.

So that’s a focus I guess-or part of the explanation of what a focus is. Which makes the idea of focus’s even more terrifying to me honestly, they’re created to dazzle and behold a feeling, but they *cant grow* from that-for growth you need some human element. If a focus is a story it must be read, if it houses a person it only houses what remains of that person. That life that was put into peoples homes and places like that cathedral was peoples lives, people who come in and out and change and pray. A focus is just a captured memory, and memory can’t change unless it’s remembered, but with no human element to remember it than the person who’s in focus can’t change. They’re no longer human.

when people say that you can just play pathologic 2 instead of playing the first game... i disagree with that, because i think P2 is weaker than P1 in basically every way except mechanically, but i can definitely see the argument. if you're not too bothered about lore or getting the best story, and just want to play a solid survival horror rpg with above-average writing, it makes sense to jump right to P2.

P3's writing is on par with P2, and the time travel mechanics were a bold move that ended up way more well-handled and engaging than i was expecting them to be (albeit with a huge amount of bugs, which is unsurprising and will hopefully be fixed in the coming months). it would be cool if the game became enough of a hit to inspire future games to experiment with causality and time manipulation in this way.

but as far as the story goes, i do think someone who hasn't played the first two games, or at least the P1 bachelor route, is going to have a diminished experience. for one thing, it's probably just very confusing if you haven't experienced the story linearly first.

but also, P3 was at its most compelling to me when it was the most open about being a conversation with the first game. when i would move through a story sequence and characters would parrot lines that i recognized verbatim from pathologic classic, like distorted echoes thrust into an altered context.

occasionally, character name spellings will randomly switch to the localizations that were used in the infamously janky 2005 english translation of the first game, prior to the 2015 rerelease. peter becomes petr, yulia->julia, aglaya->aglaia, etc. it didn't even occur to me that it was unintentional until i saw people reporting them as typo bugs, it just felt like all of these different tellings of the story melding and collapsing. it didn't break my immersion when daniil randomly calls grace "laska" in a line of dialogue, it felt rewarding because i know that is her name, in another version of this story. just little things like that, they all added up.

IPL was remaking a game, and instead of doing a straightforward remake, they decided to give the protagonist the ability to go back and change his own story. they made him obsess over the tragedies that happened to him and the people around him, and then gave him the power to go back and change things, to rewrite what happened in the hopes that he was making something better. and honestly, i have to assume that's a bit what it feels like to remake a game itself, to go back and try to rewrite a story that was already written.

i think the obvious answer is that one or both of them should have defected against dankovsky and sided with the inspector. serafima would be the obvious choice, since she's characterized as the one who is "devoted to the mission of thanatica, not bachelor dankovsky" — she could be convinced that dankovsky running off on the lab was him abandoning them, or decide that using him as a scapegoat would provide a chance for thanatica's work to continue without him (and isn't that the sort of ruthless sacrifice dankovsky himself might make to preserve something precious, anyway?). though at the same time, platon might be the better choice just for the surprise factor, since he's characterized as more of a loyalist true believer. either way!