#pathologic critique

I wrote down four statements that describe my general feelings about the demo. They will serve as a frame of reference for what my critique will fundamentally touch upon instead of trying to fit every possible complaint I might have in a disjointed fashion. Here they are:

I feel like Quarantine expects me to:

Consider Dankovsky to be a specific Character in a specific Story

Believe Dankovsky has an internal world that can be mechanically represented in the ludo-narrative

Find said internal world to be compelling enough to let it filter the whole experience of the game

(presumably) emotionally connect with Dankovsky due to all of the above

If all this sounds confusing - good! Keep reading, it's going to get even better.

So, is Daniil a character?

Yes, of course he is. But what does it mean in the context of the original game compared to Pathologic 2 and now Quarantine?

Over the years I've come across vastly different opinions about the quality of character writing in the original Pathologic. I am not including complaints about the English translations or other technical aspects, just the most basic tendency of how the game portrays its characters. Most people I've seen who have passionately engaged with the game (including me) tend to describe the original game's characterizations as nuanced, complex and strangely realistic despite their rather theatrical tendencies. But I've also heard others say the exact opposite. That the characters don't feel like real people at all, their personalities are incoherent and fall flat due to a lack of consistency, and that every single one of them, from an old man to a literal toddler, falls back on the same pseudo-philosophical cadence, which while attempting to make them seem deeper ends up dehumanizing them even further. And even though those two opinions seem to be contradictory, I think that they are both the exact same reason why the writing of the original game captivates me so much. Because it doesn't really matter.

I wrote my thesis about the brechtian influences in Classic. One of the most characteristic aspects of the Epic Theatre is the attempt to remove illusions typical to traditional theatre, among which is the illusion of a character's psychology. I believe that you can absolutely argue that the characters in patho 1 were designed to behave like Brecht's characters - lacking internal psychology, mainly serving as mouthpieces for political and philosophical arguments, more so types than individuals. But here's the catch - I believe it's actually impossible to create a character completely immune to identification, because we as humans love to project our silly little emotions on pretty much anything, including animals and inanimate objects. Compared to those cases, Gorkhon's gallery of strange individuals is a painfully human display. So it's no wonder that many of us did indeed relate to those weirdos, just like nothing can possibly stop an audience member from identifying with Mother Courage or Galileo in Brecht's play. But the fact still remains that none of those characters were designed with this kind of simple emotional identification in mind and thus the attachment we may feel to them is more of a byproduct than the main goal. Taking a character who was meant to be analytically pondered and instead adopting them as a breathing human being is in that case, almost an act of rebellion. It's like saying, this is mine now.

Coming back to Daniil, this lack of clarity of how much he was written with this sort of characterization in mind is the main reason why I found him so compelling, he always kept me asking: is this part of Daniil as a coherent whole or is it just a philosophical stance which I should ponder at this moment or is it the writer's attempt at predicting what the player (presumably a straight male player) may want to say through this character? Does Daniil say "wow" because that's how he speaks, or is it just an oversight? Am I supposed to treat optional dialogue as things he would say or just things that are sometimes said in his world? The point is I DON'T KNOW and I love that I don't know that! It gives me so many posibilities! To me Daniil's character isn't so much about what he exactly says or does, but rather the internal logic that guides him. And I am the one who can choose its exact mechanism. He is mine.

Meanwhile, I feel like Quarantine wants me to treat Dankovsky like I would treat most other characters in traditional/popular media. Here are his personality traits. He is intelligent, he says so himself, and that lady over there also said it and he knows science and formulas and speaks Latin. Here are his thoughts. He has a memory about this thing. He feels guilty about that. I suddenly have a whole army of simple sentences that are meant to help me umderstand Daniil in this new iteration. Not so much a puzzle but a construction manual. And I'm not saying that this way of storytelling is fundamentally bad just because I can parody it as simpler than it really is. I want to engage with the new game's writing on it's own terms but so far I haven't done that mostly due to the giant dankovsky shaped object blocking the view.

Speaking of-

THE BACHELOR-CENTRIC MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE

This demo is so much about Dankovsky that it almost makes me embarrassed in his name. And honestly, I'm surprised I feel that way, considering how much I usually enjoy stories where a character's perception shapes the narrative to a great extent. I love symbolic dream sequences, guilt-driven visions and unreliable narrators. But the way Daniil's perception of himself and his surroundings doesn't really feel like a service to him as a character, but rather a narrative shorthand to spoonfeed me, the player, the most relevant information. The way Daniil's thoughts appear around objects is realistic to the extent that yes, human thoughts can be often rather simple and disjointed but there are moments where I think this mental streamlining is detrimental to his characterization and rubs him of nuance. The worst culprits of that are (IN MY OPINION):

Him calling Eva a ray of sunshine

The part where he references the fact that he and Artemy always fight about whose methods are better

Any time Daniil or someone around him refers to him as especially intelligent

Mr Little's Special Tutorial Perspective or Please Daniil Explain This To Me Once Again

None of those ideas are fundamentally bad, not at all. I'm curious to see his relationship with Eva develop, I want to see him interact with Artemy more like they did in the original, I can see some great ironic potential in the constant hyping up of Daniil's intellect and yeah, I hope Yakov is revealed to be some secret government agent or something. But I'm annoyed that I feel like I can predict all of this from just a couple of lines in the demo. I want to be confused and unsure of my own judgement. I want to be proven wrong, surprised, and ashamed of my own surface level analysis. And that can still very much happen, perhaps even in the comments on this very post or once the full games comes out. But right now I feel rather pessimistic.

I don't have a good segue for this part so now let's talk mechanics.

PRESS B TO EAT A CIGARRETE

The new mechanics try to break away from the body-first focus of the original game and the way Pathologic 2 expanded on those ideas even further. This time it's all about the mind, baby. Which - again - on itself isn't a bad idea. If this game was just 2 with different dialogues it would be very hard to justify its existence as a stand-alone product that needed to somehow be funded over those last 6 years. But the result to me feels more like novelty for novelty's sake. Not everything of course - the diagnosis part of the gameplay is definitely its most well-designed aspect, and there is a consistent logic behind it. Where Artemy saw systems, Daniils sees individual parts, where Artemy had to rely on luck, Daniil controls all the variables etc etc. The same, however, cannot be said about some of the other new mechanics.

Managing Daniil's mental state doesn't feel that much different than making sure Artemy drinks enough water and I personally think it's a wasted opportunity. I'm not going to insert myself into the discussion about whether the game's use of terms associated with bipolar disorder is accurate/tasteful because other people with relevant experiences have already voiced their opinions about that and will hopefully continue to do so in the future. My point is - regardless of what exact mental condition or more general function of the human psyche the game is trying to convey, it does so in a manner so simplistic that it doesn't encourage me as a player to connect with it on a deeper level. Apathy is blue because it's sad, Mania means, well, mania so it's red. Once again, I have only experienced a small portion of the game's final system so I might be in for a surprise and perhaps I will get to see Daniil experience something... purple?

Also adding to my previous point about switching perspectives - I think this mechanic will be an absolute gut punch in the final game. I hope it's something akin to the original meeting with the Powers That Be, especially with the way multiple characters can "jump" into one conversation at any moment. This will surely be utilized for some mind-fuckery and I can't wait to see it. I think this is also the one aspect of the demo that gives me the most hope as far as my beloved emotional confusion is concerned. Because what is the switching of perspectives supposed to indicate really? Are we supposed to filter it once again through Daniil's perspective because of the framing device of him recollecting the events? So nothing we learn by getting the insight into other characters' thoughts can be taken at face value because that's just how Daniil sees them? Are those other/new characters even real or just exist in Daniil's psyche? Does it have something to do with the time travel blahblah? Or are we not playing as Daniil at all but some other entity entirely? That's the main question I hope I don't get a clear answer to but rather contradicting paths to follow. But despite that optimistic outlook I still need to get into the final aspect that made it difficult for me to engage with the new game on its own terms, and instead deciding to take its dead corpse apart.

I CARE TOO MUCH BUT NOT ENOUGH

I just can't get over the fact how much this game wants me to identify with Daniil or at the very least find him cool. Cool as in how modern characters are often cool. Wet cats, chaotic bastards, jerks with hearts of gold and vaguely homoerotic energy with other male characters. And I'm not saying this as an insult, narrative trends are a thing, I find many of those archetypes to be endearing more often than not, but my problem is that it still only serves Dankovsky as our center of the world. By flanderizing him and making him fit into a more recognizable character archetype we lose the feeling of him being always at odds with the world around him, the way he used to be conflicted over every single thing in the original game. This new world is too suited for him to be a hero of his story, a tragic hero but a hero nonetheless, while in my opinion what made him uniquely tragic in classic was precisely the fact that he wasn't anyone's hero.

I know this constant comparison to patho classic can get tiring, so let me use another point of reference which is also the reason why I am even writing this post in the first place - The Marble Nest. I love the marble nest. I find its narrative structure to be expertly crafted, emotional beats placed in just the right places and godd i still cry over the fact that they put his soul into a nutshell. And the funny thing is that TMN does share a lot of similarities with the new demo. It's a Daniil-centric story with a framing device that encourages us to look at the entire experience as Daniil's impression of the reality around him. It's a short and rather simple experience with a strong central theme. So why do I feel so emotional when Daniil talks to the death in that game but feel pretty much nothing when he talk about dying in Quarantine? Maybe because The Marble Nest is still steeped so deeply in the theatre influences which I hold dear to my heart while Quarantine moves away from them and maybe towards another medium entirely. Theatre never pretends to be reality and it's artificiality is always front and center. Film meanwhile often has the tendency to try to replicate reality or even try to be reality itself. In one of those cases I feel like an active audience member and in the other like a passive voyeur of some vision of reality. Or to put it simply, in one case I am afraid of Death and in the other, I am watching someone act out being afraid of death. That is a highly personal preference though and I'm genuinely happy to see that many people do indeed relate to this portrayal of Daniil, especially when it comes to how his mental problems are displayed front and center. And that's amazing! I want to see all the fan input that comes out of it and I hope the final game delivers on everything they hope for. But for me? I think I might need to take a back seat, at least for now. Watch the scene from afar, perhaps get a fuller picture. Because I want to care and understand and know and feel. I really do. But sometimes it's not possible and that's also good.

So, if you've read this overwritten mess to the end, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and encourage you to voice your opinion. Art doesn't exist without discussion so let's discuss!

POST-SCRIPTUM - ON THE NATURE OF MAKING GOOD THINGS IN YOUR PAST

One last thing I wanted to add which feels highly relevant to the my critique is the question of what to do when someone says they liked your old work better? I like to think of myself as an artist and I think that many of us do, even without getting into how according to Beuys everyone is an artist. So you make a thing, some people like, perhaps many people do. So you keep making things, you grow with them, change, realize your old ideas were often childish or naive which you can only do through gaining experience. So you make new things, often drastically different from the ones you made before. And someone says "I liked the old stuff better". And they don't say it as an insult, even though it may sometimes feel like it. Because you cannot recreate whatever you did in your past. And you want to grow. Does that mean that you got worse instead? That you peaked in your past and it's all downhill from here? Of course not. You know that. I know that. I hope every artist knows that. And yet it still hurts. It hurts to be perceived as a line graph when in reality you are a recursive function.

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