Here is a snippet of a piece I wrote for Ready Steady Zine, focusing on Aim higher and higher! I'm honored to be a part of this zine and I've had so much fun working with such amazing people and making such amazing memories. This is my very first zine, so I hope you all enjoy!
of course, this isn't all I wrote... be on the lookout! @ready-steady-zine
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re-read the last chapter of NtN and Harrow the person that you are.
She wakes up inside the Tomb after not having been in her body for months, a body that has been completely falling apart just seconds ago bc planet Earth was stuck inside it, there is absolute mayhem going on - and the first things she does is call Ianthe a bitch, summon a skeleton army, and confessing her love to the Corpse she's been in love with since she was ten and who is now awake.
Many thoughts head full about the new dankovsky specific mechanics, partly cus theyāre really good on their own but also partly cus in my mind, they kind of reframe artemyās mechanics. Since artemyās route in patho2 is based around tightening up the bulk of the existing mechanics from classic HD, until now Iāve mostly been engaging with them that way, ie as just a better way of doing what they were always doing. But now that dankovsky has these new mechanics that break that mold, Iām suddenly thinking about artemyās mechanics in terms of his characterisation. And it helps that in most of these cases thereās a direct foiling happening.
(Goes without saying this contains spoilers, just a heads up)
The main one is obviously the investigation mechanic: both of them have one, but artemyās is crucially based in his fatherās culture and his own inherited knowledge of how to diagnose using local unique flora. His also involves a degree of āvibesā, in the sense that you have to kinda guess where to start but the more you do it the better of a āfeelā you get for how itās gonna go, cus you tend to see the disease settle in a relatively consistent layer each day. You start to know what to check for. Whereas dankovsky, as always, is based in hard evidence, and specifically a form of evidence that is recognised by a larger scientific community. His work is peer reviewed, but both of their diagnostic methods demonstrably work.
Then we have the āregulationā mechanics: artemyās behaviour is regulated, outside of his control, by peopleās opinion of him, as well has his own bodily state; dankovskyās behaviour is regulated, outside of his control, by his mental state. This is one of the key places we see the difference in their ideologies, where artemy is a collectivist not just in the sense that he believes in collectivist policies but that he believes the world works in a collectivist framework, as a logical conclusion of his lived experiences. He is, from the beginning of the game and whether he likes it or not, beholden to othersā opinions of him and so he must massage his intentions into a methodology that doesnāt get him shunned and killed. In the same way, heās a fundamentally grounded and very literally down-to-earth person, whose main difficulty (and main triumph) is in finding ways to act within the limits his body sets for him. He must eat, he must sleep, he must not catch the plague, he must not be hated.
The interesting thing here is, I say this is an issue of ideology because the bachelor does have bodily mechanics ā he loses stamina and canāt run indefinitely, he dies if he gets hit too many times, he can seemingly catch the plague ā but we donāt see any UI for those things. Those are things that explicitly control him, but theyāre not what heās concerned with. Theyāre not part of how he thinks about his experience. Instead all of that is secondary to his brain: his mind, in observation, logic and connecting the dots, is his main strength and his main tool, but itās also the thing that is most precarious about him. Where artemy is very matter-of-fact about what happens to him and is unhindered by his own worries (though we mustnāt trivialise the fact that he very much does have them and is stressed out all the time), dankovsky is in a constant battle to essentially be able to use that tool of his at all.
I see many people engaging with this as a representation of being bipolar for obvious reasons, and Iām not trying to tell those people theyāre wrong at all, but my main takeaway from his brain mechanics are more āliving through trauma that you see as your personal responsibility to fixā mechanics. Think about how you feel when youāre doomscrolling: youāre always striking a balance between becoming so angry and panicked you canāt function, and becoming so depressed you canāt function. The ideal middle, being calm enough to work but motivated enough to do so, is very difficult to achieve. Thatās the main thing I see his stress meter as representing here, and I think itās especially clear in the way that he talks about his own perception of his responsibility here: he knows heās approaching an impossible task, but feels like heās been forced into it, sometimes going so far as to speculate it was a deliberate play by his enemies, but crucially he also repeatedly says heās āthe only doctorā in the town. This is news to us, being used to artemyās way of thinking in patho2 saying thereās 3 ā himself, dankovsky, and rubin ā and jarring for being so. But dankovsky explicitly doesnāt think of any of them as his equals or even his colleagues. The most he gives either of them is that rubin is āthe last person to see simonā and artemy is āthe local sawbonesā, and even less flatteringly, a ādropoutā. He sees himself as the protagonist in a way that artemy simply doesnāt, but itās not a strength, itās a self-imposed stressor.
This individualism vs collectivism even comes up with the townsfolk. Yes dankovsky doesnāt have a trade mechanic (except that one time he did? Weāll see how that develops in the full release) but we even see it in the way the crowd is named. Artemy conceives of them as a flock ā a single unit made of many parts, much like how he sees the physical town ā and names them in his head accordingly, giving differentiation only to different character models. Thereās no individuality here, and his endings take that to the logical conclusion: diurnal represents collectivist policy thatās trying to do right by everyone and struggling to meet the needs of a collective of very varied and diverse people, nocturnal represents the extreme version of the racism faced by the kin in how they are treated as ābeastsā to the point of losing even the ability to speak and make choices as individuals.
Dankovsky however refers to every character either by their name, or by a unique identifier (āfilatās neighborā), which is normal out of context, but with the added context of the investigative elements it gives the impression of someone needing to fit the world into a spreadsheet. No stranger can be defined by generalisations that together triangulate an individual, heās focused on specifics. And this is a strength for him! Using both his knowledge of how symptoms interact to narrow down diseases, and his ability to draw conclusions based on the wider context of a personās life, heās able to avoid making mistakes that I, as a player, probably would have done if dankovsky wasnāt there to ask the right questions and insist on more detail.
The interesting thing about that is, again, while itās a good thing for him, itās also something he resents. He makes repeated comments about people being the worst part of the job for him, in the sense of potentially lying but also their outlook and unique experiences leading them to a set of opinions that makes it hard for them to communicate forthrightly. While his concern is allegedly saving people, he seems very conflicted on the matter of whether people are worth his effort; he consistently makes the effort, he wants to avoid death to the point of being willing to be seen as a pseudoscientist to do it, but he also resents the fact he canāt fit people into neat little boxes and he canāt get them to communicate like impartial diagnostic robots, and is VERY conflicted on the matter of personal autonomy.
This ends up being the main tension of the demo, with him regularly getting contradictory dialogue options about how acceptable it is to take peopleās choice away and under what circumstances, some of them rationalising it as needing to to stop the plague (true) but others coming out as outbursts that essentially boil down to āif everyone would just act completely predictably and rationally by my reckoning my life would be so much less stressfulā. And this is of course brought to a head with the final ābreakthroughā he has. Eurika, he says, letās stop pissing people off and lift the quarantine! Great idea. Of course this makes everything worse for everyone, but having just died multiple times in the riotersā district, you can see why he thought it might be necessary. And here we come back to the central theme of pathologic as a series: multiple conflicting courses of action, all of which are necessary and non-negotiable, and all of which are mutually exclusive, thereby leaving you with only wrong choices on how to proceed.
And again, we see this especially pertinently in dankovsky finally deciding to do time travel about it. Just like his railing against death, he resents the restrictions that being temporally and spatially bound inherently impose on him, and wishes for ultimate control over all outcomes. And this is something that dates all the way back to marble nest too: the final moments of his life are spent desperately grasping at straws trying to find the puzzle piece that will make everything perfect and put him back in control of the outcome. Patho3 seems to be shaping up to be a much larger, more stressful and complex version of this where you have to manage not one day on a loop, but 12 days each with interlocking consequences on each other. In this way, the more control he has, the less he has, ironically.
This also brings me to dankovskyās time mechanic, cus itās just as rigid as artemyās but again, is rigid in the ways that dankovsky conceptualises it. Artemy, like most of us, is bound by time going forward, and it never stops. This is something that is always a restriction on him, and is another way in which his mechanics, like in classic HD, draw your attention to human weakness and need for community as no one person can do everything and everyone must first and foremost listen to their body if they want to survive long enough to do anything helpful. The only things that give artemy essentially free infinite time are the community signifiers: the conversations and the trade.
Dankovsky however has much more temporal abstraction (you donāt have to personally physically walk everywhere) but time is also a currency for him. This is most obvious when you realise at the end of the demo you need that āborrowed timeā from the person you euthanised in order to time travel, but itās also true in diagnostics and conversation. Every two dialogue lines takes one minute. Every body part you examine takes one minute. Every action you have is rationed out, and youāll likely waste a lot of time doing mood-regulating things as well so you donāt rapidly devalue all the substances you could use to self-medicate (which, oof. Many disco elysium adjacent thoughts about that). Once again time is something you must economise, but where artemy must be frugal with his movements and his engagement with the physicality of the town, dankovsky must be frugal with his brain and how time feels to him.
The other thing I wanted to talk about re collectivism vs individualism is the framing devices. Artemy is constantly having to embed himself in the town, in its politics, its emotions, its earth and blood, in order to progress. He does have the theatre every night like in classic HD, but he doesnāt have the opening dialectic in the theatre, which I think is a deliberate choice both to make the game feel more natural without all three charactersā routes already in it, as well as a way to step away from abstraction. Classic HD and patho2 have always been about subverting video game abstraction; youāre used to being able to run everywhere, go without food, heal almost instantly, and artemy reminds you of your flesh and your duty to it. Artemy shies away from abstraction because he doesnāt deal in loftiness, heās in the moment and in the place.
Dankovsky on the other hand, isnāt just an academic who is primarily concerned with making a red string conspiracy board out of his own memories, heās also crucially coming at this through the framing device of his after-the-fact interrogation. There is nothing to make you feel quite as much like an outsider as the constant reminder that dankovskyās concerns are, first and foremost, outside the town. He isnāt aware of 90% of what is going on in artemyās route, and artemy says as much with his comment about his own āstorylineā, and dankovsky isnāt even aware of how much he isnāt aware of. Even his need to contain the plague, at the end of the day, comes down to either his on-principal fight against death, or his need to survive long enough to return to his lab. As far as he is concerned, through this framing device, heās never physically in the town. This is of course the reverse of artemy: in his case weāre constantly told that he left the town, but all we experience as players is in the town and so we see him as fundamentally of the town; dankovskyās presence in the town is told through dreamlike memories whose reliability is always in question with how he intends to restructure and change them, and so he always feels like an outsider looking in.
There are probably other things Iāve missed. Like the combat mechanic is something I think is interesting. But this is like. My main set of thoughts on first playthrough of Quarantine.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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