#zero thoughts

The main one is obviously the investigation mechanic: both of them have one, but artemy’s is crucially based in his father’s culture and his own inherited knowledge of how to diagnose using local unique flora. His also involves a degree of ‘vibes’, in the sense that you have to kinda guess where to start but the more you do it the better of a ‘feel’ you get for how it’s 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 ‘regulation’ mechanics: artemy’s behaviour is regulated, outside of his control, by people’s opinion of him, as well has his own bodily state; dankovsky’s 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 others’ opinions of him and so he must massage his intentions into a methodology that doesn’t get him shunned and killed. In the same way, he’s 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 – he loses stamina and can’t run indefinitely, he dies if he gets hit too many times, he can seemingly catch the plague – but we don’t see any UI for those things. Those are things that explicitly control him, but they’re not what he’s concerned with. They’re 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 it’s 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 mustn’t 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 I’m not trying to tell those people they’re wrong at all, but my main takeaway from his brain mechanics are more ‘living through trauma that you see as your personal responsibility to fix’ mechanics. Think about how you feel when you’re doomscrolling: you’re always striking a balance between becoming so angry and panicked you can’t function, and becoming so depressed you can’t function. The ideal middle, being calm enough to work but motivated enough to do so, is very difficult to achieve. That’s the main thing I see his stress meter as representing here, and I think it’s especially clear in the way that he talks about his own perception of his responsibility here: he knows he’s approaching an impossible task, but feels like he’s 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 he’s “the only doctor” in the town. This is news to us, being used to artemy’s way of thinking in patho2 saying there’s 3 – himself, dankovsky, and rubin – and jarring for being so. But dankovsky explicitly doesn’t think of any of them as his equals or even his colleagues. The most he gives either of them is that rubin is ‘the last person to see simon’ and artemy is ‘the local sawbones’, and even less flatteringly, a ‘dropout’. He sees himself as the protagonist in a way that artemy simply doesn’t, but it’s not a strength, it’s a self-imposed stressor.

This individualism vs collectivism even comes up with the townsfolk. Yes dankovsky doesn’t have a trade mechanic (except that one time he did? We’ll 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 – a single unit made of many parts, much like how he sees the physical town – and names them in his head accordingly, giving differentiation only to different character models. There’s no individuality here, and his endings take that to the logical conclusion: diurnal represents collectivist policy that’s 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 ‘beasts’ 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 (“filat’s neighbor”), 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, he’s 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 person’s life, he’s able to avoid making mistakes that I, as a player, probably would have done if dankovsky wasn’t there to ask the right questions and insist on more detail.

The interesting thing about that is, again, while it’s a good thing for him, it’s 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 can’t fit people into neat little boxes and he can’t 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 people’s 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 ‘if everyone would just act completely predictably and rationally by my reckoning my life would be so much less stressful’. And this is of course brought to a head with the final ‘breakthrough’ he has. Eurika, he says, let’s 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 rioters’ 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 dankovsky’s time mechanic, cus it’s just as rigid as artemy’s 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 don’t 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 ‘borrowed time’ from the person you euthanised in order to time travel, but it’s 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 you’ll likely waste a lot of time doing mood-regulating things as well so you don’t 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 doesn’t 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 characters’ 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; you’re 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 doesn’t deal in loftiness, he’s in the moment and in the place.

Dankovsky on the other hand, isn’t just an academic who is primarily concerned with making a red string conspiracy board out of his own memories, he’s 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 dankovsky’s concerns are, first and foremost, outside the town. He isn’t aware of 90% of what is going on in artemy’s route, and artemy says as much with his comment about his own “storyline”, and dankovsky isn’t even aware of how much he isn’t 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, he’s never physically in the town. This is of course the reverse of artemy: in his case we’re 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; dankovsky’s 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.