Back when I wrote my initial post about Pathologic, which was come to think of it quite some time ago, I’d considered continuing a sort of ongoing diary of my experiences in the game. I almost immediately forgot to do anything about it, of course—a lot of great games dropped shortly thereafter, so this desire almost immediately fell by the wayside. Still, I can only go so long without checking in on everyone’s favorite doomed and shortly-to-be-plague-ridden town, so here we are again. Let’s review where I’d gotten the last time, shall we?

Two deaths to plague, a spate of “mysterious disappearances,” which I’m beginning to think are just ways to refer to people getting their faces caved in by muggers and madmen (eleven, I think), and none of my friends/acquaintances dead (apart from the one fellow who’d written the letter which got me to come to the town in the first place). My landlady/woman I’m sleeping with (SCANDALOUS!) begged me to help her get out of town so she could die in the steppes rather than in the town, and I agreed to do what I could. The leadership of the town refused to believe there was a plague, even though I fucking told them there was plague coming. It’s a beautiful, sunny day in wherever-the-hell, Russia. Let’s go fight the inevitability of our own failure!

I was at a bit of a loose end—I needed proof of plague in order to get the administrative powers required if I’m going to have a chance of saving townsfolk, but I’ve got no idea where to go to get that information. So instead I focused on getting my landlady out of town, figuring that the rest would sort itself out. Julia (i.e. the other educated person in town, although her insistence on demonic activity as the culprit has cast doubt on her qualifications as “educated”) suggested I visit the local hostel, as I might find allies who believed my whole “guys this Sand Plague shit is gonna fuck y’all up if you don’t let me do my job” line.

Anyway, I wound up in a weird bar playing basically the best music in the game. As it happens, the guy who could probably get me and mine out of town was present—and he was super-into­ the idea, provided that I manage to get his brother, the (probably mad) architect responsible for the weird-ass spire on the west end, to leave with us. Only his brother wasn’t into the idea of leaving, so I had to figure something else out—or, as I eventually decided to do, give up and tell my landlady that escape wasn’t happening. (Un?)Fortunately, my landlady was not to be denied, and gave me some dirt on the architect in order to scare him out of town—the fellow I’m trying to help seize emergency powers, you see, has beef with the architect. Once I help him seize power (and I will, because I fucking need someone on my side in this batshit town), it’s likely our noble architect will wind up on the wrong end of a firing squad for…whatever reason the fearless leader thinks of. So now he’s ready to go, but I still need evidence of plague to ensure things move along as they should, and thus, it’s off to talk to Lara, who runs the hospice.

Lara believes me completely about the whole “we’re all gonna die” thing and informs me that she’s made arrangements for a safe house of sorts—a “house of life” that she needs supplies for, and could I help? She also tells me that she knows of a kid who knows another kid who knows something about a “Silent house” which, from the sounds of it, was probably hit by plague. So I go off to collect donations for the house, while also tracking down this kid. It’s easier than it sounds, because the game map is surprisingly helpful—the tooltips might be a bit unreliable (because they don’t go away as you complete objectives), but if you head for red buildings you will generally get results. I talk to the kid, and she points me to another kid who points me to the silent house, and the whole time I’m doing that, I’m also trying to buy provisions in a town that is rapidly running out of them. Everything got really expensive, and I wound up pawning off some of my drugs in order to get some dried meat, because I needed the food more than the drugs.

Somewhere around this time I also realize that I’m near the architect’s house, so I get him to agree to flee town while I’m at it. Then, it’s time to enter the silent house, and wow, for a game that looks like garbage they sure know how to scare the shit out of me! You can watch the sequence that got the hair on my arms to stand right the fuck up here if you want, but there’s a LP’s voice over it all and frankly it probably isn’t as effective that way (also you might really want to save that little gem for yourself, should you ever decide to pick up Pathologic and play—although the remake will come eventually (probably in another year) so maybe hold off? Anyway, I get my evidence, and also punch a sick lady in the face. As a reward, I am infected, and my immune system is severely compromised, but hey, I got my proof and now I just need to get this guy out of town and deliver the goods to the safe house and oh yeah present my evidence to the town magistrate…guy, and holy shit is it really 20:00 already?

Also, it’s raining again and also, I am dangerously close to passing out from hunger, exhaustion, or both. My health has started to wane as well, presumably because of infection, and my immune system might as well not exist for all the good its doing. So I deliver my evidence, am told to go give more evidence to another guy immediately, and deliver my goods to the house of the living….except there’s this guy waiting for me there, which is, I quickly learn, a bad sign.

Everyone in the house is dead. Lara is not, because she hadn't gone there yet, but if you stay in the house you can hear nothing but moans and screams of the dying, and the Executor just staring at me like I've fucked up, and occasional dark clouds of what I assume are plague whirling through the hallway making me feel even worse. I stumble out of the house, the screen doing all sorts of “YOU ARE HALLUCINATING AND PROBABLY PRETTY ILL” effects on me and immediately see a guy with a knife just murdering the shit out of some other dude. This time, unlike last time, I draw my gun and fire—and an unseen child laughs as the murderer falls over, dead. I didn't manage to save his victim, of course (because you cannot save anyone, ever, no matter what), so I frisk their pockets and come away with some extra weapons and money off the murderer, and…nothing at all off the victim. He didn’t even have anything worth stealing, apparently. Christ, Pathologic, you throw dark.

I give the provisions to Lara while breaking the news of her companions’ fate, and she gives me some nuts, explaining that I probably shouldn’t eat them but children like to trade stuff for them, so there’s a new wrinkle to the economy I’d not known previously. By this time my exhaustion is nearly complete, so I make one final stop to the other two town leaders to get them to surrender their powers and collapse into bed for six hours.

Day three starts with the news that I forgot to finish making arrangements to escape town, so the architect of mine? He’s dead. So are some fifty other civilians (of plague and other maladies), and some more disappearances although I didn’t quite catch the number. Day three starts with me looking like this:

It’s going to be a rough week.