NOTE: This article contains major spoilers for Pathologic Classic and Pathologic 2

 Pathologic Classic (2005) and Pathologic 2 (2019) are my two favorite games of all time. Unified together as a singular, inseparable experience in my brain that I will remain ever fond of. A fact I knew to be true ever since I first played the games in fall of last year, but only cemented upon replaying during a bout of illness that bled into a sudden tragedy. Whilst in the midst of my fixation, my grandmother passed unexpectedly. There was no warning. I had just seen her no more than a handful of days ago. I could think no coherent or easily communicable thoughts. That day Marble Nest had just gone on sale and I had said to my friends that I hoped no one had died so I could play it (I had overheard discussion of some vague bad news that was being kept from me so I could attend class). Childhood Grave from the Pathologic 2 OST became the soundtrack of my grief. Played on repeat through days intended only to be survived and left undocumented.

 It was a fitting game to be in the throes of when faced with this tragedy, given that all of Pathologic Classic was a farce of kids playing pandemic with dolls to cope after their grandfather’s funeral. Taken by the sand pest, presumably suddenly so. I likewise felt transformed back to childhood, resorting to childhood practices such as writing fanfiction to cope.

 I’m getting ahead of myself. What even is Pathologic? If you’ve somehow never seen the major videos on these remarkable games, the original Pathologic is a survival game based in a strange anachronistic unnamed town afflicted by an extremely deadly plague known as the Sand Plague. You play as one of three healers: the Bachelor (Daniil Dankovsky), the Haruspex (Artemy Burakh), or the Changeling (Clara). The “sequel,” Pathologic 2, is essentially a remake/re-imagining of the Haruspex route that can be played on its own. The aforementioned Marble Nest is a DLC adapted from a tech demo that predates Pathologic 2 wherein you play the Bachelor trapped in a death time loop. Each of these three healers have a set of relevant NPCs from a pool of characters known as the Bound, essentially notable figures in the town that are deeply tied to its legacy or future in one way or another. Each healer must work over the course of twelve days to ensure the health of their assigned Bound as they navigate the same set of events from their unique perspectives. The Bachelor is an outsider to the town and a famed thanatologist determined to best death itself sent there to investigate the mystery of a supposedly immortal man who is dead upon his arrival. The Haruspex grew up in town, the son of the menkhu (traditional healer caste) Isidor, and returns to town after many years abroad studying surgery to learn that his father was murdered and he stands accused of patricide. The Changeling, who is only playable after completing the Bachelor or Haruspex route, awakens with no memory in a freshly dug grave. She is believed to be a thief and has the miraculous power of healing hands, but another girl, who is her exact twin, roams the town committing terrible misdeeds that tarnish her reputation. You have twelve days to resolve the plague and reach a solution. Not everyone can be saved and the town will be forever scarred due to the utter breakdown of society that the plague induces.

 Pathologic is about a lot of things. It’s about the cruel trials of survival, community destabilization, the magic of childhood, industrialization, etc. However, for me it’s inextricably about grief. Even in Pathologic 2 where you are not haunted by the looming specter of the grieving Powers That Be, you are playing as a man who has lost the father he hasn’t seen in years and facing his inheritance of a tremendous cultural burden. The death of Isidor for the majority of the game seems to manifest neatly as a simple quest for revenge, to seek out the murderer and enact justice. Only when the truth of Isidor’s death being a mercy killing of a man who would suffer a far more terrible fate does the quest for vengeance transform into the tragedy of unavoidable grief without anyone to necessarily blame. You can still pass your judgment on Isidor’s killer, but it’s not nearly the same. The situation is only further complicated with the realization that Isidor brought the plague upon the town. Artemy is faced with not only the grief of losing his father, but also the grief of losing someone who you would hope would not initiate incomprehensible suffering on his own people. The grief of knowing that someone you cannot help but still love has done something so horrific.

 Love is a consistent theme throughout the Haruspex’s route. Much of what the Haruspex does is for love. In Isidor’s words in Pathologic 2:

 “You need not choose. Not yet. Moreover, you've already made your choice. Your actions did. For they were driven by love, whether you wanted that or not. Love came from understanding. Understanding creates connections. Connections are the Lines. The Lines are love.”

 Love born of a sense of duty drove Artemy to save as much of the townsfolk that he could. It drove him beyond the obligation of preserving Isidor’s list of children to the extent of essentially adopting Sticky and Murky as his own (assuming he is able to save them). With love comes the inevitably of grief. Either on your own part or the part of others. It’s only natural that the route that most embodies love to a degree that is even remarked upon in the game design document be the one that is also most connected to conventional grief.

 You can’t save everyone in Pathologic 2, not without a stroke of tremendous luck to find an abundance of plague cures and with the straight up dice rolls to determine who survives once infected. I have yet to play a game wherein everyone survives. Multiple bound always die. At the end of the game you are faced with their ominous last words about what their respective path was and the role that they played. Then in their conventional place at the very end, a tragedian stands to mark their absence. You are unable to escape the reminder of those you left to die.

 This isn’t to say that grief isn’t present in the other two routes of Classic. Apart from the general overbearing sense of loss that comes in tow with the plague, Daniil confronts his personal grief over losing his life’s work before the revelation of his nature as a doll. He also endures the grief of losing Eva to suicide, a woman who embraced him and accepted him into her home. Clara suffers the grief of losing the family that once so graciously adopted her as well as the inherent grief of living the brief life she has, emerging fully formed from the grave at the onset of the plague, eternally unsure if she will continue to exist upon its cessation. Had she not been so preoccupied with matters of survival during the outbreak, she would be undoubtedly overcome with the anticipatory grief over knowing such an abbreviated and horrific life.

 I intend to develop these meditations on grief further at a later point in the form of a video essay of sorts. This topic means a great deal to me and I suspect it will be instrumental in further processing my own grief on top of the work that writing Pathologic fanfiction on the subject has done for me. I will not be openly linking my fanfiction anywhere any time soon, but it shouldn’t be too painfully difficult to find with a bit of sleuthing and the context clues I’ve provided. All that I ask is that you be kind if you do seek it out.

 This wasn’t the article I initially wanted to write about Pathologic. Nor was it the first article I wrote and never published about the game. Sometimes when you try to get the words out, something else overtakes you and pollutes all your effort to write. Maybe I’ll be able to break free of the discussion at some point, but for now this is what I had to get out there about the game. Happy September.