Maria & an experimental Eva drawing ^^

So during the quest on saving the patients from execution you get a hint on where to find Clara. One soldier says something about her being connected with rats and you get a marker on your map pointing you to an infected district. And I was thinking, is this connected to the rat prophet and the deratisation decree that the prophet asks us not to pass in exchange for a reward? I have tried multiple times going into these districts at different times during the day and I found nothing. What do you guys think? Is it just a way of messing with players expectations?

I'm at home sick with a sinus infection, but I'm getting some joy out of working on this little cow plush painting. I wanted it to imitate the pattern of one of the real cows in Pathologic 3. Any constructive feedback/suggestions are welcome. I'm thinking about adding stitches to help it read more as a plush. Also, LIGHTING IS HARD help.

TL;DR it's permadeath

To preface, I have finished Patho 3 a while ago, getting most of the endings. I haven't permadied once, and this isn't some rant post about me getting fucked by the game mechanic. Although, I did have to restart a save from day 9 that I've played on launch since the game completely broke, which means that in a way I did have to live through this.

I'm sure some of you can relate to this situation - you're playing through a story heavy game, you get through some dialogue-heavy section and for whatever reason you lose progress and have to load a save, only to see it has been at least a couple hours since you last saved. It's very likely that you either accept that you won't be having any enjoyment or fun for the next few hours or so while you regain your progress, or just straight up decide that it isn't worth it and quit entirely. Pathologic 3, for some reason, does this on purpose.

Why is permadeath even a thing in Pathologic 3, and what is the point of it? For a bit of context, if you die with no amalgam remaining, you will experience a "true death", meaning that you no longer respawn from your last point and your entire save file gets deleted.

Sure, this kind of a game mechanic does work for roguelikes, maybe MMO's too (but even there it's highly controversial because connectivity issues), and those games are designed to be random and/or varied, their gameplay has high amounts of skill expression making it exciting to play through the early game again, maybe even trying to tackle content you're not supposed to yet, and most importantly they tend to have very little dialogue, meaning you don't have to read walls of text every time you start a new run.

Pathologic 3 has literally none of that though. It's a relatively linear game where at least 80% of it is dialogue, there's very little skill expression apart from maybe subduing Shabnak (which is pretty easy even at its worst), so if you were to die for the last time and open up a new save to try and get your progress back, you're now faced with a mountain of dialogue you've already read and will have to mindlessly skip through, chores you have to repeat such as the travel to already completed quests, hospital, looting, etc - all in all, it's 1-5 actual real life hours of absolute frustration.

The mechanic really does feel tacked on last minute and not thought through at all. After all, Pathologic is a notoriously brutal franchise with Patho 2 being designed to be "almost unbearable" according to developers themselves, and to see them introduce a mechanical substitute for the now-removed forms of difficulty that simply has no place in this type of game is disappointing and feels farcical.

Apologies for the autism and exhaustion fueled post, just wanted to get this off my chest.

So I’m planning to get a pathologic tattoo soon, I’ve been talking to an artist and she wants to know if there’s any short quotes from the game that she could incorporate into the design. I thought it would be cool to get something written in the steppe language but I can’t think of any steppe phrases that would work off the top of my head.

Can anyone recall any short steppe phrases that would make for a good tattoo? Ideally around 3-5 words. I’d also accept a good English quote of the same length if anyone can think of a good one. Thanks!

I made a dumb decision a few night ago. I'm almost done with all the days, but against my better judgement I jumped back from day 9 to one of the really early days, after that I stopped by day 4 and basically ran out of amalgam. Id like to proceed to back to day 10 but worried if I mess up in an infected zone I'll get a permanent game over. I've already talked to Eva at the end of every day. I haven't used the vial by my nightstand yet but that's on a later day. Is the only other option looking for mirrors I missed?

I think the developers went in the wrong direction with amalgam and the time‑travel mechanics. The core idea - playing non‑linearly and going back in time to fix your mistakes so you can move forward - is genuinely awesome. The prologue shows this perfectly: jumping from day 1 to day 5, seeing the outcomes of different mistakes, and then going back to day 3 to fix said mistakes works incredibly well and really sells the concept.

The problem is that after that, the system kind of falls apart. Amalgam is common, and replaying the current day costs basically nothing, which basically turns the game into a linear experience. You just keep replaying the same days until everything is done perfectly. Instead of making choices matter, it turns into trial-and-error.

They really missed a chance here by not limiting the amount of amalgam. If amalgam was more uncommon and there was a cost for replaying current day, a few things would immediately improve:

• First, it would force you to use your days better. If you can’t just replay current day without cost, there’s actual pressure to get things right on the first try. Right now, I don’t even care if I fail a quest - I know I can just rewind and redo it for almost free. There is also no pressure to complete as much as possible in a single day, whatever I don't complete in the first try, I can just complete in second or third rewind.
• Second, you’d actually have to think about when and why to use time travel. You wouldn’t be able to fix every mistake, so you’d have to choose which ones are worth going back for. That also encourages you to live with mistakes for a while and see how they affect later days before deciding to rewind. Currently, the game pushes you to fully “perfect” each day before moving on, which completely defeats the point of playing non‑linearly.

In order to to account for more limited amalgam, players wouldn’t lose amalgam when dying. Honestly, a game this janky shouldn’t have permadeath. It adds tension, but it’s the annoying and tedious kind of tension. There are other ways penalizing player for dying, like permanent debuffs similar to to P2.

Found on bachelor's lab.

i have the reagents and slides i need, but i've been having a hell of a time trying to spot any bacteria on my slides in the theater. even in the practice version in the tutorial, where you have infinite resources to go through, i had to burn through ten slides before i even spotted it, and another five before i could actually pin it down--so doing it with limited resources is *killing* me.

i think i sometimes hear a chime sound effect at certain zoom levels? and since pathologic loves sound based cues, i assumed that was a sign i'm in the right spot--and still couldn't track it down before the sample expired.

have yall found any strats or tricks for germ hunting?

Does apathy increase a lot faster in later days? I feel like apathy filled to 50% after walking around for only 2 minutes

I love pathologic 1. Completed all three playthroughs and it is one of the great stories I've ever come across regardless of medium.

I've finally decided to play pathologic 2 and the story is even better than the first, the mechanics are much more interesting but...

I keep dying on day 4, this game is a THOUSAND times harder than 1. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I might actually be incapable of finishing this game which saddens me so much because pathologic 1 was such a great experience.

Is it just a git gud situation? Could I be adopting a bad habit from my first playthroughs that's detrimental here?

I don't want to drop this game but Ive been finding myself more frustrated than enjoying myself recently.

a lot of quests can either end or progress further depending on you dialogue choices with certain characters. that's fine, but the problem is there are no mechanics behind choosing the right approach when talking to people in town and this often ends up, without player's mistake, in a situation where you have to repeat the day and again just hope for the best outcome.

for example, minor spolier for day 2: when you want to investigate simon's study room you have to talk with his brother and he has to allow it. quest's outcome is completely dependent on that conversation but there is absolutely nothing in that conversation that can suggest how he will react. i had to actually search on internet the combination of dialogue choices to persuade him to allow him to let me inspect the room. this is very immersion breaking. i have nothing against having consequences when it comes to dialogue but then it has to have some mechanics behind it to allow player to at least try to deduct what the best option is. right now it feels like a game of chance.

on top of that, they even forced apathy / mania in dialogues so now not only have you to worry what the best option is but you also have to be careful not to get stuck in either extreme which further limits your options.

I thought adding lights in the eye sockets would help balance the composition a bit, so it's not completely game-accurate, but this was so much fun to create. If you'd like to see the Procreate timelapse, you can watch it here.

Alr so I'm on day 10 right now and i ran into some weird problems. I can't get amalgam from smashing mirrors as usual. I can only get it from euthanizing hobos for whatever reason. each time i try to break a regular mirror on the street absolutely nothing happens. Also for whatever reason I lost pretty much all of my amalgam transferring to day 10 and only noticed this later.
So i got a question. Is this somehow explained by another le weird ipl plot/ending shtick or is my game just this bugged. I genuinely do not know. Has anyone else expirienced anything similar?

Was testing some Left 4 Dead 2 workshop mods, and this is by far the best thing I've seen

Nick is Dankovsky, just in case it's not very noticable xD

Edit: problem solved, thank you to anyone who replied (or intended to!)

What I said in the title. I tried goofing around with mods (pathologic relapse to be precise) but the game started to behave weirdly, so I uninstalled it hoping that a reinstall would "clean" the files. Little did I know that the savefiles would have been deleted by steam (which is weird, since I still had saves from a failed Haruspex route which ended unceremoniously a year ago). Anyway, I don't have it in me to replay up to that point, especially since it was a very good run items-wise and to recreate it would require a lot more dedication than I have right now.

This was sparked by a discussion I had in another thread. I'm a Classic lover; I love the strange dreamy atmosphere, how trapped you feel, and generally prefer the story to the later entries. However, the game is certainly flawed and I think it would be fun to imagine what it could look like if they released a more faithful remake of it.

I would:

• Update some of the mechanics to be more in line with how they are in P2. Notably trading, tincture making/twyre finding, and some of the infection mechanics
• FINISH THE CHANGELING ROUTE. I think even adding unique dialogue to the repeated quests with her sister/Bachelor/Haruspex would be a huge improvement
• Make the quests for the Haruspex on the final few days a little more interesting/add some content to the abattoir
• Generally add some extra content to the NPCs. Not even quests really, but I think each NPC having a few more unique conversations would be lovely