Gaming: Breaking Pathologic 3 Review
Intentionally and unintentionally thorny, but still one of the most compelling mystery adventures since Disco Elysium.
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The Pathologic series has a reputation for being mechanically challenging, narratively dense, and positively grim. As you'd expect from games about surviving in a plague-ridden turn-of-the-century Russian steppe town, inspired by the most dour of classical Russian theatre. What I did not expect from Pathologic 3 is how often I would be laughing out loud, and how deeply I would resonate with its multi-layered protagonist, Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine.
What is it? A time-looping first-person medical detective adventure set during a 12-day plague.Release date January 9, 2026Expect to pay $35/£30Developer Ice-Pick LodgePublisher HypeTrain DigitalReviewed on Windows 11, i9-13900k, Nvidia RTX 4090, 64GB DDR5 RAMSteam Deck TBALink Official site
Despite its place as a vastly expanded reimagining of one of the 2005 original's three plot routes, Pathologic 3 is a great starting point. While there's plenty of little references and twists for returning fans like myself to chew on, newcomers looking to recapture the spark of Disco Elysium should look here. While Daniil isn't quite so fragmented as Revachol's defective detective, he does contain multitudes. Two core pillars I identified quickly, with a third hitting like a perfectly-timed punchline.
Core to this man is Doctor Who. Specifically, a blend of the most baffled and driven incarnations. Wrapped in several layers of narrative framing (unreliable perspective-hopping narration, perhaps some kind of theatrical play, maybe hallucinating), Dankovsky may be a continually griping, arrogant misanthrope, but he still wishes to save everyone, even if they seem to have a death-wish. But there's never enough time. Too many cases, too many places to be. Too many trolley problems to solve.
Fortunately, the nameless Town on the River Ghorkon is a mystical place, inhabited by strange, superstitious families, mystical steppe-dwelling natives and filled with impossible structures that tower above the early 1900s architecture, which would make it a lovely place to walk around if I wasn't sprinting frantically from problem to problem. Touched by the town's magic (or just telling his story badly and out
Source: PC Gamer
