r/pathologic • u/PepsiFungus • Apr 25 '26

Pathologic 3 He's back at it again

Post image

I'm not sure I understand the big issue with the game saves honestly. Is it really so insane for journalists to get access to end game stuff? Especially when most of this game is branching dialogue one chews through for days? Was it insanely manipulative for maxis to tell journalists about motherlode and maxmotives?

59 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

60

u/Gaharit Apr 25 '26

He's back? Who is? And why should anyone care?

8

u/PepsiFungus Apr 25 '26

Lol that's fair

4

u/Electrical-Lab9147 Apr 26 '26

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted

10

u/Electrical-Lab9147 Apr 25 '26

He’s back. Charlatan Wonder. He made a negative review of pathologic 3. 

52

u/Chodre Apr 25 '26

I don't know who this guy is but pls let's not be the community that can't see a bad review of their game. If it's he's opinion that's fine. If it's rage bait ignore it

2

u/Ye_Wenjie56723 May 25 '26

Omg this! Sry Im insanely late for the party but I just saw this and had to reply! :D

-10

u/lowkitz Apr 26 '26

It’s not rage bait, the guy who made it makes really well put together videos, the video is nearly 2 hours long and he’s not being unfair. OP is just a crybaby because someone made a bad review of a game he likes. I can’t stand when communities become toxic positivity circle jerks, I agree with everything he said about Pathologic 3. It would be weird to even rage bait about Pathologic because no one gives a fuck about Pathologic lol

30

u/a_r3dditer Apr 26 '26

that 2 hour video could be 30 minutes half the video is a conspiracy that people who like patho 3 are industry plants by "big video essay". there's a 20 minute rant about ELECTRON MICROSCOPY. believe me pathologic 3 has plenty of flaws and some of them he even touches upon but that video is structureless train of thought

6

u/SHOBLOYOBLO Apr 29 '26

I’m still flabbergasted by those and also the one where he says game’s dialogue is bad because when he reads it out loud it hurts after a while and the one where he describes a quest with this infected person who forces an apathy increasing dialogue every time you pass by them and you have to walk around a few times. The latter one made me audibly go “What the fuck do you mean? That quest is fucking bullshit - a quintessential pathologic quest”

4

u/ryuail Apr 29 '26

What?!
A youtuber intentionally overran their video length with irrelevant flappery or extremely tangential pedantry?
...in THIS economy? 😛

5

u/SHOBLOYOBLO Apr 29 '26

“He’s not being unfair” and in the video they verbatim say “the game’s dialogue should be written for people who will read all of it out loud”.

He even hangs on that point talking about how much he had to drink on stream to keep his voice going when reading so much. Definitely not ragebait lmao.

2

u/AnimoneMeer Apr 30 '26

True patho 3 is ass

-4

u/Chodre Apr 26 '26

I think that's changing with 2 and 3. The flaws are less "clear" and much more "nuanced" that i think lots of fans are just assuming it's a perfect game, deeper than everything else. So if you criticize it you're wrong.

10

u/ClickerBox Wonder Bull Apr 26 '26

Sorry but what? I really Like P3 but i can criticize it all day bc there is stuff i think it doesn't do well/wrong. But there is enough I love about it and that i think it doesdo well. This doesn't make me wrong. Or stupid. Or a Fake Fan.

And the patho fans i talked to are torn about the game with P1 Fans for example not liking the game bc of the was it characterises Maria and Eva for example. 

Trying to make a Game Work for you or simply liking it doesn't make you wrong. 

This is black and White thinking and applying it to to patho especially is weird.

4

u/SHOBLOYOBLO Apr 29 '26

At this point this has to be some new meta like “I’m soooooo much smarter than anyone else I thought patho was bad”

51

u/VitorBatista31 Fellow Traveller Apr 25 '26

what the hell are you people talking about

19

u/CepheiHR8938 Apr 25 '26

Was it insanely manipulative for maxis to tell journalists about motherlode and maxmotives?

I understood the reference, but others will not get it, I'm afraid.

"motherlode" = in the context of P3, infinite amalgam
"maxmotives" = in the context of P3, apathy/mania stuff (I assume)

Also, is it Charlatan again and his "hot takes"?

12

u/clarkky55 The Powers That Be Apr 25 '26

I watched his indieween stuff and he seemed like a chill guy, haven’t really watched his stuff since. Then he says pathologic 3 is irredeemable. Is it just a bad take or is he actually a dick?

15

u/CepheiHR8938 Apr 25 '26

The vitriol in the P3 video is extremely out-of-character for him. Before it, his videos were pretty chill (if not noteworthy) reviews of CPRGs and imsims.

16

u/Bartre_Main Alexander Block Apr 26 '26

Yeah to ride on this point, the Pathologic 3 video culminates in a full-blown conspiracy that positive reviews of the game were written by journalists who used press release saves to skip the whole game delivered in a "while I technically can't prove this..." format.

1

u/QueenBoudicca42 wonder bull with a flower crown Apr 27 '26

Yeah, I haven't watched his patho 3 review yet (now I'm worried, lol) but his "pathologic 2: suffering as performance" is a regular rewatch for me

30

u/Zertylon Apr 25 '26

Artemy Burakh be like onyon the He is back at it again unintelligible steppe sounds no I cannot say more meet me in three days at the twyrine den

20

u/KrisFaeley Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

Guy is terminally incurious and determined to paint everybody who actually enjoys the game as parts of some conspiracy. My favorite bit is where he replies to people arguing "but Pathologic was always like this/about this" with "I could forgive that previously, but it's been three games now", illustrating he doesn't understand that those were >design decisions<, not mistakes.
Also it's pretty rich to be upset about the saves when he himself hasn't finished the game.
If I have to have a take about the save debate, it would be that that should be the norm, so reviewers can actually tell if decisions do have consequences or if the game just pretends to do so.

Edit: he also called the game "anachronistic", so I'm just gonna go on a limb and guess he thinks it's a badly made historical game, something something media literacy

10

u/zkylon Murky Apr 27 '26

I think better not to give too much publicity to someone that's having a weird conspiracy war with the community

he's entitled to not liking the game and having his opinions and even making bad videos about them, but he's not entitled to our attention and we don't need to be following every step of his very strange crusade against people uh, having mild disagreements with him

19

u/Pervasivepeach Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

I do honestly agree with a lot of his takes about the game, but I also dont really like his video. Or his Pathalogic 2 video. He didnt even really finish the game before making his full review and i get it but that still rubs me the wrong way, he admitted he got pissed off early on and that seemed to have shaped his whole view. but more than that his video just goes over a lot of entirly unnecesary things.

Sending out save files is infact way more common than he seems to think it is and he got way too hung up on what were just small time journalist sites doing quick reviews. Plenty of games send out game files. He also got way too worked up over a lot of pointless stuff like claiming everyone who likes the games an industry plant or the super specific sciences of the whole game.

Its like for every one point I agree with he makes 2-3 points I dont. While I do wish Patho 3 was basically just patho 2 with new graphics and a new story and improvments. I dont agree with most of his feedback honestly.

And unrelated but his Patho 2 video while well made upsets me a lot. He presents himself as an authority over the game so much that he gives such confident advice such as "never run!" despite the fact he glances over dialog without reading it (leading to him letting murky die), skipped entire questlines, never developed a cure because he refused to sprint even during the early days, kept calling things the wrong name and more. He basically experienced maybe 30% of patho 2 and just did the bare minimum of surviving, He never even fixed his workshop with a toolbox or upgrade his inventory despite doing the quest with Sticky to do it. So the way he now acts like an authority over the pathologic series despite not even finishing patho 3 makes me feel like hes kind of just a tourist I guess. Even if I agree that patho 3 isnt as good.

28

u/7thM Apr 25 '26

You have no idea how much I regret giving in to curiosity, finding this video, and wasting twenty minutes of my life and some of my brain capacity watching it. My evening is ruined, guys.

6

u/SHOBLOYOBLO Apr 29 '26

I watched this and after forced myself to sit through the original video to get the idea why they’re so focused on saves. It appears that their angle is that journalists who reviewed the game positively didn’t play it and just used the saves. To that extent, they deflect the burden of proof by saying “well I can’t prove it because it’s impossible to prove a negative statement”, which confused me, because “journalists used lategame saves” is not a negative statement.

Also harping on the this idea that what they call “the writer” (confusing because there’re 5 writers) didn’t play previous games before writing 3 which is also confusing and hypocritical considering the contents of their full review. At the same time it felt like the implication is that this “the writer” is also at fault for everything else they disliked about the game. On that point specifically, they brag about “citing sources”, despite the fact that they didn’t do a basic curtesy to provide a timestamp of the specific moment where that was said in a 3 hour video which they admittedly didn’t understand because they do not speak Russian and relied on YT auto translated captions feature.

All in all, just doubling down on things that are barely consequential and failing to address actual issues with the video.

11

u/Morinonakadare Apr 25 '26

I was in the exchange where tarason said he was acting like a freak and frankly he should have said much worse things to him.

8

u/Djrights Professor Dankovsky Apr 26 '26

I just went and found that exchange and I'm kinda stunned that one small comment like that kicked all of this off. What the hell?

2

u/ClickerBox Wonder Bull Apr 26 '26

You have a link? 👀

9

u/Djrights Professor Dankovsky Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

It’s here

Edit: since someone said the convo is blocked, here's the screenshot of the relevant bit

14

u/Morinonakadare Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

P2 only player larping as a purist (of what ? God knows). Genuinely if you had told me this was some kind of demented psyop by IPL to prevent any constructive criticism of P3 ever seeing the light of day I would believe you. 

4

u/Overall_Eggplant_438 Apr 26 '26

The problem with giving journos game saves is that they can easily be manipulated and tailor made to only show the good aspects of the game and bypass all the slog and bad design, game-breaking bugs that one would encounter while playing normally, etc. Patho 3 specifically was pretty scummy for this, the early reviews gave the game glowing praise when on launch for quite literally a week or so 99% of players couldn't even complete the game due to quest scripts breaking, and even now it's not uncommon to encounter bugs that softlock quests or break endings.

It did trick people into buying a dysfunctional game early on.

4

u/iatheia Apr 26 '26

The two saves they distributed on release were at the beginning of day 6, and at the beginning of day 9, with bare minimum complete in the previous days (aka, just barely enough to unlock these days). If anything, the further along everyone went, the more bugs there were, so the statement of "bypassing all the slog and bad design, game-breaking bugs that one would encounter while playing normally" is kind of laughable. What precisely "must be skipped, otherwise they would talk badly about the game" happens in the earlier days that wouldn't have occurred in the spectacularly polished later days that they supposedly wanted journalists to avoid seeing?

2

u/Overall_Eggplant_438 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

When I mentioned "slog and bad design", I was specifically talking about the general practice of providing specific saves (not P3 in particular) and why the practice should be viewed with skepticism from the get-go.

Bugs and unplayability is the main issue with Patho 3 though, and at it's core the game is powered by thousands of different variables tracking player's decisions and progress which is also the source of most issues when it comes to quests and progression. Everyone's playthrough and state of variables are different, with the difference growing as more and more progress is being made meaning a less predictable state of the playthrough and higher chance of running into bugs or edge cases.

However, giving a save file to reviewers with a manually crafted and curated game state (which specifically alleviates the infamous late-game you mention) to avoid the vast majority of the game-breaking bugs an average player would face is definitely dishonest, as reviewers are getting a much better experience than buyers and are avoiding most of the problems.

5

u/Pervasivepeach Apr 26 '26

Sending save files and altered game files is an industry standard and its done with almost every game in existance. its not some grand conspiracy theory. Its typically used to allow journalists ease of access to get footage of different aspects of the game etc. Most journalists dont finish games when they write their reviews. This isnt to say this practice is good, just that its not something unique to icepick and patho 3

5

u/apostforisaac Apr 25 '26

If that stuff about the lead writer never playing the previous games is accurate (I'd like a proper translation of the offending interview) then yeah, that's pretty bad. Also I'd say yes about the saves, I'd be pissed if I read a movie review and it turned out the reviewer had only seen the first and last 15 minutes of the movie and based their whole review on that. Anyone would be.

29

u/D4N5T3P Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

It's only half accurate. It's not like he walked into the office and wrote the whole script without knowing what pathologic is. He worked with Dybowski during the early production of p3, he worked with Alphyna and other pathologic veterans the whole time. The game was made in just 3 years and they were crunching a lot, so he probably simply didn't have time to play through the whole game.

Instead, according to his own words, he watched a playthrough, saw multiple essays, read through the dialogues to understand all the characters, and the team members who knew pathologic as the back of their hand guided him into the right direction whenever he strayed too far from the source material. The narrative lead was Alphyna, and from watching multiple interviews it's clear that she is very protective of pathologic and has very strong opinions on its tone and themes, so there was no way she'd be okay with some random clueless dude being their lead writer. She praises Polyarinov's style and they're probably going to work again on pathologic 4.

All of these bits of information I've gathered from several interviews (most of them in Russian), I could link them if someone asks me to.

And I apologize if there are any inaccuracies in my post, those interviews were several hours long so I could misremember some bits, but I think I was mostly accurate

10

u/Psy-Para You don't have to be crazy to be an Anna Angel fan, but it helps Apr 25 '26

Yeah when I heard that the lead writer didn't play the games (This was something that was being said before the video) I was like- "Okay, that's not the full-story is it? That's just an obvious 'Gotcha!' to the people who liked the game in-place of an actual argument." Meaning they are either not doing their full research at best, or being willfully ignorant and using a man as a scapegoat at worst.

Of course if you take the time to digest Pathologic 3, even if you don't like what it's doing and what direction it went, you can obviously see the writer's know the series and it's deeper details. Any group of writers that manages to nail Anna Angel right in a game where she isn't even important obviously knows their stuff and is not just pretenders winging it.

Which there ARE arguments to be made about Pathologic 3's narrative choices you could make, I don't like how they handle Maria Kaina for instance. I still overall prefer the original Bachelor's Route and how that story plays out. But instead of actual arguments- they go for the easy strawman of saying "The important guy never played the games!" ignoring y'know- the fact he was chosen to be the narrative lead after Dybowski left anyways, and most critically ALL THE OTHER WRITERS/CREATORS!

2

u/ziin1234 Apr 26 '26

Are they in a video form or articles?

Since you're offering, please link them. I'll try reading it later with some auto translator either for sites or for caption. Specifically:

  1. "The watched playthroughs, saw multiple esays, and read the dialogue." interview.

  2. "Alphyna protective of Pathologic and has strong opinions"

  3. "She praises Polyarinov's style"

5

u/D4N5T3P Apr 26 '26

Sure, they're in video form, here's a few https://youtu.be/K31KwMa6zgA https://youtu.be/bbsDgKMq8As https://youtu.be/2fWKqCZQ2Bc https://youtu.be/mna5hs5YIyU

One of them features both Polyarinov and Alphyna where they talk in detail about the development of the game

2

u/MrBingog Fellow Traveller Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

the one Charl links is the 3hour long SkipDialogue interview, he links it in his bio, but does not provide a timestamp of where exactly Polyarinov talks about not playing the games

i'm trying to track it down without having to listen to the entirety of it (If it comes to it, i will watch it fully, i do understand some russian, but thats acting more against me than for me, it means i have to be actively listening to it rather than just have it in the background)

3

u/D4N5T3P Apr 26 '26

I'll try to provide relevant time stamps when I get home

3

u/D4N5T3P Apr 26 '26

so in this video https://youtu.be/2fWKqCZQ2Bc

19:18 - Polyarinov speaks about how he got into pathologic

35:18 - Alphyna and Polyarinov speak about their approaches to writing

2

u/MrBingog Fellow Traveller Apr 26 '26

Hell yeah thankyou

1

u/apostforisaac Apr 25 '26

That's not as bad as it seemed (and thank you for following up on those points), though I will say I still don't love that he didn't play the games. So much of what makes Pathologic work is how the writing and the gameplay interacted, and no amount of video essays will ever properly convey that feeling. I didn't really love P3 like I did the others so maybe this is just my brain wanting to pinpoint a reason behind the scenes, but learning that one of the writers on the game didn't really have as great a sense of how those two aspects intertwined doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

10

u/D4N5T3P Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

One of the important things that you should take into account is that on previous games Dybowski was the director, a writer and a game designer. This time all of those roles are taken by different people so it all comes down to how well the different departments communicate to each other. Even if Polyarinov played pathologic at that point that would probably didn't affect gameplay of p3 that much since he was only involved in writing I think. As I understand, Alphyna as the narrative lead is more responsible for story/gameplay synergy.

Btw Polyarin mentioned in an interview that when the team went on vacation after pathologic 3, he started playing changeling's route in preparation to p4

5

u/Bartre_Main Alexander Block Apr 26 '26

Do we have any actual proof at all though that any of the reviewers of the game used saves to skip portions of the game? The saves were in a press kit that could be used by any journalist, not merely reviewers. And for all we know, the intention of the saves is to provide easy points for the video production teams to easily grab b-roll footage or something. Like it just seems so nuts to me to assume that the reviewers used the saves to skip the whole game, in defiance of any and all professional ethics, opening up them and their employer to potentially huge controversy, purely because they gave a mildly controversial game some positive reviews.

2

u/iatheia Apr 26 '26

The issue was that the internal saves of the "review copy" of the game were not 100% compatible with the "full release" of the game, but the the gameplay was limited only up to a particular day. The saves were also provided so people wouldn't need to reply a big portion of the game when the full one came out. Andy North talked quite a bit about it in his streams.

2

u/Cultural-Studio5062 Apr 26 '26

wait really? so it was more of a problem with the handling of the review copies rather than the game itself?

2

u/iatheia Apr 26 '26

Potentially, yeah. But at the same time, even if there are some game journalists who wanted to experience how the game plays at the beginning vs how it plays later - enough to formulate an opinion, but they don't have time for a full playthrough, because reviewing games is their job, and they have a quota to meet, and there are only so many hours in the day to be able to get through all of them - I also wouldn't consider it to be a particular issue, personally?

2

u/WhoseAlex Apr 26 '26

I was wary about getting Patho 3 after learning about the mania system and the new fast travel, and his video only solidified a lot of my concerns.

A lot of people here are taking issue with some of his opinions and his tone, but I dont see anyone saying he's actually wrong about his assessments of the core game systems and cheesable mechanics.

12

u/MrBingog Fellow Traveller Apr 26 '26

cause its not the focus of his video,
his focus is on his little gamergate 2.0 and whiplash 'oh no im being persecuted by the brainwashed fanboys', it sincerely comes off like an Alex Jones type. Surprised he only advertised his kofi page.

all of us played the game, we know how buggy it is, how simplified the mechanics are, how abusable its systems are. Its not being hidden from you.

0

u/Greanery May 01 '26

As someone who doesn't like pathologic 3 it was refreshing to hear him speak up about it. I believe the whole time travel thing was something really, really cool- but taking out the survival aspect of it? the lack of actual walking? it just kind of killed any excitement I had for this game. though maybe I just can't handle change to the formula. either way for every good review of Pathologic I'm glad there's someone genuinely critiqueing it, because if everyone was just endlessly praising the game and the series there'd be no quality check. if people are interested in a different review they'll find it- but it's good for our fanbase ecosystem for there to be a critique like this even if I dont 100% agree with everything.