Pathologic 3 Producer Talks about Changes in Gameplay & Creating Indie Games

Introduction

My name is Alexander Souslov, and I’m the Executive Producer and Lead Game Designer at Ice-Pick Lodge. Besides the Pathologic series, our team has released several other games. I first wanted to describe them as a single, unified concept, but it seems there really isn’t one: rather, there is a constant striving toward experimentation and toward exploring the possibilities that video games offer as a form of expression. Back in 2001, the founders of Ice-Pick Lodge articulated this in the Deep Game Manifesto, where they declared video games a breakthrough art form that reflects the contemporary world more fully than any other medium.

So what games has the studio released? The Void, a surreal adventure about collecting color. Knock-Knock, a small-scale horror game about the fear of one’s apartment at night. Know By Heart, a nostalgic game-poem about a post-Soviet town struck by an epidemic of amnesia. Franz, a mobile horror game in which the main character tries to gain control over the player’s real life outside the game itself. And finally, Cargo! The Quest for Gravity – a game I struggle to describe, but one in which naked babies with elderly faces produce a resource necessary to recover lost gravity.

Pathologic 3

80.lv: Pathologic 3 is your, well, third take on the game. Do you consider it Ice-Pick Lodge’s magnum opus? Do you still have something to say in the universe?

I think games live in a very different way than, say, films, TV series, or books. In fact, I’d say these art forms – or media, depending on how you see them – have almost nothing in common in how they tell stories. A game tells a story more like an art installation does. For example, when Olafur Eliasson exhibited an artificial sun in the Tate Modern – The Weather Project – that’s quite close to what a video game does. You can come closer, stay at the entrance, never approach the sun at all, or run straight toward it.

Olafur Eliasson probably isn’t planning to make The Weather Project 2, but I can imagine him creating more installations for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. For us, Pathologic is a kind of Turbine Hall – a space where you can assemble one installation or another. We’ve studied this space well, and we definitely still have something to say through this world.

80.lv: When Pathologic 2 came out, you promised to add Bachelor’s and Changeling’s storylines right into that game, so I was surprised to hear about Pathologic 3. Many fans were not happy about the decision. Was it because you realized that Bachelor’s part was getting too big, or were there other considerations?

The original Pathologic was released in 2005, when expectations for games were much lower. I don’t mean game design quality, but rather the level of environmental and character detail. Honestly, I miss that era, because games were much closer to theater back then than they are now. I think games are an evolution of theater. In theater, it’s completely normal for a king’s castle to be a drawing on cardboard, or for a train car to be created using sound, a flashlight, and a bench. Theater builds reality through symbols that are obvious in their symbolic nature. A theatrical castle doesn’t pretend to be a real castle. But in cinema, a castle has to convincingly look like an actual architectural structure.

Games started as theater, but at some point they wanted to become cinema – and I believe the current crisis in the industry is the price we’re paying for that desire. It may sound like I’m avoiding your question, but I’m getting to it. The first Pathologic came out in the theatrical era. Pathologic 2 came out in the era of games that wanted to be movies. That’s a completely different level of budget and effort. Recreating Pathologic 1 in the format of Pathologic 2 was unrealistic – both from a technical and commercial standpoint.

That’s how the concept of standalone games for each original Pathologic character emerged. But then we return to the studio’s manifesto and remember that a game is its own language. Despite Ice-Pick Lodge’s literature-centric tendencies, we can’t treat a “new game” as simply “the old game with new texts.” Gameplay is the text of the game. That’s why we wanted to explore Daniil Dankovsky not just through dialogue, but through the actions he performs in the game. This required rebuilding the entire game system, and we needed to signal to the audience that this was truly something new. That’s how the number 3 appeared in the title – not so much as a chapter number, but as the number of an interpretation of this universe.

80.lv: Pathologic 2 came out just before our own, real pandemic in 2019, which I think influenced its popularity. Do you have bigger expectations for the new game? Will we see Changeling’s path sooner than Bachelor’s?

Obviously, the COVID pandemic affected the popularity of Pathologic 2. Any epidemic is terrifying, but fear can be reduced if you package it as a kind of fairy tale. I’ve read studies about pornography that noted a spike in themes related to medical examinations, medical masks, social distancing, and so on during 2020-2021. People rushed to get rid of their neurosis by turning it into a kind of fetish. In that sense, Pathologic 2 fits into the same media strategy – it’s a way to move all the danger and stress onto the screen and leave it there.

As for expectations, at the very least, I hope that Pathologic 3 won’t benefit from any similar external marketing incentives as Pathologic 2 did with COVID. Commercially, the game launched much stronger than Haruspex's story, but the market is in such a state right now that I wouldn’t dare make any triumphant statements. I can say that we do have plans, and even a core concept for the next game in the Pathologic series, but we’re not ready to share any details yet.

Gameplay Changes

80.lv: Pathologic 2 was often jokingly called a homeless person simulator. In the new game, you walk from one trash can to another for the noise rather than food, as Bachelor doesn’t need it anymore. Why did you change this, arguably, important mechanic? Doesn’t it make keeping time easier?

The reason we removed the system of scavenging food and useful items from trash containers is fairly obvious – our protagonist, Daniil Dankovsky. He socializes with the town’s elite; he’s a fashionable man from the Capital, the head of the anti-epidemic Emergency Command. It would be very strange if he started a fistfight with a proletarian on the street to rob him of a bottle of water and a piece of bread.

As I said earlier, gameplay is the game’s text. In this case, we’re telling a story about intellectual pursuits and inner turmoil, so the main battle takes place inside the character’s psyche. That said, if you’re familiar with the rituals common to people with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, you’ll understand Dankovsky’s strange relationship with certain objects. Sometimes it’s extremely important to skip every third step on a staircase, not look at red cars, or turn off the microwave two seconds before it beeps.

In other words, the life of the mind is never confined to the mind itself – it unfolds in the space around us. The sound of a knife scraping a plate, a creaking door, a small red light on a TV that shows it’s plugged in and turns into a laser burning your eyes when you’re trying to fall asleep. Okay, maybe I’m leaning a bit too much into personal experience here – but I think you get the idea.

80.lv: Speaking of easier, the whole idea of Pathologic 3 is playing with time. The motto of the first games was “you can’t save everyone,” but Dankovsky can now simply replay the day and save some of its progress. Why did you change it? Also, why can players now exchange stuff with children only at certain places and not just stop a random kid on the street?

I think we shouldn’t forget that a game isn’t just a place your avatar walks around, where you shoot people in the head, build fortresses, or plant cabbage. A game is also the main menu, the inventory screen, and the save system. Video games have always had a complicated relationship with time.

If you’re playing Civilization and you decide to build the Pyramids, but Mahatma Gandhi beats you to it, you load a save and build the Library of Alexandria instead. You change the past. Even in a game like Darkwood, where you can’t rewind time through save loading because progress is saved automatically into a single file, you can still copy that file, store it somewhere, and restore it later – effectively jumping back in time. We simply decided to bring these off-screen player actions into the game itself.

You know, if players in a competitive shooter like to sit in bushes or behind crates, patiently waiting for their prey, maybe you shouldn’t punish them by removing bushes and crates through level design. Maybe you should build the entire game around the fact that there could be a patient hunter behind every bush.

As for the reduced trading system – that’s a fair question. Here’s how we see it: trade and exchange inevitably lead to resource accumulation, because once trade exists, capitalist logic follows – this resource can be obtained here and sold there. That would pull the game away from the feelings we’re aiming for. Overall, you could say we have a fairly leftist economy in the game. We give the player a kind of universal basic income in the form of a set of medical supplies each day – but only once per day. We provide moderate abundance by placing items in locations, and then we stop adding more.

A player who manages resources wisely won’t feel scarcity. A player who wastes them will create serious problems for themselves. If any character could become a trader, the pressure of potential scarcity would disappear, replaced by a sense of infinite resource circulation.

80.lv: How did the idea of apathy and mania as one of the main mechanics for this part appear? Why do you associate it with Dankovsky? 

I think we’re always projecting our own problems. I personally have this issue: during the day, I have to manage a huge number of tasks, and I’m constantly trying to energize myself – without medication, mind you, but you have no idea how much tea I drink and how many cookies I eat – it should probably be illegal. But at night, I constantly struggle to make my brain stop thinking and finally fall asleep.

If you’re not in shape, if you’re exhausted or burned out, time leaks away – you open a document, blink twice, and suddenly three hours have passed. You need to rest and continue later. But if you’re energized, inspired, you can solve five or six tasks in an hour. So this is personal experience reflected in game design. And why did this idea emerge at all? Because Dankovsky is a man doomed to multitasking.

80.lv: You’ve also added fast traveling to the game that was (in)famous for its endless walking around the eerie town. Why did you change it? Was it influenced by fans’ feedback?

Movement around the Town is a classic design problem because we’re solving several issues at once: a technological one (optimization requires breaking the town into separate district-levels that load independently), a narrative one (the player sees that the town is fragmented, which is impossible to ignore), and a gameplay one (choosing a district on the map should be a game, not just an interface action).

In the end, we created a system that allows the player to solve logistical problems and make life easier or harder for themselves. One route is longer – you lose time – but avoids all dangerous districts. Another lets you cut through an infected area, which is risky but very fast. We initially solved a purely technical problem, but it allowed us to reshape gameplay and make it more compact. Creating an urban simulation is probably the most expensive thing you can attempt in video games.

80.lv: I always thought Pathologic 2 features Haruspex, even though the original game starts with Bachelor, because it shows the relationship between the townsfolk and the steppe people better and allows the player to do some fun plant experiments right away to keep them playing. Is that why, or was there another reason? Now that we have the Bachelor line, do you regret this decision? 

While we were working on Pathologic 2, there was a lot of discussion within the team about which character would be the first to have a script written for them. In Pathologic 1, that character was Bachelor Dankovsky, and to avoid this fixation on a single protagonist, the studio decided to try building the game around the character of Haruspex. In the end, the entire game turned out to be dedicated to Artemy. There are no regrets about this. Artemy was the best fit for the gameplay of the traditional Pathologic core loop, where trash bins, rising prices, and night-time criminal activity created an atmosphere of decay and despair. Obviously, for Clara, the third protagonist, this environment and gameplay would not have been a good fit. We mentioned Dankovsky earlier, so it turns out that everything worked out quite well.

Past & Future

80.lv: The first Pathologic was released 20 years ago, and those who are familiar know all the secrets and endings. Did it limit you when making Pathologic 3? Does it have a different ending from what we know from the first two games? How do you make sure the same game stays fresh after so many years?

Overall, we didn’t really center everything around the experience of those who completed or even just played the first game. People who played the original Pathologic in the 2000s don’t actually remember their feelings anymore. What remains is an aftertaste, a memory of those feelings. Those who played the remaster couldn’t experience the game directly either – it was already framed as a cultural artifact. If you’ve watched video essays about a game on YouTube, your reaction will be completely different from someone who just played Midtown Madness 2 and then thought, “Oh, here’s another game about life in a town, I like that.”

Yes, people may know the major plot points, but we all know the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and we still go see it performed. We know the play, but we’re interested in a new production. Pathologic 3 is a new production of an old play – or, if you prefer, a new installation in a familiar space.

80.lv: How has the reception of the game been so far? Is it what you expected? You care a lot about players’ feedback. How has it changed the game? Are there any big differences from older versions inspired by fans?

We assumed that some fans would react very negatively to the changes – simply because that’s how the human psyche works. If I truly love something, I don’t want it to change. I might even hate the changes, because I’m comfortable when there’s a canon, and it stays intact. But the majority of the audience has clearly embraced our take on Daniil Dankovsky’s story – perhaps they would have embraced it even more if we had spent more time on pre-release testing.

When your narrative structure allows you to change almost any event in almost any order, you have to be ready for the most extravagant time paradoxes. But by now, we’ve fixed the major ones.

80.lv: Do you already have plans for Pathologic 4? 

I’d say it’s still too early to announce plans for the next installment, but we definitely have a concept for Pathologic 4.

80.lv: Is there a reason you stay faithful to Unity? Is there a chance the next game will be powered by Unreal, as many modern games are?

Choosing a game engine is almost never a simple, everyday decision like “vanilla or chocolate ice cream.” There’s programmer experience, an accumulated asset base, established toolsets – this is more of a logistical problem than a choice based purely on engine features. Is switching to Unreal feasible? We don’t rule it out at this point.

80.lv: Pathologic has been with you for so many years. What do you think about indie game development in 2026 as opposed to 2005? How is it different to make games now? Where is Pathologic’s place in the oversaturated market?

Back in 2005, making games was harder, but releasing them was easier. If you wanted to make a game, you first had to write your own engine – or borrow one from friends, or maybe adapt Quake 2. Without a publisher to pay for CD production, distribution, and retail sales, it was impossible to deliver the game to players. There were far fewer players overall – it was still a niche form of entertainment. YouTube existed as an obscure website for weird videos. If you wanted people to know about your game, you had to contact the gaming press.

But that high barrier to entry made life easier for those who managed to break through. Today, the barrier is almost zero, limited mainly by the cost of buying a Steam app ID. Social media creates an illusion of marketing, free asset libraries provide content, and on top of that, we now have “vibe coding” with neural networks. It’s an overcrowded, uncomfortable market.

Our strategy is built on being unlike anything else. What genre is Pathologic 3? We don’t really know ourselves. We see genuine excitement from people who can’t figure out what to compare Pathologic to. That creates additional challenges for marketing communication, but on the other hand, it immediately sets the series apart from thousands of other games.

Conclusion

80.lv: Pathologic is pretty hard to describe. How would you pitch Pathologic 3 to those who haven’t played it yet?

Honestly, we ourselves struggle to define a genre for this game. But that’s actually normal – genres don’t really exist as clearly defined objects, they’re conventions. There is no such convention for Pathologic, because it’s objectively not a very conventional game. When we were looking for a publisher, we used this pitch: “An adventure game about time travel combined with medical investigations and city management simulator elements.”

Personally, though, I’d put it this way: Pathologic is always a simulator of a person on the brink of despair, and it's up to the player to decide if that line is crossed.

Alexander Souslov, Executive Producer & Lead Game Designer at Ice-Pick Lodge

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine