The Kin wanted me to be Menkhu. Wanted me to be Isidor. To choose for them. To be the herdsman for their kine. In fact, it wasn’t until that last moment that they ever really expressed a plea for me to make a specific choice, rather than simply to choose.

Which was the illness? Which was the cure?

I chose. The Polyhedron fell.

I couldn’t sacrifice what was human for what was miraculous.

Act III, Again: A Machine That Makes Time

Taya and Oyun survived my playthrough. Both of them are Kin as Kin can be. So I don’t know where people get off saying the choice to destroy the Polyhedron kills all the Kin. Perhaps the thought is, as has been for a lot of colonialism, that if the nonwhite are not magical and they are clearly not people, then they must not exist at all. I thought that was comforting. That ultimately what I had decided was that the Kin were flesh and blood people and not just an expression of Boddho’s magic. I didn’t exactly have that thought before I pulled the trigger, but still.

Day 12, the postgame, where you wander around town and talk to all the Bound who made it, has a strange bittersweet quality to it. It’s not a resounding celebration. No firecrackers and clapping. You just walk around and talk to everyone. Introduce your kids to their new house. Catch up with your old friends. Get scolded by the Changeling who thinks she’s going to go back to being made of clay as a result of your decision. Find the Bachelor drunk as all hell and promise him that someday new magical towers will be built.

It’s nothing special. It’s an ordinary life. It’s boring. It’s precious.

Then, of course, you talk to Mark Imortell in the Theater and he spews some gibberish and like, dude, did you see I got the Imago achievement? Shut the fuck up for one second please, I’m tired of it.

It took me a few months before I went back, loaded up my save, and chose the other ending. Just to see it.

If I wanted some spectacle, hoo boy. Everything about the ending where you let the Town die over the Polyhedron is like your most vivid nightmare. Darkness and plague inherit the earth. The townsfolk are driven from the Steppe, potentially already dead. I walked up and talked to them wading in black water and realized they have no recollection of me, not my friends, not the elder children, not even the Bachelor Dankovsky who so badly wanted to save the Polyhedron. I teleported from place to place in a state of confusion, and Aspity, dead in my playthrough, returned just to congratulate me on having fulfilled my father’s legacy. Now the Kin had merged together into giant auroch bulls that towered over the buildings, the new mistresses overlooking them from atop the Polyhedron, speaking as if they were looking into a future I had no way of seeing. All that I had loved was gone. Even the Kin as I knew them were gone.

It didn’t say it was the Bad Ending but it made me feel worse than any Bad Ending ever could. And I realized, this is the power of the new Pathologic.

The original Pathologic was a game of ideas. Characters casually mentioning materialism, individualism, utopianism, truth. Big concepts, and I loved it because I was a pretentious teenager who read Plato and Nietzche and thought that justified me being a jerk to everyone. In other words, I used to be much more sympathetic to the Bachelor.

Pathologic 2 isn’t bereft of philosophizing. It doesn’t have less. People will still rant to you about what the nature of a town really is, or quiz you on what you think of the plague from a theoretical standpoint.

But it also makes you care. A lot. About people and doing right by them. About figuring out what you believe to be right and choosing, the game never telling you if what you chose is even the correct path.

Any choice is right, so long as it is willed. That’s the truth.

The game asked me on so many levels to take a look at how time is burning right through and think about what it means to do good, and it gave me all the reason to do good because like that first chat with Lara, I soon realized all these Bound, these people, they were just people. Humans. Not stand-ins for abstract concepts like I felt them to be in the first game, not explicit abstract concepts like in IPL’s other classic game, The Void. They’re kids and parents, husbands and wives, and lonely anime villains living in warehouses. They don’t deserve to die in plague-ridden agony and I knew it and when they did, I felt real failure, real loss.

And it’s truly new. In the original Pathologic I was killing people left, right, and center just to mug them for their stuff. Here, I can’t think of one moment I attacked not out of self defense or for quest reasons. Because I was trying to do good. There’s a game with the kids where they ask you to trade stuff through collection boxes that basically works on a “leave the money” honor system and I tried my best to keep to it even though there is no proof doing so does anything. Because I was trying to do good. I fought all those Worms for you Rubin, even though you’re an idiot, a stupid, stupid idiot. BECAUSE —

Imagine that. A game that asks you to think about what it means to be good in a world with limited resources. An apocalyptic world where the earth has been changed irrevocably by human action. By colonialism. By ecological interference. By industrialization. By war. Where there is no going back to a time when those things hadn’t changed who we are. Where the illness and the body are one and the same. Where being good sometimes, a lot of the time, makes you suffer. Where the choices you make are about what is worth saving, and who inherits the future.

Your choice may not be perfect, a lot of the time it’s wrong, but you must choose. The illness is yours to diagnose, and the cure yours to administer.

There are some people who probably feel as strongly about choosing to save the Polyhedron as I do about choosing to save the Town and that’s amazing to me. That both of those beliefs come from the sentiment of wanting to save something worth loving. Something human. Something miraculous. Something both and neither and like nothing else.

Get it? I’m talking about the game. I lov gam. Buy Pathologic 2, ya oynons.