Pathologic 3

Hello, friends!

October is the perfect time for the Great Autumn Update for Pathologic 3. Throughout summer, we've fixed a lot of bugs — and also added several highly-requested features like difficulty levels and customizable subtitle language. And also a photomode!

We couldn't have done it without you, by the way. Community testers helped us identify and sort out a lot of issues. Thank you for this invaluable assistance!

We also invite you to read our letter from the developers, where we reflect on the process of improving a game after release and on game development in general.

Highlights

• Subtitle language independent of the voice-over language. You asked for the option to keep the Russian audio while using English subtitles — now you can.

• Photo Mode. Yes! You can adjust the scene, weather, and lighting, use stickers — and make some ridiculously beautiful screenshots.

• Two new difficulty levels: one easier and one harder. You might find this funny, but we actually got a lot of requests for both. The original difficulty is still there too. Difficulty affects a lot of parameters, from the amount of amalgam available to how strongly mania and apathy affect the Bachelor — everything is explained on the difficulty selection screen — and makes the playthrough more or less feverish.

• New ways to deal with Shabnak. Originally, we wanted to show that she could be both dangerous and cunning, but the mode where there were two Shabnaks simply didn't work very well. We've replaced it and added one more variation on top of that. You'll see what exactly you need to do in the game, but this time you'll have to rely more on paying attention than on quick reflexes.

• Lots of new thoughts from the Bachelor about the things around him.

• A huge number of fixes to quests, dialogue, level design, balance, and UI. More details below.

• The game has been optimized for weaker CPUs and adapted for Steam Deck.

Full Patch Notes

Please note: the detailed patch notes contain story spoilers.

Prologue and General Quest Fixes

• Two items that increase mania and apathy have been added near the children by the train, so the player can no longer get stuck there.

• The boy at the Train Station no longer offers dialogue intended for before the Bachelor obtains the Prototype once the morgue sequence is complete.

• The children near the train no longer offer introductory thoughts and Mania tutorial dialogue after the Prototype has been obtained. The dialogue can no longer be repeated indefinitely.

• Removed premature thoughts about Grief near the freight train, which could introduce him earlier than intended.

• Corrected the highlighting of papers during the microscope sequence in Thanatica: they are highlighted only when they can be interacted with.

• Low-health screen effects no longer appear during the microscope sequence in Thanatica.

• Disabled the street sweeper's introductory dialogue after the Prototype has been obtained.

• Fixed situations in which characters or objects displayed thoughts intended for a different quest state, including Nina's statue at the Cape and the Child Face Stealing quest on Day 6.

• Thoughts near the Theatre sandbox now become available only after the quest to find a location for the Hospital. They no longer appear prematurely on Days 1-3.

• Fixed doors and objects offering interaction prompts when they could not actually be used, including the Bachelor's open cell door during the Prison Escape quest and a door in the Wicked Old House.

Quests, Dialogue and Story Scenes

Day 2

• Isidor's Funeral: Grace no longer delivers both the successful and failed funeral-visit dialogues when the player arrives before 19:00, leaves without speaking to her, and returns later.

• Before Isidor's Funeral: Fixed the Embalmer becoming stuck in Shekhen after returning to Isidor's body.

• Isidor's Funeral: Fixed Isidor's body flickering at the Cemetery when Concentration was activated.

• Musical Interlude decree: The decree now unlocks regardless of whether the Bachelor first speaks to the Dogheads or to Mark Immortell. Previously, one dialogue order could lock the decree for the rest of the game.

Day 3

• Examining the Dancer / Saving Andrey: Vlad's vaccine is now correctly removed from the inventory when the quest is reset, preventing the quest from restarting in an incorrect state.

• Decree scene in the Gut: Fixed a camera transition that left the Pawn outside the dialogue frame.

• Registration decree in Skinners: The patrolman no longer appears inside a tent during the conversation.

• The Stillwater: Townspeople and their voices now disappear together when the End of Day sequence begins, rather than leaving disembodied voices behind. This also affects Day 10.

Day 4

• Hospital: Little no longer repeats his introductory briefing about the next stage of Hospital work if the day is restarted after some patients have already been diagnosed.

• Murky's conversation: Removed a branch in which Murky repeated the same line twice.

Day 5

• Katerina and Morphine: Fixed the conditions for Katerina's first dialogue so it remains available when the quest is replayed.

• Grief's death: Added a Concentration highlight to Grief's body in the Warehouses.

• Extradition of Rubin: Fixed Georgiy's dialogue animation.

• Rubin's fate: Fixed thoughts and quest conditions for all three outcomes (which we are not going to spoil). A living Rubin no longer displays thoughts about his own death, however much he might want to.

• Prison Break: The exit marker from the Backbone now disappears after the player leaves the district.

• The Crucible: Fixed the camera angle during the conversation with Georgiy by the furnace. He no longer hides behind a pipe.

• The Crucible: Georgiy's quest marker now remains visible until the corresponding quest is actually complete.

Day 6

• Children Search: Khan at the Water Tower can now be interacted with and his thoughts are accessible. Removed an additional conversation that did not belong to this quest.

• The mask at the Warehouses: Fixed a conversation that initially showed only text with no character on screen and then repeated with the character visible.

• The Inquisitor Coming: The marker pointing to Victor now appears with every outcome of the dangerous street quest, rather than only one of them. This fix also applies to events on Day 7.

Day 7

• Grief's escape: The quest now completes even if the Bachelor goes directly to Grief at Isidor's house without first clearing the Mind Map node about searching the Warehouses.

• The Stillwater: The front door now opens at End of Day even when the Inquisition flashback at the Institute has not been completed.

• Invitation to the Beheading: The dialogue near the gallows can now be triggered only once.

• Street closure in the Atrium: Barricades now remain in place when returning to Day 7 after having closed the street, even if the quest was not reset.

• Bull analysis: The final thought now unlocks only after the sample has been collected and analysed.

• Rioters near the Saburovs' house: The three rioters at the barricade no longer repeat the same conversation individually.

• Saburov's trial: Accusing the Changeling of spreading the plague no longer cuts the dialogue short or causes the Mind Map to refer to events the player has not seen.

• Institute flashback: Fixed camera shots that made characters appear to float above the ground.

Day 8

• Heron at the Cathedral: Fixed a quest-reset issue that could make Heron disappear permanently after resetting Saving the Decrees and Secretary Replacement: Heron.

• Blood Grass: The quest reward is no longer added to the inventory repeatedly every time the day starts.

• Saving the Decrees: Removed an obsolete Cathedral marker requesting Heron if the relevant note was picked up after the quest was complete.

• Plague Devouring: The messenger now appears only once and no longer returns after the Bachelor has already visited the Hospital.

• Wicked Old House: Corrected speaker names and portraits in the conspirators' dialogue.

• Vlad and Maria: The Utopians' lines are now attributed to the correct characters instead of all appearing under Vlad's name.

• The bull: Samples can no longer be collected after the animal has disappeared.

• Khan's choice: Improved camera positioning in the cage conversation to avoid views through the bars and situations where the Bachelor is hidden by a wall.

Days 9-10

• Karminsky and Emilia (Day 9): The game now correctly remembers Emilia's passage through the closed street and the confirmation of her diagnosis when the Day 7 street quest is reset and replayed.

• Clara's arrest: Dialogues with Rubin, Saburov and The Good One now refer to Clara as imprisoned only if she was actually arrested, rather than after either ending of her quest.

• Little's Hospital quest (Day 10): Corrected a Mind Map node that mistakenly displayed the title and description of the examination node instead of Little's personal file.

Day 11

• Nina Walking: Victor's dialogue now plays only once, and Victor and the onlookers no longer spawn on top of one another near the statue's remains.

• False Andrey: He no longer appears during the performance at the Cathedral if he has already died.

Day 12

• Burakh in the Odongh village: Fixed an obstruction caused by the rock on which he sits, allowing the Bachelor to speak to him and inspect his thoughts.

• Sticky and Sticky's Shadow: Adjusted their positions in the Odongh village so the characters do not clip into the tent flag or nearby objects during their final conversation.

• My Path Was Called...: Corrected a quest marker that pointed to Lara's house.

• The Saburovs' shadows at the Rod: Corrected the positions of Alexander's and Katerina's Tragedian shadows when they are dead, and removed two extra conversations about suicide and overdose that incorrectly appeared after the main scene.

Other Story Events

• Shabnak: The death notification now appears whether Shabnak is shot from cover or stunned before being shot during hide-and-seek.

Gameplay and Balance

• Reduced the amount of matches found in containers. Both drop rates and stack sizes now depend on the selected difficulty, with significantly fewer matches on Hard.

• Rebalanced Amalgam acquisition on Hard. The Cathedral now grants half its previous amount, and Eva's morning conversations grant very little. Her evening conversation grants the same amount as on Normal. Euthanising dying people now grants more Amalgam than before.

• Fixed mirrors on Easy difficulty granting too little Amalgam. Regular mirrors now grant 50 Amalgam on Easy.

• Mirrors inside the Polyhedron now grant the same amount of Amalgam as regular mirrors on the corresponding difficulty.

• Added gramophones at the Cathedral after Karminsky's arrival that allow the player to adjust Mania and Apathy.

Interface, Map and Controls

• Fixed a bug that could break the Mind Map when opening it after receiving an important thought not associated with a particular day.

• The time-travel screen now correctly shows how much Amalgam will be spent when restarting the current day. Added a visual effect to indicate the expenditure.

• Fixed the Health indicator occasionally displaying values above 100.

• Fixed overlapping Apathy values and text wrapping in save profiles and the Load Game interface.

• Grief and Aglaya are now correctly marked as alive on the People screen after completing the quests that save them.

• Corrected location icons in the Load Game window.

• Quest markers are now drawn over district exit markers on the map.

• Fixed characters appearing wet in their dossier portraits.

• Fixed compression artifacts in the crafting window's gradient background.

• Reworked dossier and tooltip positioning so longer descriptions, including those for Peter Stamatin and the Changeling, fit on screen.

• Corrected the ordering of weapon slots and restored missing Prototype and revolver icons, as well as the corresponding indicator colours.

• Fixed the silver-bullet indicator on the weapon bar. Throwing a match no longer makes a loaded bullet appear absent, and the indicator is hidden until the Prototype has been obtained.

• Corrected tooltips in Emergency Command and context menus along the edges of the inventory and quick slots that could extend beyond the screen.

• Unified fonts across the analyser, crafting, silver-bullet crafting, microscope, time-skip and Prototype-charging windows.

• Fixed the Controls settings displaying a placeholder instead of the name of the S key.

• The People screen now remembers the player's scroll position after a dossier is closed.

• The game now mutes music and sound effects while its window is minimised, without pausing gameplay.

• Added individual icons for decrees in Emergency Command to make different types easier to identify.

• Fixed input actions triggering multiple times after reopening certain windows, or remaining active after they were closed. This affected looting, the furnace, stash, vault, inventory, analyser, crafting, microscope, Prototype charging, Casebook, profile screen and key rebinding.

• Decrees assigned to days that have become unavailable can now be removed in Emergency Command.

• Corrected positive and negative values, as well as their highlight colours, in notifications and the Mind Map when contagion or unrest decreases.

• Emergency Command no longer displays Change Decree or Remove Decree hints during the Day 5 introduction, when the player can inspect Vlad the Younger's decree board but cannot change it yet.

• The Casebook now retains the diagnosis stamp when the player diagnoses a patient and then restarts the day.

• Removed unintended bright outlines around UI elements, including the clock, district names and consequence warnings, in dark locations and at night.

• Fixed the map being cropped on ultrawide monitors, including 21:9 displays. Route markers and building shadows near the screen edges are now visible.

• Restored a missing house on the map of the Backbone.

• Improved Photo Mode support for gamepads: camera movement and menu controls now work separately, and the lower toolbar can be operated with a controller.

• Added a first-use spoiler warning for Photo Mode and completed the localisation of its weather presets, stickers and controls.

Environment, Graphics and Level Design

• Corrected the lighting and time-of-day rendering at the Train Station when starting a new game.

• Fixed rain splashing against invisible surfaces, including above flowerbeds in the Marrow and Backbone districts.

• Corrected the visuals of fresh graves at the Cemetery.

• Moved the mirror at the Water Tower to the base of the tower.

• Corrected the visuals of the mirror outside the Stillwater.

• Restored the gramophone outside the Stillwater during the Musical Interlude decree scene and fixed records not spinning on several types of gramophone around town.

• Corrected the positioning and appearance of plague scarecrows and townspeople in the Spleen and on Bridge Square during Protection from Shabnak decree scenes.

• Fixed a spot at the Train Station where the Bachelor could become stuck between train cars and iron bars.

• Added collision to barrels in barricades in the Warehouses during riots.

• Added collision to rocks near the Trammel in the Chine.

• Added a Concentration highlight to the door of Grace's lodge at the Cemetery.

• Corrected the Concentration highlight on the Crowstone.

• Added Concentration highlights to the pipe and taps in the Broken Heart.

• Fixed the Changeling's animation in the eighth End of Day pantomime.

• Fixed the dialogue animation for Poshinok's son in the Hospital.

• Corrected the placement of plague samples that were floating above the ground in the infected Hindquarters and Skinners districts.

• Fixed an overly bright, blurred hair material on a townswoman in peaceful districts.

• Moved a Hospital patient who was standing inside a desk with papers.

• Corrected the placement of a Quarantine decree painted symbol that was partially cut off, including the one opposite the Town Hall in the Backbone.

• Fixed the Concentration outline of a door in the Saburovs' house.

• Added a trader to the previously empty counter in the Maw area and adjusted his position and orientation at the counter.

• Fixed incorrect lighting on dumpsters, which made them appear too dark.

• Replaced the playground swings in Maw with the double swings used at other playgrounds.

• Corrected the exterior views visible through windows in the Saburovs' and Isidor's houses.

• Fixed the Cathedral lever's chains clipping through the balconies.

• Enlarged the interaction area of Stamatin's stash near Crowstone and corrected its lighting in overcast weather.

• Fixed children sitting beside benches rather than on them when the benches were placed at an angle.

• Fixed unlocked interior doors sometimes behaving as if they were locked and refusing interaction.

• Corrected the Concentration highlight on the flower in Kira's herbarium, which flickered previously.

• Fixed certain environmental effects, including gates, bonfires and lanterns, appearing through trees in infected districts.

• Adjusted a sunken bench in the Gut so townspeople sitting on it no longer appear to float.

• Repositioned a Doghead at the Water Tower so he stands on a pedestal instead of floating above the ground.

• Corrected a shovel stuck in the kerb in the Gut.

• Adjusted the pose of a dead steppe man at the Train Station on Day 11 to stop his hand clipping through the ground.

• Fixed walls flickering in Concentration mode inside the Polyhedron on Day 12.

• Corrected a reflection on a glass window near the Crucible that ended before the edge of the glass.

• Fixed kerbs in the Backbone wrong lighting and appearing darker than the surrounding environment.

• Added missing collision to a table in the Odongh village.

• Replaced ordinary burning barrels with the correct infected-district versions in the Flank.

• The poster in Lara's house now highlights correctly in Concentration mode when its thoughts are available on Days 4-12.

• Corrected the positions of children who were standing knee-deep in the ground during the Day 9 decree scene at the Cape.

• Improved Concentration highlighting so characters and objects without currently available thoughts, including Hypat during the Poisoned Water quest, are no longer highlighted as though they have something to say.

• Removed an unintended stick from child's hand during the children's army scene at the Cape on Days 9-11.

• Replaced the two boxes and invisible wall near the Polyhedron bridge with a proper barricade on Days 6-8. The barricade also appears correctly when loading saved games.

• Fixed the floor of the jerboa cage near the Crucible flickering in Concentration mode.

• Added missing collision to columns in the Saburovs' fireplace hall and chairs in the Olgimskys' house.

• Mobilising Vigilantes: Corrected a townsman sitting beside a bench rather than on it, as well as character positions that caused heads to overlap during dialogue on Bridge Square and near the Town Hall.

• Filat's house in Skinners: Added the missing Concentration highlight to the entrance door.

Sound and Music

• Fixed the main outdoor music track continuing to play over interior music.

• Music themes from some locations no longer randomly play inside unrelated buildings.

• Fixed music and sound-effect volume controls both in the main menu and during gameplay.

• Corrected audio transitions when opening thoughts, the map, inventory and other interface screens.

• Fixed interrogation music sometimes failing to start when speaking to the Inspector immediately. The interrogation track now starts at the intended time.

• Rain ambience no longer continues inside the interrogation room when it was raining outdoors.

• Restored Serafima's missing opening line in the Day 6 interrogation.

• Restored the flute music near the Rat Prophet and Clara during the Day 11 quest by correcting its sound source.

• Restored the Thanatica theme in the Institute hall during the Day 7 flashback and in the Capital.

• Removed an unrecorded English reaction to Shabnak's scream that had no matching voice-over.

Text, Subtitles and Localisation

• Fixed approximately 100 typos, grammatical errors, punctuation and formatting issues across Russian and English dialogue, subtitles, thoughts, Mind Map entries, tutorials and interface text.

• Updated Russian thoughts on the test tubes in the introduction sequence to match the current English version.

• Day 4, Filat's room: Corrected thoughts on the shelf and mop that revealed information from a neighbour before the player had spoken to her.

• Day 5, the God’s Fool: Restored missing text in a repeated Hospital conversation.

• Corrected a Shabnak appearance subtitle that had not been translated into Russian.

• Day 8, Vlad's fate: Corrected Hospital dialogue, Mind Map text and the conversation with the Worm that referred to Vlad as dead even if the player had saved him.

• Restored thoughts about Vlad the Younger after Day 8 and corrected dialogue conditions involving the children and Notkin.

• Restored the missing English translation in the Day 11 conversation between the Rat Prophet and the Changeling.

• Corrected subtitle timing in an End of Day sequence and improved consistency between subtitles and spoken dialogue.

• Updated the credits with additional contributors and sections.

Thank You for Your Support!

Thank you to everyone who reported bugs, helped us test the game, and shared suggestions. We're especially grateful to the team of volunteers who helped us prepare this update.

We hope these new features and fixes make your time in the Town a little better.

Take care of yourselves!

Ice-Pick Lodge

Hello, friends!

It's October 2026, and we're releasing a new update for Pathologic 3. We're fixing bugs, improving existing mechanics, and adding several new features. We've published the full patch notes separately. They're rather extensive — ten whole pages.

But today, we'd like to talk not so much about individual fixes as about the process of fixing something that's already finished.

Think of this devlog as a letter. Two hundred years ago, people wrote to their friends to ask how the winter crops had turned out and what price oats were fetching at the market. But the crops were often just an excuse. The real reason for writing was to stay in touch and reflect on life. And that's what we're doing here. We've already released quite a few patches. Let's talk about games in general, about theater, about art, and about mistakes.

If you'd rather watch and listen than read, we've also prepared a video version of this letter.

Fixing What's Already Finished

What's so wonderful about theater? The fact that it never stays the same.

You can have the same production, the same director, the same theater, and the same actors. Yet every performance is different. The delivery changes, the pacing shifts, and sometimes even the actors are replaced. Did a scene fall flat? Did a joke fail?

Next time, you can try something else.

Cinema is different. Once a film has been edited and released, it generally remains as it is. Of course, there are director's cuts and re-releases, but those are different versions of the film. You had one film, you re-edited it, and now you have two. You had one play, performed it differently, and it's still the same play.

But what about games?

For its creators, a game is never truly finished. Unlike a film, it can keep changing after release. Bad balance can be fixed. An awkward mechanic can be reworked. Sometimes the changes can be far more radical than anything you could do to a theater production. But there's a problem.

In theater, the audience's experience is shaped by the actors and everything happening on stage: sets, lighting, music, costumes, and even the arrangement of seats in the auditorium. Antonin Artaud, who developed the concept of the Theatre of Cruelty, paid particular attention to this. We think he might have liked Pathologic.

In video games, however, the performance is created by the players and the game's code. Neither is entirely under the developers' control.

We expected the player to view a scene from a certain angle, but they walked into a corner and triggered it from there. We expected the code to do one thing, but it did something else. This is a kind of fog of war. We can never fully predict how a game will work until someone actually starts playing it.

And there's another difficulty. A filmmaker can watch their own film almost on equal terms with the audience. A game developer can never quite do the same. We know too much about the game. We've spent hundreds of hours with it and played dozens of different versions. Our senses have grown dull in precisely the places where we need them most.

That's why your impressions, reviews, and feedback matter so much to us.

Art, Function, and an Invisible Apple Tree

There's another fundamental difference between video games and other art forms: a video game is software. It has to work.

Roger Ebert, the famous film critic, once argued that video games could never be art. It's curious, then, that urinals and bottle racks achieved that status with hardly any struggle, thanks to Marcel Duchamp.

So Myst, StarCraft, or Pathologic can't be art, but a urinal can? The distinction, perhaps, lies in function. A urinal placed in a museum stops being plumbing and becomes a symbol. A video game, on the other hand, remains a functional object. We still have to use it.

But enough about urinals. Let's turn to another famous work: Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs.

In this work, a chair is no longer simply something to sit on. Whether it's comfortable hardly matters: as a work of art, it still functions. A video game can also become a symbolic chair. But you still have to sit on it. There's a running joke that Pathologic is a great game that nobody actually plays. Somehow, it really has become something like Kosuth's symbolic chair, one nobody is obliged to sit on. Which raises a question: should we even fix Pathologic if its symbolic nature has almost overtaken its function as a product?

Take visual bugs, for instance. Are they broken chairs you can't sit on, or artistic decisions?

Consider our famous invisible apple tree. Oh, apple tree! Why are you here? What are we supposed to do with you? This is probably the most famous bug in Pathologic 3. We've received more complaints about it than almost anything else. We have to admit there were moments when we genuinely hated that tree. Are we going to fix it in this update? Perhaps not.

After all, it's a creation of the machine. Somehow, the game's code produced this impossible object. And over time, our annoyance at it has begun to turn into a strange affection. Sometimes an artistic act lies not in creating something, but in the artist's decision about it. Maybe this apple tree is trying to tell us something. So the tree stays.

What, then, are we actually changing?

What's New in This Update?

New Difficulty Modes

We're adding two new difficulty settings while keeping the original one unchanged.

• Easy — significantly reduces the pressure of the gameplay systems, allowing you to focus on exploring the story without constantly having to solve gameplay challenges.

• Normal — remains the experience we designed for release. We think it's important to preserve it.

• Hard — demands more careful resource management and a deeper understanding of the game's mechanics.

Photo Mode

Now you can create your own works of art using Pathologic 3. The Pathologic community has always shown remarkable artistic talent. We hope this new tool will help you see the Town from a different perspective and capture things that perhaps even we haven't noticed.

New Decree Icons

We've added new icons for decrees. They should now be much easier to tell apart, especially later in the game.

Two New Ways to Kill Shabnak

One resembles a game of hide-and-seek. The other is more like choosing a bride, as in the Novgorod tale of Sadko, the Celtic tale The Green Man of Noman's Land, or the Scottish fairy tale The Battle of the Birds. Why does Dankovsky have to choose a bride? And why is this bride trying to kill him? We'd rather leave that for the players to figure out.

Subtitle Language Selection

You can now choose your preferred subtitle language independently of the voice acting. Whether you want to experience the original performances with translated subtitles or simply prefer a different language for dialogue, the choice is now yours.

Beyond these additions, the update includes numerous technical fixes, improvements, and gameplay changes. You can find all the details in the full patch notes.

You Could Fix Him (And You Did)

There's a saying in game development: "A game can never be finished, it can only be released." We could have spent several more months working on this update — it's hard to stop fixing and tuning. First you fix bugs, then you improve individual mechanics, then you start rebuilding entire systems. Before you know it, "fixing" has turned into "remaking."

But the Bachelor is standing firmly on his own two feet now.

This update would have been impossible without the people who helped us along the way. Above all, we'd like to thank our team of volunteers. Your reports, comments, and suggestions helped us stay focused and bring this work to completion. Without you, this patch might never have made it out of closed beta.

Special thanks to our technical director, Albert, who not only helped with the Pathologic 3 update but also joined the work on a patch for Pathologic 2. Albert, you're a force of nature! And we'd also like to thank Marcel Duchamp — for his humor, his notes on art, and especially his work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

There's something strangely familiar to us in that image of the bride, those absurd bachelors, the ambiguity, and the playful way the artist treats his own work and its possible interpretations.

We think our invisible apple tree could become good friends with that piece.

And Finally, Thank You

This has turned into quite a long letter. And some rather strange thoughts. But Pathologic 3 is a very unusual game — in fact, it's almost impossible for a game like this to exist in today's market. And yet, it does. It's possible thanks to you — the people who play, debate, criticize, search for meaning, and keep returning to the Town. We hope you'll enjoy the update. Take care of yourselves.

With warm regards,

Ice-Pick Lodge