i enjoyed pathologic 3, but i really disagree with the dev interview i saw which claimed that P3 can work as an entry point to the series.
when people say that you can just play pathologic 2 instead of playing the first game... i disagree with that, because i think P2 is weaker than P1 in basically every way except mechanically, but i can definitely see the argument. if you're not too bothered about lore or getting the best story, and just want to play a solid survival horror rpg with above-average writing, it makes sense to jump right to P2.
P3's writing is on par with P2, and the time travel mechanics were a bold move that ended up way more well-handled and engaging than i was expecting them to be (albeit with a huge amount of bugs, which is unsurprising and will hopefully be fixed in the coming months). it would be cool if the game became enough of a hit to inspire future games to experiment with causality and time manipulation in this way.
but as far as the story goes, i do think someone who hasn't played the first two games, or at least the P1 bachelor route, is going to have a diminished experience. for one thing, it's probably just very confusing if you haven't experienced the story linearly first.
but also, P3 was at its most compelling to me when it was the most open about being a conversation with the first game. when i would move through a story sequence and characters would parrot lines that i recognized verbatim from pathologic classic, like distorted echoes thrust into an altered context.
occasionally, character name spellings will randomly switch to the localizations that were used in the infamously janky 2005 english translation of the first game, prior to the 2015 rerelease. peter becomes petr, yulia->julia, aglaya->aglaia, etc. it didn't even occur to me that it was unintentional until i saw people reporting them as typo bugs, it just felt like all of these different tellings of the story melding and collapsing. it didn't break my immersion when daniil randomly calls grace "laska" in a line of dialogue, it felt rewarding because i know that is her name, in another version of this story. just little things like that, they all added up.
IPL was remaking a game, and instead of doing a straightforward remake, they decided to give the protagonist the ability to go back and change his own story. they made him obsess over the tragedies that happened to him and the people around him, and then gave him the power to go back and change things, to rewrite what happened in the hopes that he was making something better. and honestly, i have to assume that's a bit what it feels like to remake a game itself, to go back and try to rewrite a story that was already written.
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
discoholicmusic
